Nedávné recenze uživatele RobOda

No - too shallow overall.

I want to like the game, because it is one of those that tries to showcase the horrors of WWI and the difficulties of managing a war hospital, but it falls flat on two counts;

1. Once you understand how to triage things, the gameplay loop becomes boring.

The devs did say they wanted to provoke the player's emotions via patient profiles (they're married, have kids, whatever) but the reality is when you're dealing with 5+ patients, and eventually 10+, you're not really going to pay attention to that sort of thing because it is completely irrelevant.

The only statistics that matter are; 1. How difficult the operation will be, and 2. how many resources will we spend fixing this person up.

If a patient arrives terminal? Send him to the palliative care department, he'll die on the way to surgery so why waste time?

Patient is stable but the operation 100% going to fail? No point wasting time then is there?

High risk operation with excessive resource demands? To the morgue with you.

Low risk? Book him for surgery.

It genuinely is that simple. When you have patients in excess of 5+, it just becomes a case of queuing the patients by how stable they are, and how tired the surgeon is.

It can get dicey at times with the pressures of numbers of patients vs surgeons, but that's the point of triage, prioritising those you can save and unfortunately, discarding those who you can't.

2. The management is just a case of escalating pressures mixed with resource drain.

It is expensive to buy supplies, but creating them on site is mostly just refining one resource into another, and spending all day there with engineers staff.

You have huge supply deliveries initially - enough to cap out your warehouse (why?) and then eventually you get nothing, except more patients brought in via train. So, as you can see, you need to prioritise building your base to produce supplies (for surgery, and food for feeding everyone), and this is alright, you do have to make choices here.

Problem? You simply will never have any staff resources to spend to break any bottleneck, ergo half the upgrades are nearly pointless as you won't have any staff to work them. (I'm pretty sure this is a bug, because staff points were triggering through the tutorial phase, but on new games they no longer do.)

That means you're unable to really set up chains of production because you'll never have the staff to do so. It also makes shift work pointless for most staff because you'll never have anyone available to rotate shifts with in the first place. You're better off manually resting staff than leaving them on 12 hour shifts, as they'll be off resting when emergencies happen. (Also, why would you shift work nurses in the operating theatre? That would mean you have a nurse working there during non-operating hours at times because doctors don't work to a shift, they work on a per patient and tiredness basis.)


The result is a bit of dull gameplay loop - where you juggle supplies and ultimately, triage patients, but it's not really compelling because the progress is like a horse stuck in the mud, and endless grind of tedium. Rather than working towards optimising something, or breaking a bottleneck, it's just passing the time until you can get a staff member to even do anything with ~ for me, the balance is off. It's not even difficult, it's just... dull. And that's criminal in a video game.

No because the game is abandoned for a new project.

This is sort of a visual novel with some playable elements - mainly an economy management system and some warfare, which is very basic.

The draw of the game is the plot, it's a high sci-fi story where you're a futuristic AI of a sort, that comes to lower tech civilisations in order to 'influence' and interfere in their evolutionary process by covert means. For example, taking over the economy, or direct interference via wars.

The translation is a bit too stiff and inconsistent, as a result you need to show a bit of patience with this game.

At the start you get to create your avatar, but the concepts (or attributes) aren't explained very well, so you have limited grasp on what values you benefit from.

That's about all there is to say really, your choices and development of the initial planet leads you to several different endings. DLC 1 is free, and apparently is lacking quality control in writing and gameplay (see the DLC reviews for that) and DLC2 will be released in English later in 2024.

However, read back on the dev's roadmap and you'll find they are ending their game with DLC 2 as they've realised their systems are too basic and rudimentary to suit the story they want to tell. So, they're off to make a new game, which I wish them all the best with, and I assume it'll be a full fledged sci-fi story like this. But on this basis, I cannot recommend buying this game, as you're getting a passion project that is basically cut short.

You'd be better off waiting for their new game, whenever that comes out (I'll make an AI bet that it'll be 2026/7).

Otherwise, if you really do want a sci-fi story in tricky English, and are aware of the limitations and the fact this will be abandoned, then jump on in, but wait for a sale.

Empty by design.

Like the moon.

That wasn't boring.

But this is.

Unless you're Bethesda.

Then it's a whale of a time!

5/10, threadbare Star Trek skin for Stellaris.

The warning signs were obvious when they sent out dev diaries that did their utmost to avoid discussing gameplay mechanics (particularly the last one, 4) and then told everyone 'we have given it to streamers, if you like to watch fat lads who can't play games anyway' instead of pointing to some nice reviews. (Newsflash; Reviews are more or less negative.)

There's so many issues with this game, never mind that a lot of people are having launcher issues, and the game fails to recognise DLC (lol, already) being owned.

Let's just get into it;

Firstly, it is Stellaris with a Star Trek skin, so if you come from that game you'll be fine here. But there's only 4 factions to take control of, each with their own 'gameplay', or core mechanic. So, the Federation is diplomacy, Klingon's are war, Romulans do spycraft and the Cardassians bring the slave trade.

To mould your experience, you're given a flimsy mission tree, and it is flimsy, it's literally just minor text blurb, a goal to aim for and when you reach it, you click it for a buff, happy days. For the Feds, the first mission is pretty much getting your science ships up and running, to boldly go and all that, whilst the Klingons want their warships up and running instead. Little things like that.

The mission tree is supposed to be a guiding principle for the factions, but it fails on the basis of simply not being a tree, but rather a stick, with maybe a knobbly bit on the end of it. You have at most, one or two mutually exclusive branches to go down, that's it. Riveting! (Guess who has the most complex tree? The Federation, so no doubt they'll flesh out the rest in true Paradox fashion of 'continued development' or *cough* DLC *cough*)

Anyway, gameplay... The game takes place after the Khitomer incident (from the shows), and that means we're early in the Star Trek timeline, so a few years before TNG starts. Everyone has the same starting positions, but to keep things spicy there's an element of RNG for planets and spawns.

For example, in my first game as the Federation, the Naucissan pirates spawned an empire literally next door to me, whilst in my second game they were nowhere near me.

In my first game, Vulcan (an Arid world...) was a farming paradise, but in my second it was just a vanilla planet.

It just... sucks? Why aren't there exclusive planetary wonders for each planet? For Vulcan, for Andoria etc? These are recognisable places, with deep lore and history for Trekkies, and yet they're victim to the RNG. As a bonus for Feds, every species 'originally' hails from Earth, meaning you get none of the diversity options for colonising planets ~ Vulcans come from Vulcan, an Arid world, but their habitability is considered a Temperate world as their origin is 'Earth'.

It is little things like this that completely mar the experience, it's like the project lead snoozed on the editing pass, these are details you should be picking up on after your first playtest, not completely missing beyond launch day.

On top of this, you start as an established faction, but with zero infrastructure. Where Stellaris had you with one planet and a plan to expand and exploit, Infinite dumps you with FOUR, and they're all randomly good/bad at anything, and none of them are developed to any standard. So you're starting way behind the curve, having to build an economy for a four strong Empire right out of the gate.

And even though you're in an established Empire, you'll be placed in control of areas devoid of life where there should be life (Feds + Rigelia for example), or missing core systems. Look, this game has the Borg as the final big bad, and that's great, but guess what the Federation doesn't start with (and has to rush to get)? That's right, they don't even own Wolf 359! You have to race vs the Romulans to grab it. Who the hell missed that? Wolf should be with the Fed from the start and they should be using it as a centrepiece when the Borg arrive on the scene, I mean, that's a complete open goal for fan service, how do you mess up so badly?

Traditions are similar to Stellaris, but quite disappointing overall. Each faction has one unique tradition, be it Honour, Progress, whatever, but all the rest? Effectively similar (Defence vs Conquest, Welfare Vs Capitalism etc) with minor changes within the selections itself.

The issues don't stop there. Voice acting, sound effects, phaser colours, everything is relatively poor. There's set ships for each faction, so almost zero diversity in what you will set out to create, you'll always start with Miranda classes for the Federation, and each hull type you can research is set in stone, so there's a ton of ships that are missing out.

I want to like the game, but it is just amateur in its design mechanics, shallow in its mission trees and plotlines, the project was clearly mismanaged and greenlit by nodding heads that thought 'yeah, this is great.' Except, it isn't great, it's lukewarm mediocre servings that needed more spice, flavour, depth and a longer cooking time.

Star Trek has long languished because of crap writers and poor game developers, and this has done nothing to swerve course. (Please, Owlcat, do a Star Trek CRPG, the franchise needs some love).

Overall; Not recommended unless you're an absolute diehard Trekkie, and even then, nope. Maybe after the deluge of DLC and fixes it'll be up to scratch, but games should be smashing it on launch (bugs be damned) and this simply isn't it.

Always-online, so when their serves get clogged or overheats or whatever, you've got a dummy game that won't even let you play.

And no, you can't play in offline mode, or without any connection whatsoever.

Don't waste your time.

6/10 Decent (Recommendation: Depends)

Raging Loop is a horror visual novel based on a cursed village with werewolves, and the locals playing a life and death voting game where you must kill one person per day. The idea being, that you identify the werewolves in human form and kill each one, until eventually all the wolves are dead and everyone can live happily ever after.

The major plot hook to this well crafted novel, is that the protagonist is stuck in a groundhog day time loop, with retained memories. This is a clever way of allowing you, the reader, to go back and pick different choices if you mess up and die.

There's an enforced playing order, routes are locked behind 'keys', which tend to be critical bits of information that you reveal via playing (and dying).

There are three huge routes, with major variations and twists on the storyline, so content-wise you are spoilt for choice here. This is a fantastic novel to settle down with and have a good read, three mysteries in one that when you complete them all, will eventually collate into a 'true' ending of sorts.

So, if I'm praising the story so much, why is my score so low? Why haven't I stuck a big thumbs up on it?

There's a few issues with the game, some of them critical;

1. Visually, it's quite weak.

There aren't many art assets on show here, and the team have been lazy, cutting corners. You'll see the same backgrounds constantly. The murder/gore scenes are so tame, you could probably rate this game as PG (or suitable for older children with parental supervision), instead of showing the carnage of the wolves, it just shows red/black vague images. That's a bit disappointing, I expected to see something to make the reader resonate with the impact of what is being shown to the in game characters.

2. The localisation is bad, and the team were too lazy to bother fixing wordplay;

Don't take my word for it, there's an in-industry review of the translation that marks it down as 'tolerable' (see: nihonsei review of Raging Loop translation), and one of the most offensive parts of the translation is the use of 'kanji' tricks;

So, to explain it at a very basic level, it's like splitting up the meanings of a word, for example, stating that and English word has roots in Germanic or Latin or French, so you can see how the word evolved over time from meaning one thing in the past, to meaning something else now.

You can do that with Japanese Kanji too, though if you're not familiar with Kanji, then chances are your eyes will glaze over at some very critical moments in the plot. This is because, there's huge explanations regarding the mythology of the story that is related to breaking down and changing around the kanji in certain words to make it mean something else.

It's bad enough figuring this out in English as a native English speaker, but the translation team put no effort into trying to localise what any of this means. They just splatter the kanji on the screen, next to the literal English translation and go 'this means that, and this means this, and if we switch it around, it means this' which, as you might imagine, is dull, uninspired and basically results in the English reader being 'told' what each thing means, rather than the original intent of trying to make the reader suss it out from connecting all the meanings together.

The game is full of such wordplay, and the team put zero effort into trying to allow it to make sense.

3. The localisation team adheres to awful grammar standards.

I'm not a professional translator, and English isn't my first language, so I don't really have that high of a standard to grammar and spelling, but I try my best.

This game has some shocking grammar though, notable from the start, where the translation team uses 'off of' a term that is entirely incorrect in 99% of cases.

i.e. "I took the salt off of the table" is just clumsy and stupid, when "I took the salt off the table" works perfectly fine.

I.e. "I never thought I'd get this off of a station attendant" instead of the more natural, and correct way of saying "I never thought I'd get/receive this from a station attendant."

I.E. "I based this off of a design" instead of "I based this on a design by..."

Off of is just clumsy, something I'd expect to see from the internet forums, like "I could care less" or "Loose" instead of lose etc. To see it be used in a professional capacity is quite sad, and shows how poor the quality control for the English translation is; (And if you don't believe that, the very final screen on this game is 'goodspeed to you' instead of 'godspeed to you,' which I think says it all tbh.)


So, whilst the initial three core storylines are all interesting and well written, even if you have to fight the kanji dumping, towards the end when the revelations come thick and fast, the localisation fails to keep it flowing naturally and interesting; And the same applies to lack of art background to give you something to look at during the introspective moments.

* Overall;

So, altogether, I think Raging Loop is a fantastic horror mystery, at least as long as it remained a mystery (honestly, the ending is a bit meh), and so it is absolutely worth a playthrough.

Even with the localisation and translation issues, I think it warrants a playthrough, but the localisation issues really just stop it from being absolute top tier, which I think is a massive shame, as the potential is there for it to be one of the best horror/mystery novels out there.

9/10 Excellent.

Probably one of the most well-written and conceived choose your own adventure games (or life sim, whatever) out there.

You take the role of Sir Brante, a man born into a unique world, with interesting religious views where the Gods actually exist, and grant you three lives, meaning you can die three times before your fourth death is a permanent affair.

It is a clever way of introducing a way to fail without failing too hard, a way to ensure that you can take some risks, and that you'll have some falls along the way in your chosen life.

The world divides people into three lots, the noble's lot is to rule, the priests' listen to the gods and tell everyone how to live, whilst the commoners are born just to toil and suffer.

Brante takes an unusual position in that he's born to a noble father and a commoner mother. Thus, he has the opportunity to evolve his life into each of the three lots, and that's essentially how the story goes.

You take control of Brante literally from birth, making choices and watching as he grows into a toddler, to a youth and eventually an adult. Each choice tends to raise certain attributes, and the sum of your childhood attributes combine into your adulthood skills.

You can endeavour to strive to become a noble, remain a commoner or become a holy man, and each potential path offers a unique storyline within it once you unlock that path. There are multiple ways for each path to resolve, you could become a noble driven by a sense of duty, or become a tyrant, rich on corruption and focused only on advancing your career. Similar choices and paths exist throughout for the priest and the commoner routes, and it is only when you play all three routes and their variations do you get to see how neatly the pieces on the board fit and how the story manages to progress with or without each type of Brante existing.

Overall, the game is simplistic, but that's fine, we're here primarily for story and characterisation, and this has both in spades. These games, CYOA games are by no means easy to produce, the effort and planning required to get lengthy and consistent storylines is quite a challenge, and I'm happy to say that I think here, they managed to get the balance just right.

A solid recommendation to anyone who likes Choose your own adventure games, or offshoots of the visual novel genre.

I have a slew of criticisms for this visual novel, from the inconsistent renders/graphics (which, to be fair the developer acknowledges on their commentary mode) to dialogue coming across as naive/preachy at times, where in reality people might be a bit more abrasive.

It is basically a bit of a fairy tale in some dialogues, a bit fantastical in others.

Having said that; There's more than enough scenes where the dialogue and especially the comedy moments are absolutely smashed out of the park for a home-run. Where you can 100% relate to the characters, their struggles and their humour.

The end result is a fairly uneven or inconsistent visual novel in all areas, but one that I think is still worth recommending because it has two core concepts people should thoroughly enjoy.

1. It's a fantastic feel-good story with genuinely brilliant comedy moments and a fairly strong message on how to behave nicely (for most the part), that people could always do with a reminder of.

2. It has a very poignant core message about mental health, human issues and how we deal and process them, a message that comes from the developer's own personal experience (that's what I took away from the game's major scenes), and these really do need to be played through as they handle the topic extremely well, from the brutality of depression to the naiveness of people thinking that they can 'fix them'.

Aside from that, there are sex scenes, it's an adult visual novel after all, but to be honest, aside from one or two (Lexi's in particular) they really don't add a lot to the game's overall value in my opinion. There are some minor gameplay mechanics, related to minor stat raising that unlock new actions or consequences, but these, along with the phone/twitter mechanics seem to fade away from the story all too soon, which is a shame.

Overall however, as much as I think it has many flaws, I also think it is a great and genuine visual novel that is absolutely worth a purchase, and hopefully multiple playthroughs. I also recommend the reasonably priced DLC, which really opens up a lot of information regarding the development process if you're interested in that.

If Alien Isolation was the authentic spiritual game for the Alien movie, then Dark Descent is the authentic spiritual game for the Aliens movie.


It's a real time squad based game, you control your four marines, who act as one entity, through a certified Xeno planetary holiday. The game riffs off the Aliens movie constantly, from the buildings, layouts, dialogue and action scenes. (For turn based fans; You have an option to play real time with pause. The default setting is real time with 'slow down' when making big decisions, but you have free choice to turn that setting into a 100% pause button and there's no penalties for doing so.)

Although marines are controlled as one entity, it kind of makes sense, they still retain uniqueness, it is just streamlined. So, for example, if you tell the team to unleash hell in the form of suppressing fire, the game automatically chooses your gunner (or your Vasquez) to unload on them.

Each map is persistent, so any doors you weld shut, remains shut (unless the enemy took it down) and every resource you take now, is a resource you won't have later on. You need to balance exploration, with stealth and combat ~ bypassing aliens via the use of motion tracking, so you can get to locations to find data, lore, or critical information.

Combat is quick and lethal, you do not want to get into melee range, but the aliens are sturdy and rapid, and you don't want extended firefights, because your marines are human, and like Gorman and Hudson, are capable of freezing up in incompetence, or having stress levels get to such a point they're exclaiming 'game over, man'

You have to manage your stress levels, as failure to do so enacts heavy penalties on your marines mental state. It takes a while to recover, and you don't have the days to wait. Heavy penalties persist across missions, ranging from paranoia, to just being so shaken that they're less accurate at firing.

Managing stress levels means ensuring combat is quick and decisive, followed by going into stealth (i.e. get out of dodge), because any combat means the aliens begin hunting for you and your stress levels constantly rise throughout the hunt period. If you get undetected, then you can sneak around again and your stress levels stay even.

To negate stress, you have to find safe rooms to sleep in, or alternatively chuck down pills like it is going out of fashion.

There are several, huge, boss fights, lots of data to collect that expands on the lore, and even a few survivors to save and recruit ~ you have to, because you have no reinforcements. If anyone dies, that's it, you can't hire someone or replace them, you must recruit marines from an already decimated colony survivor population, assuming you can even find anyone to rescue in the first place.

It is loud, brash and full of action, a homage to the Aliens movie and is definitely worth buying for any Aliens fan.

EDIT: 29/06 (Completed the game)

The dev team have been quick to patch out the most pressing issues. I did encounter quite a few bugs, but managed to avoid anything game breaking before the patch. With the rate of patches at the moment, I think the game is in a decent place.

The full game experience is quite good, it can get a bit on-rails later because it is story-driven, which is fine if you're here for the story (as I was), and there's definitely a lot of room for potential sequels or expansions with this sort of gameplay.

Having said that; the final mission and reveal is... awful, like, so bad, it might leave a sour taste, which is a shame because everything leading up to it was great. Still recommend it as an overall experience though, a wonderful game that I hope the developers go on to expand as a sequel in the future.

It is okay, nothing to write home about.

Vandal Hearts 2 probably does political drama and scope better, and any modern turn based tactical RPG is probably better in terms of gameplay than this.

The issues are frequent; There's uneven pacing, a storyline that takes place across three nations, but has people jumping between them relatively quickly ~ obnoxiously so. The passage of time barely seems to happen, it is just 'this happens, now this event happens, and now this event happens.'

There's no lull where the consequences of events can take its time to sink in. Every other optional story blurb is an almost unnecessary scene that pads out the time but offers little in way of additional drama or value.

The game is basically crying out for more minor skirmishes, incidents that go along in the chapter arc that lends weight to the actions of the villains and the heroes. Instead, with basically 1 battle per chapter arc, the events fly forth so rapidly, it's difficult to really care. And isn't helped, by some giant leaps of logic in the story (you're telling me an entire army traversed through a border etc without any alarms being set off along the way? Really? Or that, having surrounded an enemy, when they reveal a potential nation shattering secret, we simply relent and let them 'discuss' the situation rather than exterminating the problem right there and then?)

It is a shame really, because the initial premise was quite promising. If the story is a bit meh, then it needs the battle system to save it, but this isn't a particularly unique system, you've seen it before, and difficulty only really comes through by escalating the level gaps. The first bloody fight is a level 2/3 fight, when you're level 1 for gods sake.

Eh, by chapter 11-12, the fights don't really offer enough variety, neither do the units (IMO) and the tactical fights aren't that difficult ~ mind you, I grew up on this sort of game style, so maybe it's my years of experience helping.

Overall, I thought this was a disappointing game. I'll crack on for the golden ending, but honestly, it's lost its shine ages ago. I'd only pick this up if you're really desperate for a tactical RPG, and are willing to switch off for some interesting logical leaps for the storyline.