Recent reviews by LtUlman

This... this is a stylish game. It has interesting visuals with fun animations for each move. The cards are presented well with a clean style that tells you what each card is/does very quickly. The music fits the theme and the sound effects add nicely to the atmosphere.

But none of this overcomes the complete lack of gameplay.
Each round you draw a hand of 5 cards and select 3 of them to go into slots 1, 2, or 3, your opponent does the same. Each card is one of three types, Ranged, Melee, or Skill and each one of those beats one of the others, ala Rock Paper Scissors. Ranged beats Melee, Melee beats Skill, and Skill beats Ranged. Only the cards that win this battle are actually played, so if you put your "gain shields" Skill card in slot 1 and your opponent put their "do damage" Melee card in their slot 1 your card will do nothing. Bye bye shields you were relying on, you don't get to come out to play. The problem with this is that neither side knows what the other has put out in advance so on at least the first few turns of each fight you are blindly guessing, you have no idea what the makeup of the other person's deck is so you have no idea what cards of yours are actually going to be effective.

Now you do get a second deck of cards called "Hacks" which allow you to manipulate the cards already in slots, e.g. swapping slots so you have a more favourable match up or lowering the damage on something you can't prevent but they cost energy to use (you gain 1 per turn) AND are one use cards so you have a double limit on them. Trying to switch your cards around on the battlefield after you had to blind guess is the most strategic thing in the game and the creators decided to impose two limits on you doing that. Why?

In most CCG/LCG/Fixed card games you can build a deck designed to do a thing and have that particular thing work with some degree of regularity, here you can't. Your key cards can be blocked on every play and there's very little you can do to mitigate that.


Now I'll admit, I have not played for very long (I spent longer debating with myself how to word this review than I did on playing the game!) but the game itself did not inspire me to play for more than 30 odd minutes. It's a shame, I love card games, I love how digital card games can do things real world ones can't, I love the cyberpunk aesthetic and I love how this game makes me feel. But I just can't recommend it as a game.

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I love Sentinels of the Multiverse. I enjoyed the game play of the card game, but what really kept me coming back to the game was because I wanted to find out more about the characters, the small bits of flavour text on the bottom of the cards were a great window into the world.

I love Freedom Force. A real time isometric super hero game, destructible terrain, an epic story and a robust creation system where you could create your own hero/powers to mess around in that world too, what's not to love?

This game seemed to be a mashup of both of those things, it should have been a slam dunk, but it's not. In my opinion this game should not have released yet, it's not ready. At best this is still an Early Access game.

Let's start with the good, it wont take long.

The character creator.
There are so many options to create your superhero, and not just the cut and style of your costume. You can choose from multiple different sources for your powers, and they all come with differing effects to help or hinder your play style, such as increased range for your powers or more hit points at the cost of movement speed. And then you can choose 2 different "suites" of powers as well, so you can build a tech imbued magic caster or a gun totting bot summoner, there truly is a wealth of options to dig through to create your hero.


And now let's move on to the neutral.

Settings
The music is a suitably poppy superhero-esq sound track, it's created by the inimitable Jean-Marc Giffin, he who made the music for the digital adaptation of the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game so it keeps the same flavour as before but it's so short and repeats with no variations, at a volume level that drowns out all the sound effects of the game... and you can't change the volume. You can’t customise the controls, you can’t change the mouse acceleration, you can’t make any changes to the game beyond the quality of the graphics and the screen size.
I'm not expecting to be able to make sweeping changes to the game from the options menu, but why are there no earth are there no volume controls?

The game play.
This is partially my fault. This is not Freedom Force, it’s not real time, it’s turn based. I went in expecting one thing and got another. For what it is it’s merely OK. The difficulty of the game isn’t because the super villains are tough or they have special powers you need to overcome, the game just throws waves and waves of normal criminals at you, and they can take you down just as easily as a super villain cane, it just takes longer.
Interactions between attack and defence are poorly explained. If you open the menu it shows you a table of interactions but doesn’t detail what half the icons on it mean.
And the attacks don’t seem to have been tested thoroughly, I was able to knock Ermine out of bounds, and after she finally came back to attack me she ran back out of bounds with her overwatch ability.


And then the bad.

The graphics make the characters’ skin look plastic. These do not look like comic book characters so much as collectible figures, which wouldn’t be a problem if the game didn’t play up the comic book aesthetics so hard, going so far as to put them in comic book panels between levels. It looks like an action figure collector is trying to make a youtube video to tell stories with their toys.

The camera is wonky. This is a turn based game but the camera doesn’t move to show you the characters who are acting at the time, it stays on the “centre” of the action, where ever that may be, and that’s not always on the character attacking/being attacked.
The camera has an elastic boundary limit, it wont stay in certain places and keeps snapping back if you let go of the movement keys for the camera.

The writing is just terrible. I don’t expect a masterpiece, but I do expect a character to be consistent with how they’ve been portrayed before. In the opening scene Wraith is talking and making jokes while trying to sneak around the city, she’s the Batman analogue and she’s joking around and blowing her stealth? That has not been her character traits in the 10 odd years she has been around in the card game (and who is she talking to? Us? She’s no 4th wall breaker like Guise). It wouldn’t even work as narration, “...the heat and pressure of progress…” is not part of a sentence anyone has ever uttered, not even as corny comic book dialogue.

During my play time I heard a single voiced line for each character, why is that even there? If you’re not going to have voice acting in the game, don’t have a single line that pops up when it’s that character’s turn, it’s grating and repetitive. Have multiple lines so there’s at least a chance that people will have a surprise when it pops up, they might even pick a favourite. I will admit that it’s possible that I missed that there was more than one line, but I blame that on the music drowning out all other sounds.


This idea had so much potential, and it wasted it all. I’ve played my 2 odd hours and got a refund. I wont be back to see how this progresses.

Wow.

I came to this game with some expectations, an RPG with an epic storyline and characters to match the occasion. I was not disappointed. I chose to play as a human noble and was introduced to the game through that storyline, with Tim Curry voicing the (obviously traitorous) friend of my father, I was enjoying myself immensely (I could have done with a voice acted protagonist though).

And then we came to the combat.

For a game with such an epic story the combat in this game feels so unepic that I just couldn't slog through it to get to the next story/exploration bit, it's just not fun. Sure, I can automate my companions with various different tactics, which is cool, but the time it takes for the combat to run is just too slow for a game promising "epicness". I got to the lighting of the beacon on top of the tower and would have loved to have seen how that turn out, and changed the course of Ferelden forever but I would have had to fight my way through so many Genlocks to get there I just wasn't interested.

Thumbs down.

What can I say about this game?

It lacks the engaging warmth of Portal 2 and the guiding hand that made that game fun.
It appears as if the game wants you to remember everything that you did in Portal 2 and add in new puzzle concepts without ever explaining what any of them are. Too many of these puzzles are try-and-find-what-concepts-we-are-using-in-this-room! to be fun.

The puzzles are challenging, they require you to think along similar lines of the other portal games and do have internally consistant logic but I had no sense of achievement when I completed one, just an easing of frustration.

The storyline is intrigue and, if 1.4 hadn't happened, I would have worked my way through to find out what was going on, using "Cave Johnson" as the GLaDOS substitue was inspired... until the reveal. Then it's just a core, like Wheatley but without the humour; if only it could have been something else, another human test subject trapped, or a rival company that wanted to get its hands on a portal gun.


I was a good way through Chapter 4 when update 1.4 was uploaded, it didn't stop my save from working but there were a lot of graphical glitches added (example), and when I thought about it I found I did not want to go back and play through the beginning of the chapter again, it just wasn't fun. If I was playing Portal 2 I would have happily jumped back to the start of chapter to play around in it, but I've nothing different to try out here, and there's no fun in using the exact same solution here, there's no GLaDOS style character to "motivate" you as you test.

I give this a thumbs down.

An excellent Rogue-Like, the classes aren't all balanced but that's half the fun. The DLCs do add a fair amount of longevity to the game, and some of it is free.

I give this game 4 thumbs up out of 5

I DON'T recommend this, the gameplay is repetitive and the units you buy and have available to you each month are completely random so you can't take in your nicely upgraded units, making planning a strategy a worthless task; this game is more about mitigating your losses than anything else.
I regret spending money on this game.