Just finished campaign 1, here is some feedback

[thesuicidefox]

First, this game is really fun. I like the throwback feel to Commandos with upgrade controls (using a stick is WAY better than point and click). It was a fun experience and good story, I look forward to playing through c2 next. That said, I do have some feedback regarding gameplay. I know there was an update recently, I am on Xbox and this update has not reached me yet, so if I mention something that has been fixed my apologies, I tried to read the entire patch notes but there is a lot.

I'll try to use spoiler tags but if you want to be sure about any of that, just stop reading here.

1. Sanity loss at night. This one I immediately turned off, it became very annoying to constantly be dying from sanity loss especially when there are really only 2 ways to deal with it and neither are that reliable for use every night. Maybe if sanity loss was lowered across the board I could see this being a reasonable feature, otherwise it just sticks out like a sore thumb, forcing me to waste resources every night to keep up sanity on characters I might have otherwise done a good job protecting.

2. Beartraps in 1 lane paths. There are at least 3 spots on c1 where there is a beartrap that you cannot pass by at all. One is right next to a hatch which basically makes it unusable unless you bring Eduardo. Maybe if there were other ways to disarm them this would be okay, but it just seems cheap to put on in a 1 lane path when I can't do a damn thing about it most of the time. This besides the fact that bear traps can spawn in blind spots where you can't see them at all until you step in them, and their hitbox is bigger than it looks, I would just like more ways to deal with these.

3. "Permanent" needs to be better defined. As I have found, there are only 6 things that are actually permanent: put out/ignite fire, picking a lock, breaking a boarded wall, placing a board bridge, switches for gates without timers, and hanging a rope. Everything else resets periodically. This would be fine except that some stuff says "permanent". Like flies should permanently remove a corpse, IDK why that would come back. Beartraps maybe shouldn't be permanent either, that could fix 2 (or maybe make them reset when security changes). Al's Power Of Faith says the effects are permanent but this is not true. It took me a while to realize gargoyles respawn too. I know Agnes has a power she can use them but it would be better if they stay destroyed and I just had to spend resources to fix it maybe. It just seems like a lot of inconsistency in what is permanent and what isn't from day to day. I get guards should be replaced if they get killed, that stuff is fine you can plan around that, but to account for all this other random stuff that should really be permanent just makes the game feel tedious.

4. There needs to be more ways to do some things. The only way to discard a corpse is flies, for example. There should be maybe an acid potion I can find or craft that could do that too. Beartraps as mentioned before. Moving crates, destroying anima. I feel like everything should have at minimum 3 options, aside from some Agnes spells of course.

5. The end of the last mission in c1. I know this one's a spoiler. I am talking about when you find the body of the doctor in the tomb and you have to drag his ass to the cart in the back of laundry. WOW was this really a challenge. The thing was the solution I found seems to be the only real viable way to do this, I honestly don't see how you were meant to do this otherwise. What I did was, day before I killed the 2 gun guards in wine cellar, the one in the middle and the one on the platform by the secret exit to laundry at the bottom. Then advanced the day, had Agnes cast Curse Of Sleep on wine cellar, and use Forgery to lower security as much as possible. Then started with Lenora, Alfredo, and Eduardo in the underground caves. Had Al immediately go to latrines, climb down the rope, put on a robe, and wait over by the gates. Then had Lenora run and grab the body/evidence, then drag through the caves, past the guard in the little room, out the burner, waited for the guard up top to turn around, ran out, knocked out the monk right there, run back, drag the body down the stairs, then Al casts Preach to distract a few right by the gate, and then I dragged him through the secret path and to the cart. I JUST BARELY made it to the second get when the first bell rang. This was exhilarating and took a lot of planning, but after careful analysis, for the life of me I don't see how else you were to do this. If a developer could please tell me how else you were to do this, I would LOVE to know, but I really don't think there was any other solution, which bothers me because I like the idea of going back and doing it again a different way.

Also I ran into a lot of game breaking bugs, one with Agnes fire dispel glitching the hell out of the game, sometimes guards are invisible, it's also really annoying to try and select a target to see their POV and it locks on to something below or above you. Hope some or all of this gets fixed in the patched. EDIT: Also I cannot get the achievement for unlocking everything in c1 because there is an unreachable little red chest next to the hatch outside the Library in the corner of the path.

Again amazing game, I just disagree with some of these design decisions. They feel very limiting as a player and just kind bog down the experience.

Thanks for reading.

[Away]

From the perspective of a user who has cleared all difficulties, it seems like you still don't fully understand the game.

[per.ludos.vita]

A few (hopefully constructive) responses to your points:

1. I'm a little surprised this was a problem for you. Between Leonora's violin, Amelia's Having Fun ability, and Alfredo using Chocolate on the group, it's not too hard to keep everyone's levels up, unless you're triggering their phobias excessively during the day. Obviously this isn't infinite, since you will eventually run out of supplies, but I haven't come anywhere close to that point after multiple playthroughs, including on the hard setting.

One little tip that might makes things easier is that, depending on your playstyle, you don't need to worry about Agnes' sanity, since her amulet will always restore it up to 30 when she's deployed as long as it's in her inventory, which means you have effectively infinite uses of every spell other than Goetia.


2. There is another way to deal with beartraps: have Leonora shoot them. She can also destroy mirrors and gargoyles in this way. This is a great way to make use of those pistols cluttering up your inventory if you aren't using them on enemies.

Alternatively, if one of your characters has enough health (at least four full hearts, since beartraps cause three damage), you can also just have trigger a trap by walking over it, then heal them up after the day is done. In a pinch, you can always use a character who doesn't have enough health as a sacrificial pawn to trigger a trap—the only downsides are that you can't use them for the rest of that day, and you'll have to patch them up at night.


3. I agree regarding the ánimas and the gargoyles respawning—the description of Alfredo's Power of Faith skill says "permanently", and there's no plausible in-game explanation for how a stone gargoyle could somehow be repaired/replaced in a matter of days. I found that these actually did stay permanently gone before the first major patch was released, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.


4. I respectfully disagree on this point. Part of the challenge of the game is planning each day's loadout so that your characters' abilities complement each other's weaknesses. If too many characters had ways to get around the same obstacle, they'd lose their distinctiveness and start feeling interchangeable.

Plus, there are multiple ways to deal with most obstacles, even if they're not always immediately obvious. I give another method for dealing with beartraps in my spoilered comment above. With guards, for instance, you can knock them out with Eduardo or Leonora (or Agnes' Evil Eye), distract them for awhile with Agnes' Flies, lure them away with Amelia's Mockery, or go stealth mode using Alfredo's priest disguise. With a few exceptions, most of the paths you need Leonora's ropes or Eduardo's planks to access are optional. And so on and so forth.

One thing I tried on subsequent playthroughs was to deliberately focus on using abilities that I hadn't on my previous ones. I discovered a number of other solutions to obstacles that I hadn't even considered the first time around.


5. Curse of Sleep definitely makes this sequence easier, but it's not absolutely necessary. If you have Agnes extinguish all the torches and fires ahead of time, it's a lot easier to drag the body to the exit without being spotted. Plus, you do have the entire day to complete the mission, so you can always drop the body somewhere out of sight and send Leonora and /or Agnes ahead to knock out enemies in advance (or just straight-up have Leonora shoot them in the case of the soldiers) to clear a path to the exit for you. You could also wait until the third bell, when the civilians clear out of the wine cellar, so that there are even fewer obstacles.


Finally, unless I'm misunderstanding which one you're referring to, that chest you mentioned isn't unreachable—you can just walk right up to it from either the trapdoor (after dealing with the beartrap) or from the other direction from the front door of the library. The outside of the library isn't a prohibited area (apart from the balcony that Leonora can toss a rope to), so it's no big deal as long as the guards don't see you opening the chest.