Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £29.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Spike Chunsoft, much like their serial antagonist of many faces, Zero, has left me in a bit of a pickle. Thankfully not one involving Running Man style exploding collars, or deathtraps, or locked rooms, but one involving that most dangerous of minefields for a reviewer. SPOILERS.

…Oh, it might be, it might not be. Every screenshot potentially is for me. 😛

Beyond what I just said, and the fact that I think the game is quite interesting and cool (And that it’s good news that the other two games, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward), you won’t find any. Or maybe you will. It can, in the middle of play, feel as confusing as whether this game is a sequel, a midquel, a threequel, or all of the above… Although I’m moderately sure “None of the above” is not a valid answer, leading only to the Bad End of dubious canon. I’m only going to tell you what you need to know to make a decision.

First up, it’s a voiced, 3D visual novel with puzzles that remind one of earlier games like The 7^th Guest and Myst, where skipping dialogue for the first time through is not recommended, and where philosophy, Pop Quantum Physics, and death all reign. There are six billion lives at stake, and this is not a spoiler because you’re told that in the first minute or so of the bloody game. Click on things, move things, escape from rooms, and make choices that will have a momentous effect on the game’s world… Or not. If the Pop Quantum Physics mention didn’t clue you in, not everything is as it appears at first.

And that’s actually the second important thing to note that isn’t a spoiler. The game is, for the most part, non linear. Even in the middle of a puzzle, you can, for the most part, sod off to a different, unlocked part of the story, and the game relies on this for multiple reasons. At first, you will get annoyed at unlocking Bad Ends (Some messier than others), but as the game progresses… As more of the timeline unlocks… Those “Grr”s will soon turn to “Ohhhhhh”s and “Wait, WHA-”s. More of the former than the latter, which is a credit to the writing team.

…For example, even this beginning segment says things. 🙁

Similarly, the voice acting team and musicians deserve kudos, because the English dub of this game is not bad at all. The VA in general is well delivered, the music is mostly fitting to its atmosphere and well crafted (The exceptions not actually being the musical and VA teams’ fault, as there is, unfortunately, a currently unpatched bug that sometimes cuts the music out before it’s meant to end, and if you don’t turn the music and SFX down a little, it sometimes overrides the voice acting), and, while the SFX aren’t always that great (About on par, I would say, with the aforementioned FMV adventure games of days gone by, so still alright), the visuals and area design managed to keep my interest for 8 straight hours in a row, helped along by an intriguing story with twists and turns aplenty.

Of course, no game is perfect. There are bugs, but thankfully not many. Some of the dialogue, due to the non-linear nature of the game, will feel repetitive even with the best VA and writing (And, often, the VA and writing dip into “Only fair to good”, with the occasional pun that even makes me groan. I’m not kitten…) Finally, it’s not greatly intuitive how to unlock certain scenes (Suffice to say, the triggers are sometimes spread across more than one scene), and that can lead to some frustration around the midgame.

Pictured: Not The Midgame, But Somewhat Eye-Murdering.

But, as far as adventures go, this one is a corker. There is an internal logic, and it can be discerned, but exploration is a must, both through space and time. So long as you understand that, I think adventure fans and VN fans alike may well enjoy Zero Time Dilemma, and, while I wouldn’t call it a great introduction to either genre, if you feel like a challenge, this is well priced.

The Mad Welshman is now going to tell your future. You are going to scroll down from these words… Or up from the previous article in the list, and be injected with Rad-Spoiler-7. Fortunately, Rad-Spoiler-7, while 100% fatal otherwise, is the only known antidote to Irritato-BadEnd , which is 75% fatal.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £9.99 (£3.99 for the Soundtrack, which definitely ain’t bad)
Where To Get It: Steam 

When I got the email that the developers of UnEpic were making a new game, I was both excited and nervous. Excited, because UnEpic did interesting things. Nervous, because it was also referential as hell, dumb in places, and stupidly hard and grindy in others.

This, er… Makes slightly more sense as a joke once you’ve played UnEpic and seen the bits before this… :/

For good or for ill… Little has changed. The references are somewhat less forced, the story veers wildly between pulpy silliness, philosophical discussion, and blatant referential humour, and the grind?

Oh yes. The grind remains. And it remains my problem with Ghost 1.0, because, to me? It’s just not fun to repeat alarm lockdowns for Energon-Cubes-As-Currency, so I can get better weapons that, really, I should be earning more organically. And this is a damn shame, because, for all the bitching, there has been improvement over the UnEpic formula, with fluid movement, a better overall story (Involving the enslavement of androids by an evil corporation… Hey, I said better, not amazing), and some cool stuff hidden in there… But, even past the halfway point, I’m not sure it feels worth it to continue. Boss with nigh unavoidable paralyzing shockwave, making it a damage race? Check. Instant death laser segments that, while using the cool idea of controlling robots with cyber-psychic powers, uses it for tedious, “Do it right or do it again” segments involving scientist robots with no offensive abilities (Read: Forced puzzle-stealth segments.) Check.

Not cool, Fran, I totally made my Dexterity Check!

There’s fun in there. Really, there is. The second boss, for example, is fun. The first boss, once you figure it out, is fun. The interplay between Ghost, Boogan, and Jacker (The latter two technically making a return from UnEpic) is fun. But it’s buried beneath a game that feels like it’s run by an adversarial GM who still thinks OD&D is the best thing since sliced bread. And this is such a core problem, and obviously deliberate, that I unfortunately can’t get past it.

So, when it comes to the question of “Is Ghost 1.0 worth playing?” , two questions have to be asked. The first is whether you like metroidvanias. A simple enough question, but the next is harder: Do you find grind and “death makes things harder on you” fun? Because, regardless of the good voice acting, the fair animation, the interesting toys (Once you’ve earned them), and the story that definitely has interesting elements, if the answer to that second question is “No, not really”, or some variation thereof, I really can’t recommend Ghost 1.0 to you.

The first boss, about to get a schooling from an awesome cyber-psychic merc lady. Who still died five times while getting the cash for the gun she’s using… >:|

The Mad Welshman is hacking Ghost 1.0 to provide a “Less Grindy” mode, but he’s hit Alarm Level 9, and the respawns are getting a bit tiresome. 

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £29.99
Where To Get It: Steam, Official Store

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada (or Armada, as it’s going to be referred to for the rest of the review) is an adaptation of Games Workshop’s spaceship battle tabletop game where, in the grim darkness of the future, there are only chiselled jawlines. It preloads, and this can, in some cases, take a while (2 minutes at best, 10 at the worst I’ve seen it), but once you’re in the game? It’s fairly entertaining!

Well, *one* of us isn’t relying on just his faith to win the battle… Idiot…

As such, however, I want to get the bad out of the way first. The game does not tutorialise terribly well, as the campaign focuses on the Imperium of Man (As 90% of GW licensed properties in 40K have done), and so getting a handle on the other three factions currently in the game (Eldar, Ork, and Chaos) is a matter of experimentation rather than being shown. Occasionally, the camera will refuse to co-operate until you reselect a ship, for reasons I have yet to discover. And the multiplayer needs work, with some factions requiring more micromanagement using limited Tactical Cogitator time (Slowdown, basically), and matchmaking needing improvements. Thankfully, these are at least on the development roadmap.

Now to the good: The campaign is well presented, and teaches some skills as it goes along, such as boarding actions, auto engagement, and the fact that losing a mission is not, as in many strategy games, a game over, but more of a setback than anything else, so, while savescumming is do-able, and a valid way to play, it’s by no means necessary. Of course, being 40K, it’s both dark and silly at the same time, so the second campaign mission, involving Ork Freebootaz (Orc space pirates, basically) is introduced by a cutscene that begins with… Gretchin (Space goblins) being fired out of a large gun, and being surprisingly pumped about either impacting another ship at high speed, or missing and asphyxiating in the cold bleakness of space. That image alone… Is actually a pretty good summary of 40K. It also provides an excellent example of how defeat will make your job harder, as losing the convoy in this second mission adds more rebellious worlds in the area, as, unsurprisingly, people get unhappy when they’re starving.

Warhammer40K.JPG

Aurally, it’s a treat, with a lot of good voice acting, some suitably dramatic music, and some impactful sound effects that really make space fighting fun, and visually, it can be quite cool, although often, you’ll be too zoomed out to truly appreciate the majestic ships and barrelfuls of dakka, and the Tactical Cogitator filter… Slightly detracts. But as far as adaptations of Battlefleet Gothic go? It’s priced fairly for even the campaign, and, so long as you don’t mind using Skirmish to get a handle on the ships of non-Imperial factions, the multiplayer’s quite fun too.

Unsurprisingly, things go horribly wrong sometimes. This will soon be one of those times.

The Mad Welshman checked the Holy Manual of Shooting Things Very Dead. The instructions were simple, and, once his visex had… What do you mean, the terminology’s all wrong?

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Source: Review Copy
Price: £14.99
Where To Get It: Steam, Official Site
Other Reviews: Early Access

Erik Johnson, one of the Misfits Attic team on Duskers, stated “When I created Duskers it was really around a feeling: of being alone in the dark, of isolation, of being surrounded by old gritty tech that could only give you a partial picture about what’s going on around you, like the motion sensor that goes off, but doesn’t tell you exactly what’s out there. I like the idea of needing to rely on that tech, and the claustrophobia and isolation that would cause.”

Every single one of these ships is devoid of its original crew. Every one is deadly.

He’s not wrong, and Duskers is an interesting game that somewhat defies easy genre labelling. But hot-damn, am I grateful the difficulty is so customisable, because with all the options on, it’s tense, and death, or rather, being left without your drones, is quite easy.

Storywise, it’s simple: You are possibly the last human being left alive, and you want to both survive… And know why, how it happened. All you have is a small drone salvage ship, with a (mostly) full complement of drones, and your wits. Good luck with that!

What this means, however, is that you are controlling a variety of drones, none of which see overly clearly, through an easy to learn text interface and HUD. You can directly control the movement of a single drone with the arrow keys, but for everything else, it’s commands like “Navigate 2 r4” (Move drone 2 to room 4) or “Motion 1” (Use drone 1’s motion tracker, because another drone I brought along also has one), with some easter egg messages available using the “Run” command (For example: Run twirlygig)

Most of the time, this isn’t a problem, and the game is like a puzzle. But the older the ship, the larger the threats that loom, and the less time you have to react to them. And often, it presents you with tough and interesting decisions. For example, spacing threats is, especially with radiation turned off, an option… Once you’ve discovered them. And there are three and a half ways to discover a threat: Motion trackers, which don’t always work; Sensors, which require you to place them; Stealth, which doesn’t always work; And, of course, them discovering you. Which is bad. Very bad.

Map view, where we see some sensors, the sensors picking up someone bad, and the remains of one of my drones. SOD.

At the beginning of the game, you will have, at most, two and a half of these options. And maintaining all of them once you get them is asking for a “Reset”, which, on the one hand, keeps your objective progress and logs collected. On the other, it puts you back in the original ship, with starter drones, and the threats discovered remain as well.

If a ship is cleared of enemies, it can be commandeered, sometimes allowing for greater Scrap storage (The currency of the game, and the only means of keeping your upgrades active for more than a few missions at a time), more ship upgrade slots (Which give you more responses to situations), a few ship specific upgrades (Such as the Military Ship’s cannon, which will kill everything in a room… At the cost of permanently opening it to space), and better fuel storage (Allowing you to travel further without jumping to another system.) There’s also a lot of options, and all of them have a help command that explains their function. It makes for a lot of choices when you get a good run going, and it’s interesting to see the developers do a lot with a little.

However, that doesn’t mean the game is perfect. I’ve often said no game is, and there are things that could possibly be worked on. The reset option takes a lot of the sting out of failing a boarding, losing nearly everything, and that’s a good thing… But it, along with the procedural nature of the universe, means the game slows down a fair bit when you get to the third or fourth sets of objectives in the various disaster questlines, due to needing specific tools or places. Right now, for example, I have to find a specific class of ship, with at least the “pry” or “teleport” tools, preferably a turret and some mines, and destroy all threats within it without turning the ship’s power on. Even if the ship is found, that’s a fair bit of setup, and you can only visit a ship once.

…I can’t see where I’m going. Crap.

Similarly, there is no colour blind support for this game, as, while most of the drone colour schemes are thought out nicely, some make the drones unplayable, perhaps even to folks who see colour better than I do. Dark brown on black, for example, is a terrible idea, and dark red on black, similarly, isn’t great. Thankfully, those are relatively rare, but it would be nice if they’d vanish entirely in a later patch, for the sake of everyone’s eyeballs.

But, while you may be thinking that graphically, this doesn’t look like a whole lot for £14.99, there’s a lot under the hood, and I find myself coming back to it, wanting to know… What red button did they push? Was it machinery out of control? A super AI? A galactic war? Maybe they found something that somehow killed us all on its lonesome? What’s the real secret?

So if you like procedurally generated games, mysteries, puzzles, and a little bit of existential horror, perhaps give this one a go. It seems barebones at first, but there’s definitely some interesting things being done with this game, such as allowing you to continue the story even if you “died.” And, when you think the mystery’s been solved with this one, try a clean save, see if it’s any different. I ruled out Grey Goo, for example, let me know if you did too!

Tim took out its electronic frustrations before a security bot did the same.

The Mad Welshman sighed as Abby’s microphone picked up the telltale synthetic drone… Checking his shipscan, he grinned. The room was worthless, and bordered on an airlock. “NOT THE BEES”, he cried with glee as he violently flipped the “LOCK OVERRIDE” switch.

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Source: Birthday Gift
Price: £14.99 (£18.99 with Soundtrack)
Where To Get It: GOG, Steam
Other Reviews: Release

StarCrawlers, by Juggernaut Games, is the latest in a few games this year and last that’s exploring the ol’ step based RPG formula that we know and love, and… Honestly? I’ve never been more scared of those galactic punching bags, Space Pirates, even if… I don’t think that’s entirely intentional at this stage. More on that later on.

Encounter groups are visible in the main world, much like Might and Magic titles, although this won’t always tell you the whole story.

If you’ve played more recent step-based RPGs (So named because they involve taking single “steps”, rather than smooth first person movement) like Legend of Grimrock, and older step-based games like the Might and Magic series (A heavy inspiration), then you’ll know what to expect with StarCrawlers: You go into dungeons, occasionally solving simple puzzles, but mostly using your party to beat the stuffing out of various beasties and achieve their objectives with the power of TEAMWORK. The kind of teamwork that RPG heroes do, that is… Maximizing the amount of pain they can lay onto a group.

There seems to be more on the way, but the basic gameplay is already there: You kill things for XP (Although not as much as you’ll get for doing the job overall), and loot things in order to make your pretty numbers go up, and occasionally take on story missions that seem to hint at Shenanigans (Capitalised because these are Space Opera Villain Shenanigans, the kind that results in the death of worlds, rather than banana custard over somebody’s face), and allow you to pick your side between various players in a sci-fi universe (From the UFP, Corporate Overlords, to people like the Workers’ Collective, essentially one of the few unions left around in the far future, it seems.) In between said story missions, you’ll do procedurally generated dungeons, with the puzzles and encounters being based on the tileset and objective. Mines, for example, have Radiant Ore, which, as far as I’m aware, only an Engineer can deal with, while Corporate Offices are the Hackers’ main playground. Similarly, protecting a scientist means exactly that, with no sweet reward if he dies before you leave, while one of the few mission types that doesn’t involve pissing someone off involves doing them a favour while fighting off animal or robot type enemies.

An example of the Void Psyker’s personality, and the character art (Which is also good)

There’s quite a cast of characters, too, with eight being playable off the bat, and at least one unlockable through the first story mission, each with their own uses, quirks, and mechanics. The Prototype (A stupidly advanced killer robot with some programming issues, and the aforementioned unlockable), for example, is all about massive damage, but with the caveat that if you use their powers too much, they’ll malfunction, and odd things will happen, eventually leading to them being out of the fight. So far, of course, this is reading more like a feature list than a critical review, but it’s important to get across how complex the game is under the hood, before examining how accessible it is, and whether that complexity is good or bad.

Funnily enough, it’s fairly easy to get into, as the first few story missions are balanced around a single character, two at most, and it’s entirely possible to either get three out of the nine or so characters in your party (Four can be taken on any one mission), or two well kitted ones by the time you hit the Aurora Starliner (The third story mission, and the one where the game’s story starts kicking off.) There are also multiple saves, skill respecs (There aren’t, currently, enough skill points to achieve all of more than a single tree, out of three per character), and each character’s role is well explained, even if their quirks may take a little getting used to. Also helping is that characters are not, strictly speaking, gendered (Male or female is fine), although their characters seem firmly fixed at the present time (And are likely to remain so): The Void Psyker is a bit monkeycheese, because it turns out messing with the dark between the stars messes with your perception of reality, the Smuggler is morally grey, the Prototype is torn between being violent braggart and friendly, poetry creating nice person…

…The writing, as a result, is okay. It’s not going to win any awards, except perhaps Good Use of Archetypes/Stereotypes. But the combat is accessible, the tilesets are pretty nice, with some variation between them (Grimy starship, Nice starship, and various Plot Starships, as one example of the subsets), and their own little quirks (Including, in some missions, faction loot, which, if you take it, will worsen your relationship with… Very possibly the very person who hired you.) So far, it’s seeming like it’s well worth the money if you like step-based RPGs, with some cool stuff. And yet, as I often say, no game is perfect, and definitely no game that’s still in development. So what do you have to watch out for right now if you buy it while it’s still being made?

Some characters even have loot you gain for exploring their mechanics. Malfunction a lot? have a haiku!

Balance. As I’ve mentioned, this is a complex game under the hood, and while it tutorialises quite well, new things get introduced, and then have to be fine tuned. A good example of this would be the aforementioned Space Pirates. Yes, I did get there.

I don’t take Space Pirate missions anymore. At least, not until they’ve been through the balance grinder… Because that “Normal: For Level 3” or the like? It Lies. Space Pirates come in groups of 1… to 5. And there’s rarely just one group. They have pretty average hit points for humans, and pretty average damage for humans… But they’re the only human group right now that I know of, that can start with a full group… Nearly everything else is monsters or some variety of robot, mostly individually weaker than the party. Space Pirates, on the other hand, are only “below par” because they don’t have the wide ability grouping that the party does… And this actually makes them more dangerous. They take time to whittle down, and all that time, the only thing they’re going to be doing is a constant stream of damage, damage that, of course, whittles you down. As I mentioned… There’s rarely one group, and nearly all of my sadquits (I can’t really call them ragequits, because I wasn’t angry, just resigned) have been through either missions involving them, or missions involving Corporate Officers (Who have at least twice the normal human HP, and can summon other monsters.)

The latter set of encounters, by the way, was my fault. This game already has the beginnings of a faction system, and, as it turns out, pissing off Chimera Biopharm (Think the Umbrella Corporation) was a bad idea. Because the very next mission after I’d hit the “Okay, we want you dead now” threshold (Something like -60 Reputation), I’d decided to raid Chimera… And they welcomed me with a series of encounters that rapidly picked my party apart, even turning up in some missions only slightly related to them because… Well, they really wanted me dead!

Sometimes, there are interesting and… Odd bits of furniture. This was in a Corporate Office.

So, right now, StarCrawlers is in a place that interests me critically, but I’ll freely admit isn’t for everybody: The midgame so far (About Level 5) currently feels a little grindy, and is about where the missions started blending into one another for me (Mainly because I had to do more of them to get to those aforementioned Story Missions), and I’ll happily admit that I have yet to get to the current “endgame”, the full levelling of my characters, because sooner or later, I run into one of those balancing issues, and it kills my interest in that save.

Do I think the game has promise? Yes, it’s pretty damn clear that Juggernaut knows their RPGs, and knows how to put them together. They’ve shown, over previous updates, that they do know they have to balance things, and I’m as confident as I can be that they can get that mix right. Similarly, a lot of effort has gone into both accessibility and environment, and even the placeholder designs for newer enemies such as Security Turrets shows that mix of wanting to give an impression of the final design, while concentrating on how they work. Do I think it’s worth a gamble of £15? Yes. But the usual Early Access caveat applies: Be Aware It’s Still In Development. It may only start to seem obvious after your twentieth or so mission, which hints at why I feel this game has promise, but it will happen.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep plugging away until release. The game definitely seems worth that.

This is a screen you’ll see a lot of. It’s actually quite friendly, and intuitive.

The Mad Welshman drew the powers of the Dark to him, and giggled. He had such sights to show!

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