Recent reviews by baudot

This is already a good game, and it's still in early release. It on-ramps the player really well, handing you new tools and game mechanics right as you're starting to feel like you've mastered the last batch.

This game has many improvements over the already good first in the series. The tactics are more clever. The graphics are creepier. There's just more to do. And yet... it sucks.

Understand, I quite enjoyed my first 20 hours with the game. Unfortunately, I'm now ~80 hours into this game, and it's just dragging at the end. It dragged in the middle, too.

There's just so many meaningless, repetitive fights. Progress is gated behind boss fights. But each time you want to try to make it to the next stage, you have to fight through dozens of meaningless fights with mooks to get to the boss trial. It's the same thing, over, and over, and over, and over, and over...

This is a game about managing your luck. Every turn, a half dozen random things will happen, and you might have the power to steer a third of them, looking for the choices that best optimize your chances of setting up a good move. When it works, you feel like a brilliant tactician. When you stop caring, because you've been stuck at the same stage for half a dozen attempts and you're midway through hours of grinding for one more attempt, everything falls apart. The fights feel meaningless, even when they aren't. You can't bring yourself to puzzle through the little decisions that would earn you that little edge that gets you ahead.

And once you get to that state, the game increases the odds you get stuck there. The little rewards the game gives you after a failed run, to try to propel you over the finish line run out. Lose a run? You get to spend your "candles" to unlock new, more powerful items. And you start the next run with one of each new thing you unlocked. Get stuck? After you lose enough runs, you run out of new things to unlock, so now you start each new run with ... nothing.

Having everything unlocked can turn into a disadvantage, too. As you've played through countless runs, you've built up theories of how to make a powerful party. You've devised your own combos, trying to find the one that will beat the next boss. This is one of the best things about the game, while it's still fresh.

But once you have everything unlocked, the odds that you get pushed out of your interesting combos increases, because now when the RNG forces you out of your tuned build, there are more other random options for it to pick from that don't work with your strategy.

You built your Grave Robber to be a master of poisoning people from stealth, but the RNG decided that the rest of the party hates her so it picked a bunch of skills that piss off the other party members when she uses them. It locked those skills in her build, replacing the ones you needed to make her actually good at her job. Now more party members get beat up, have meltdowns, start hating each other, and the downward spiral gets worse.

There's a bunch of other systems in the game that seem counter to the designer's purposes. In a careful, turn based game where a single foolish decision can start you on the downward slide, why is there an arcade gameplay section where you get rewarded for driving your cart into obstacles, at odds with the turn based gameplay in every other part of the game? And when you get a new item in the middle of that arcade gameplay, it's important to stop the arcade mode, look over your party, and decide if that item has a place in your strategy. So why does the narrator chide you for taking the few seconds that decision needs?

This is a game where decisions you made early in the game can come back to haunt you in completely unpredictable ways. Example: I used my early unlocks to get options for powerful damage-over-time combos. Then the next boss was one who (spoilers) murders you if you don't damage his helpers enough, and his helpers are immune to damage over time effects. It took me almost half a dozen more runs bashing my head against the wall to both figure out what had gone wrong, that my current build was never going to solve it, and to unlock enough other abilities to make a new coherent build that could beat that boss. By the time I got past that boss, I had gotten so far ahead in unlocks that it came back to bite me at the endgame, where I ran out of new unlocks and started having runs where I didn't get any unlock awards at the start.

So now I'm stuck at the end. I've made it to the final boss multiple times, I've got a pretty solid plan of how I could beat him... but each attempt takes hours of battling the same meaningless mooks I've fought now dozens upon dozens of times already. I'm so bored of these guys. But if I stop paying attention and thinking through the choices, the carefully formed party I've put together loses a lynchpin member to a bad fight halfway along the way and now I've got to see if I can juggle together a new plan with the rando replacement I get at the next inn. Even if I stay disciplined, and carefully consider each decision for the hours it takes to fight up to the end boss, bad luck can always spoil the run hours in, starting the whole process over.

This stopped feeling like a game dozens of hours ago. It's just a chore now.

Update: At 82.4 hours of game time, I did clear the final boss. And I want to reconfirm: For all its satisfactions, this game just has Toooooo Muchhhh Grinnnnd.

The UI really is terrible.

For example: There's a confirm button in the bottom right of the screen that you have to click to finalize every single choice, including clicking other single buttons. Would you like A or B? OK, you clicked the B button. Now confirm that with the confirm button.

This is just one of those soothing games that builds on itself, gradually introducing new elements and tools as you master the ones you started with. It has some tense moments, but most of your time is spent doing stuff you've mastered on previous playthroughs, with just one new element to master each time you play.

One of the better board-game-to-computer conversions out there. I've played over a hundred games of this, and am still learning new lessons from it.

If you like deep, complex, board-game-style play, this is well worth your time.

Is this game worth the time and attention you spend on it? I was really wanting to be impressed with this game, but in the end, I wasn't. Some of the puzzles are too easy, others are too obtuse. And when you get down to it, there's just not a lot happening, and not a lot to do.

The big push of the game - to really slow you down and make you think about time - is delivered. Mission accomplished. But the rest of the game around it just isn't satisfying. In the end, for me, playing this game was not time well spent.

Too much time spent doing basic maintenance chores and selling back the random crap you draw until you get the thing you need for your next unlock.

Unplayably buggy. I can't get through 20 minutes of this game without it becoming unresponsive. Reboot, start over from last save, repeat.

It delivers on the promise: CDPR understands Mike Pondsmith's creation, and delivered it, consistent with the way they did Witcher. It's the game I was expecting it to be.

I could point out minor grumbles: The hit points make the fights feel samey with most other games. They don't have the quick and brutal feel of cyberpunk. And the driving controls need rework.

But, big picture, this is a fun, well-written game.

This game is tediously capricious. You can get 20 minutes into a mission and have to start all over because you STILL can't train new troops yet and your starting rangers were spread too thin to get coverage on a patrol. One zom touches one tent, and the chain reaction starts and you know that now you will inevitably lose and have to restart, but you have to wait and watch it play out because there isn't even a quit & restart mission option on the menu. It feels intense at first, like a zombie themed game should. You can't afford to make a single mistake! Your people's lives are on the line! But after replaying the same level a half dozen times like you did the level before it, you realize it's just capricious.

You literally don't have the resources yet to set up an airtight patrol yet. You're using every starting soldier you got and even having memorized where the resources are on THIS map, you can't get a barracks set up fast enough to train more for another day and a half into the mission. And a zom has slipped through a hole in your patrol AGAIN so now you have to wait while they inevitably take over your town until you can even restart.

The UI is bad. In a game where even starter missions require you to build more than 100 tents (looking at you, "Hunters Fields") maybe there should have been a hotkey for tent? What's the point of having a hotkey to get into the build menu and then still only being able to select the building by clicking on it? What is this, 1991?

The pathing is bad. If a zombie shambles stupidly, and gets hung up because there was a rock it could have just walked around, that's thematic. Zombies are dumb. But when my rangers do the same thing only faster, the game is just dumb. Literally. The pathing is stupid.