Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 2 September 2023, 19:53:15
Tags: Black Book; MorteshkaEach adventure starts with a main goal related to the plot, usually through a visiting NPC at your Izba. It’s not terribly subtle considering your Grandfather will chime in and outright say there’s a chance you’ll run into something you need. However, you never know where the adventure will take you, or what to expect. You’re presented with a map highlighting where you need to go, and the stops along the way, including detours for hidden quests, combat & lore.
However, the pacing really shines here, with the game never letting you get too comfortable. The second any feeling of repetitiveness or boredom starts to creep up, you find yourself stuck somewhere unfamiliar, sometimes for an entire chapter. On top of story pacing, gameplay changes wildly as well. From typical countryside exploration, to solving a village mystery, to escorting caravans, all the way to dungeons. Another point for atmosphere in this regard, because making it back from your journey really emphasizes the feeling of being at home.
No good a time as this to point out this is not an open-world, walking simulator, sandbox exploration. You travel on the map, reach your location, and more often than not deal with your problems through dialogue unless you trigger a combat encounter. Experience gained, items & lore received; you can now go on your merry way.
Final destinations differ slightly from the formula, many times forcing you to deal with pseudo-dungeons. Most commonly you find yourself on a plot of land to navigate and investigate, eventually leading to a dungeon. This was not the main focus of the game, so it’s nothing special in and of itself. No 4-hour dungeon crawling for you! Consequently, their size and narrow focus avoids the sin many games make by keeping you locked in trash encounter hell for hours at a time between the same grey walls. Instead, the dungeon stays true to the exploration you experience on the surface with small side areas providing lore and occasional combat. Even better, the aesthetics vary wildly due to the variety of places you visit. Forests, beneath a lake, villages, underground lairs, even Hell itself all make an appearance. In some cases, these dungeons can last for days of game time, keeping you away from the Izba & your regular compatriots.
With this loop Morteshka nailed the pacing, providing the player with nearly 0 filler content. As a result, nearly 99% of the game time will be dialogue, combat, reading & managing gameplay elements. It’s not the best exploration, its not the most innovative, but it does the job very well for what it’s trying to achieve.
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RPG Codex Review: Jagged Alliance 3
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 26 August 2023, 18:31:32
Tags: Haemimont Games; Jagged Alliance 3; THQ NordicAnd what do you know – it does. The game once again copies a number of its systems from Jagged Alliance 2, and since that is probably the pinnacle of the genre, as you’d expect it all works very nicely. The control you have over your mercenaries is very granular, and you can specify everything from whether they should be running, crouching or lying down, to exactly how many action points they should spend zeroing in on an enemy, as well as what part of the body to aim for. Unconventionally (though not for the franchise), chance to hit is not displayed, and you will have to eyeball each shot, while mercs provide helpful comments whenever they think a shot is likely to succeed or fail. It’s a great system, which strikes a good balance between uncertainty and feedback, and it’s nice to see it make its return.
There are other such nuances to the combat as well, which are not new to the series but are rarely seen elsewhere, especially these days. With the option to target body parts comes location-specific damage; so a shot to the leg will decrease movement, a shot to the arms will decrease accuracy, and so on. Guns fire bullets with real trajectories and real penetration, which means that a missed shot might hit something else, or a shot with a high-penetration weapon might travel right through the target and hit something else behind him. Cover can be destroyed, visual contact can be broken with smoke, characters can be suppressed by gunfire and flashbangs, and combatants can get panicked and lose their turn entirely.
Energy and morale are also in, although the energy and morale metres of the previous game have been replaced by a ladder of cumulative status effects. If forced to operate for a long time without a break, mercs will gain the “Tired” status, reducing their maximum action points by 1. If forced to keep going, they will eventually become “Exhausted”, losing another action point. On top of that, exhausted characters are liable to fall unconscious if they’re hit with more energy-draining attacks. Likewise with morale: it can drop to low or very low, decreasing AP, if mercs take significant damage or if someone dies, and rise when mercs score good kills, complete quests or progress in the campaign. Overall, the effect works out to be about the same as in the previous game, if presented in a slightly more cumbersome way.
One aspect of combat that deserves particular praise is the level of environmental destruction the game supports. You can break a lot of scenery in Jagged Alliance 3. Certain things you will not be able to blow up, such as the skeletons of larger buildings as well as bridges and other things essential to the traversability of the map. Still, the level of damage that you can do to most structures is impressive and a delight to play with. Level the second floor of a building with a rocket launcher, and have enemies rain down from above into the waiting arms of your knife-wielding melee specialist on the first floor. Blow the roof off a building with a grenade, then chuck a second one through the hole into the cluster of enemies huddled inside. It is simply great fun, and makes explosives specialists very valuable additions to your team, quite apart from their direct damage potential. There are plenty of sector designs that provide good opportunities to make use of their potential, too. It doesn’t reach the level of mayhem that you can cause in X-COM: Apocalypse or Silent Storm – the kings of the genre if all you want to do is raze the entire map – but it’s miles above most of the competition.
[...] There are other issues as well, and the most serious ones all have to do with how combat is initiated. Firstly, there’s the matter of stealth mode, and more broadly, enemy awareness in general. Enemies in this game are deaf, dumb and blind to a ridiculous degree. The vision range of your own mercs is more than twice as long as that of the enemies, which ensures that you'll always spot them before they spot you. Even in broad daylight you can freely run around in the open without having to be particularly careful. Engage stealth mode as well, which at the cost of movement speed makes your mercs even harder to detect, and you can run rings around enemies without them noticing. Now add the detection system, where enemies have detection bars that need to fill up before they’re considered to have spotted you, and the result is that the only time you won’t get to initiate combat yourself is if a patrol happens to walk right into one of your mercs while you’re busy controlling someone else.
And that’s not all. Alongside the stealth system there is a stealth kill system. Essentially, there is a percentage chance of an attack made from stealth to result in an instant kill. There are mercs who via perks and high stats have a higher chance of achieving stealth kills, and with these you are all but guaranteed that the first attack you make results in a fatality. Did I mention that you can re-enter stealth in the middle of combat? And that silenced weapons are so easy to come by that you can have several after the very first tutorial sector? It is an absurd system, and fundamentally warps balance in favour of long-range weapons – sniper rifles, in other words. The tragedy is that the balance in the utility of different weapon types is quite good otherwise, and every weapon type has its niche. It is a shame that by far the best strategy in terms of preserving the safety of your mercs is to ignore them. Perhaps bring along a single machine gun when things get hairy, but otherwise stick to silenced rifles and pick enemies off from stealth. The game doesn’t have to be played this way, but any other approach is far, far more likely to land your mercs in trouble.
The developers obviously realised that setting up devastating stealth ambushes was inordinately powerful, so they came up with a solution. Unfortunately their solution is, once again, terrible. What they did was allow the enemies a small quasi-turn at the beginning of combat to reposition themselves. In other words, whenever you start combat by shooting a bad guy, all his friends are allowed a moment to scurry for cover without there being anything you can do about it. This destroys any potential of a well-executed ambush – or it would, if you could not set up overwatch over every enemy and watch them get shot as they do their little scramble. In any case, it takes away your control of the situation. It would seem to be a natural thing, in a game about tactical operations with a small squad of elite soldiers who are vastly outnumbered, to reward the player for setting up a good ambush. Clearly, though, in Jagged Alliance 3 this is so absurdly easy to do that the player can’t be allowed to do it, so control must be taken away from him in however arbitrary a fashion. This is a textbook example of how bad design begets bad design.
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JRPG Codex Review: The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
Review - posted by Darth Roxor on Mon 14 August 2023, 12:27:01
Tags: Falcom; The Legend of Heroes: Trails into ReverieSuffice to say, he seems to be fairly positive about it. To give a snippet:
(...)
Once again you will get to control a massive cast of characters, each one with their own personality and combat abilities. You'll meet old characters and new alike – among them, the protagonists of every past series, a political terrorist leader, a powerful villain re-emerged and even a sentient doll. The characters whose lives you will closely experience constantly struggle with their own morality and place in the world, such as the former contract killer Rixia when she encounters a duo of young assassins, and Rean, when he meets a master of both the blade and life that far surpasses his own abilities.
The characters come and go throughout the game, much like in previous entries. Don't get too attached to anyone for too long and try not to equip your absolute strongest equipment or gems on anyone but the main characters until you have plenty enough to go around; the way the game flows is entirely dependent on the plot.
And the enemies do include just everything this time as well, from dancing ant-eaters to krakens and demons, assassins, perverted versions of your own characters and more. Some of the creatures are throwbacks to Trails in the Sky from 19 years ago, others are brand new. Regardless, figuring out and exploiting or working around weaknesses and resistances is as fun as ever, especially when you introduce the high difficulty tactical element.
The article is fairly in-depth, and many of the details mentioned here managed to spark the interest of even someone as jaded as yours truly. To find out if you are also able to connect with your inner weeb, dive right on in. Read the full article: JRPG Codex Review: The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
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RPG Codex Review: Black Geyser
Codex Review - posted by Darth Roxor on Fri 28 July 2023, 18:29:16
Tags: Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness; GrapeOcean TechnologiesSurprisingly enough, this strong contender for the weirdest title ever plastered on an RPG made by a bunch of nobodies actually turned out enjoyable. As with any other game, it has its ups and downs, but some things it manages to do fairly well. As Lady Error puts it:
For example, there is a time travel-themed quest in an underground area where the party needs to retrieve an antidote from a hostile group of cultists in the past and find a way to bring it to the present to save some allies. The difficulty is that all small magical items get destroyed by the time travel device, including the antidote.
The main quest focuses heavily on royal diplomacy in different kingdoms, which is a relatively new theme compared to the Infinity Engine titles. The majority of the quests can also be resolved in more than one way – often there is a pacifist solution available. There are even a few quests with heavy choices and consequences. Without spoiling too much, one of them really surprised me: when helping someone in need resulted in wiping out an entire peaceful settlement. And all the unresolved quests from that settlement were lost, though I did get a very powerful item as a "thank you."
Overall, this game is not too short, with a similar amount of content as the original Baldur's Gate. Black Geyser does not overstay its welcome.
But there is more to like and dislike about it, all neatly arranged in a tidy list of what's right and wrong. Read the full article: RPG Codex Review: Black Geyser
RPG Codex Interview: Sérgio Gil on Project Haven
Codex Interview - posted by Infinitron on Sat 15 July 2023, 18:09:56
Tags: Code Three Fifty One; Project HavenHey! Thanks for having me. Truly appreciate the interest in Project Haven! We've always been avid gamers since childhood back in the early 90's, and like many always wanted to make our own games. I've personally started my professional game dev career in 2000 and have been making games since. Joana has a master's in Psychology and a PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, she always loved games, particularly games with a good story. Back in 2015 we started creating a game together for fun, and it eventually turned into Project Haven when we saw its potential.
If you could describe Project Haven to an audience of grognards who love CRPGs and tactical games, how would you do so?
Project Haven is our attempt to recreate the same feeling you had in firefights in games like Jagged Alliance 2, Silent Storm and the original Xcoms. Essentially it's a turn based game where fights are very messy, uncertain, and you have to deal with a lot of variables in the field at the same time. You have very granular control of your characters (it's not a simplified experience) allowing you to engage each encounter exactly as you like. In Project Haven we've paired this gameplay with a cinematic storyline that will push the player forward through the streets of Haven city.
The implementation of a non-grid-based system to provide the player with more granular control is an interesting one not seen in too many tactics games. Furthermore, players are able to do things like sidestep, free aim, etc. In an era where tactics games have become increasingly streamlined to appeal to more gamers, why did you choose to go the other way?
From the start we wanted to have significant emphasis on the characters' mechanical control. Free Aim was actually one of the first features we tried, it started out as a test to see how it felt, but in the end, for us, it improves the experience and the immersion in the world. It does depart from the percentage based hit systems that are more common, though Free Aim arguably seems like a more "fair" system as you can visually assess how likely you are to hit. The gridless movement comes together with all the rest of the features we have in Project Haven like strafe, lean, direction of facing being important, etc.... It would be a disservice to the game to have gridded movement when we have all the other means of controlling the characters. I personally don't think steamlining increases the appeal in general, look at games like Path of Exile or Escape from Tarkov, they are very complex experiences and can't really be considered niche, they have massive audiences too. I think it's more risky to do a complex game, since there's more opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot as a developer, but if managed and tested properly it can definitely be a plus.
Let's talk about one of the most intriguing features of Project Haven: the implementation of true ballistics, where bullets have trajectories and can even penetrate soft surfaces like wood. How does it work, and how difficult was it to implement and balance across the different gun types?
We tried to model the ballistics in a fairly realistic way. We didn't implement bullet drop off as the ranges aren't that long in the game, but otherwise it behaves as you would expect a real bullet to behave. When a bullet hits something the material type and thickness affect how much energy the bullet loses. We also have different ammo types like regular FMJ, hollow point and armor piercing which all affect how a bullet performs. For balancing reasons we have to stray from reality on the damage, effective range and how much material a bullet can actually go through. For instance, say a normal 9mm may not deal any damage in reality when it hits an armor plate, but in Project Haven it will deal a certain amount of damage to the armor and potentially the character too. Iteration and playtesting is king here. Fun is the most important factor.
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RPG Codex Review: Ctrl Alt Ego
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 1 July 2023, 22:27:03
Tags: Ctrl Alt Ego; MindThunkApart from the aforementioned, because of how varied the skills and upgrades are, you can accomplish tasks in almost any way you please so long as it is feasible within the constraints of the map. It never gets old converting an enemy MOM into a walking bomb, then having it enter a room full of other enemies. You can even do a pacifist run if you so please, turning yourself invisible and using the VacQ (a vacuum cleaner to suck up small objects, or to suck YOU towards big objects) to dart about swiftly from room to room. A lot of times, you don’t even have to use any of your skills if you don’t want to, as you can just hide behind boxes and wait for imminent threats to pass you by. Stealth isn’t light-based for those of you wondering, though it is still very much a viable option.
The maps are an absolute joy to explore and exploit. The initial chapters start off more like linear puzzle maps, though despite that, you still have many ways to overcome challenges: other than Bug 22's skills, you can also turn the environment to your advantage. Most items can be moved around and used as a tool of some sort; rarely will you enter a room that does not have at least one exploitable feature. It’s up to you how you want to play within the constraints of the game’s physics. Hide or confront, sabotage or ignore, there are so many ways to overcome a given problem.
The AI is also competent at tracking you down. If you try to hide behind a box right in front of a hostile, it will start to grow suspicious. When you move the box around, the hostile machine’s suspicion grows, until it decides it’s had enough of your nonsense and zaps away your cover. It is also quick to pick up on your presence if you take control of an enemy and start attacking them with their own mate. But, again, because there are so many ways to accomplish an objective, you can mix and match strategies. You can use a combination of stealth and brute force, or a combination of sabotage and subterfuge. It’s your playground.
There are a total of 8 chapters, and I must say that from Chapters 1 to 6, I treated the game more like a puzzle game than a simulation. It was very reminiscent of Portal in the way the maps of these 6 chapters were designed. I might be going out on a limb here, but it felt like the design philosophy for those earlier chapters was to only present the player with a series of challenges of escalating difficulty as games from the puzzle genre normally do. This was evident in the various MacGuffins that you had to go after, with a simple narrative to tie everything together. I did have a good time as each chapter got progressively more difficult, but I never really felt like I was playing an “immersive sim”.
And then, I was greeted by Chapters 7 and 8.
The map layout and design of these two chapters blew my mind. Not only were the maps huge, easily beating Chapters 1 to 6 in scale, but there was so much to do. There was so much to discover, so many access points and routes to traverse across the stations. Many games tend to fall apart towards the later levels, but CAE maintains a strong consistency in quality. At no point did I feel the developers dropped the ball and got sloppy to rush out the product. Bear in mind that this was developed by a team of two to three guys, making it even more mind-blowing!
I can’t say more about these last two chapters without ruining the surprise you get when you reach that point but be prepared to do a lot of exploration. Not only are they huge, but most major areas are interconnected in some way. It’s a very nice mix of closed corridors and big open spaces, two glorious playgrounds for you to mess around with whichever tools you fancy.
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RPG Codex Review: Caves of Lore
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 10 June 2023, 23:26:11
Tags: Caves of LoreThe game also has an in-game automap, filled in as you explore. There is just enough detail on the automap to jog your memory and aid you when trying to recall bits and pieces of unfinished puzzles, without being so explicit that it gives the game away. The automap also allows for an (as far as I know) undocumented auto-travel feature, useful when backtracking or moving about in town and so forth. It also keeps track of how many of each area's secrets and ores you've discovered. Normally I wouldn't appreciate such a tracker, but in this case, with the myriad secrets and some uncertainty about whether the doodads on the map are actually used in the game or not, I didn't mind it too much.
Let's get this out of the way now: I'm a huge fan of this game's exploration mechanics, and I believe it is by far its most enjoyable aspect. You never feel bored wandering around. There are always new areas to explore, or old areas with expanded avenues opening up, or interesting opportunities to interact with the environment. Discovering the mechanics behind the game's lunar system is the best kind of joy: frustrating at first, then deeply satisfying once you've attained mastery. And since treasure unlocked via lunar mechanics is by far the best in the game, it's always a huge rush to figure out a given puzzle. Learning the little peculiarities of each type of puzzle was also fun and satisfying.
For those (like me) who had a difficult time figuring out the lunar system solely through in-game experimentation, there are a series of books giving more detailed explanations, while still leaving room for further discovery, and several spells which are solely exploration-related to expand options as the game progresses.
Camping is conducted anywhere with enough room to seat your party of characters. You have a range of jobs which can be performed during camp, as well as some options for passing time, both in terms of hours/days and moon phase. Your hp and mana will regen while encamped, dependent on each character's Survival skill.
A few sour notes detract from the overall experience. First, a game tied to a lunar system which depends on the passage of time necessarily entails a lot of time spent waiting in the game (usually via camping). You're going to spend a lot of time staring at the game's sundial while encamped if you want to unlock every secret. I'm not sure how to solve this problem (or even if it's wise to mess with it), since the feeling of time passing is tied so tightly into exploration.
Second, one character's exploration ability is absolutely required in order to unlock several secrets, which does not in my opinion fit with the other characters' theme of "useful but not necessary" exploration abilities. In particular there is a great deal of pressure placed on the player to conduct a ton of grinding in order to bring this character up to speed with the rest of the party, so he can be useful to the party in combat (which also ties back to the character development issues talked about earlier).
Finally, camping is effectively a risk-free refill mechanic. The only potential throttle is the possible amount of time required to completely refill the mana of mage characters. Especially at higher levels it's usually faster to stay the night at the inn or dormitory since it instantly refills health and mana overnight. The developer recently added the ability for nearby monsters to ambush you while encamped, but practically speaking you will only risk this happening if you camp right on top of a monster (within a couple tiles).
Still, I cannot emphasize enough how happy I've been to enjoy exploration so much. As I've commented elsewhere, I don't remember the last time I looked forward so eagerly to finding out what's just around the corner. Maybe the Exiles, from when I was a teenager. A very impressive feat, and the developer deserves major kudos.
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RPG Codex Review: Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 22 April 2023, 18:58:30
Tags: Owlcat Games; Pathfinder: Wrath of the RighteousLike Kingmaker, the journal entries are written by someone who isn't the player character. It soon becomes obvious that they're written from the perspective of the primary antagonist, which I believe may be a first for the genre. It's an amusing novelty, even if I found myself annoyed by the verbosity, though I'll admit it fits the character's personality. It also led to a giddy sense of pride when my character asserted ownership of the journal with the final quest entry.
WotR has another colorful cast of characters, though this bunch is far more queer in both senses of the term. Owlcat wasn't afraid to be polarizing, though I found myself not ultimately disliking how any of them were written. As an example, Lann's Whedonesque quipping aggravated me at first, but as the game progresses, he behaves more seriously and gets less obnoxious with the jokes. I don't know if that was a deliberate character arc, but it worked for me.
Naturally a game where the player character gains mythic powers to defeat a demonic invasion will be as ego stroking as it gets. The various mythic paths cover a wide variety of motivations: you can be a lawful zealot who corrects all wrong-doing, a tough but fair judge meting out justice with mercy, a free spirit who defeats demons with the power of friendship, a rival evil who wants to eliminate the competition, or someone just having fun. Unlike Kingmaker, there weren't any spots where I felt unsatisfied with the number of decisions available for the character I had in mind.
The story covers themes of corruption and redemption. Unsurprisingly, your allies aren't entirely good or infallible, and some of your enemies aren't entirely bad. As a good character, I had to make some pragmatic decisions for the greater good. For example, early on I met a commanding officer who's revealed to have ordered one of your companions burned at the stake out of belief she was a secret cultist. My initial desire was to execute him on the spot (which would be justified and isn't considered an evil action by the game), but given the dire circumstances of the war, I decided I didn't have the luxury of being too particular about who my allies were. Sure enough, his presence had a beneficial effect on an event many dozens of hours later.
Reactivity like that is abundant throughout the game. The first act has a soft time limit with changes to certain maps after you reach it (or a potential reward if you manage to initiate the act-ending quest before the event can trigger). The second act has reactions to how long you take and your crusade's losses and morale. The availability of certain companions changes depending on what decisions you make, and some can permanently turn on you. Your choice of mythic path will open up certain exclusive options (including at the end) and each has its own particular questline. Multiple companions can have interjecting conversations among themselves and with other characters. Sometimes characters you meet will react to certain magical items you have in your inventory. There's even an ending that requires meeting a very precise set of requirements to unlock (you're gradually given the instructions how to do it throughout the game, with the last set of requirements revealed at the very end; I would recommend against metagaming it the first time you play given that it might not even fit your character concept).
[...] Before release, it was my hope that Wrath of the Righteous would address the biggest issues I had with Kingmaker and become an undisputed classic. Instead it's a whole-lot-more-of-the-same sequel that does some things better and some things worse. That's fine, but once more I find myself not wanting to go through it again even though I would like to explore more mythic paths and make different choices. Nevertheless, if you can accept that Owlcat is dedicated to filling their games to the brim with text and enemies and strategic management minigames, and you have the time to commit to it, then it's certainly worth playing.
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RPG Codex Retrospective Review: Freedom Force
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 1 April 2023, 21:09:52
Tags: Freedom Force; Irrational GamesRead the full article: RPG Codex Retrospective Review: Freedom Force
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RPG Codex GOTY 2022: Results & Cool Graphs
Community - posted by felipepepe on Sat 18 February 2023, 11:29:30
Tags: GOTY 2022This year we went back to a Codex-only vote. Also to a 1-5 scale, because I forgot to ask to change it to 1-4 lol. In total, we had 364 voters, who rated 157 RPGs that came out last year.
For those of you who just want the TL;DR, here are the winners:
RPG CODEX'S 2022 GOTYs:
#1 - Elden Ring
#2 - Knights of the Chalice 2
#3 - King Arthur: Knight's Tale
For the full results and fancy graphs, just follow the link below.
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Community - posted by Infinitron on Mon 17 October 2022, 22:18:43
Read the full article: RPG Codex Top 55 JRPGs
RPG Codex Review: Jupiter Hell
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 28 May 2022, 15:52:51
Tags: ChaosForge; Jupiter HellGuns have accuracy thresholds for distance, with all having optimal and max ranges, and some having minimum range. You will take an accuracy penalty for being at a distance lower than minimum or greater than optimal, while exceeding max range will down your accuracy to zero. One thing I don’t entirely get here is the purpose of optimal/max ranges greater than 6, because 6 tiles is the limit of your view, and you can’t shoot beyond that, even with blind fire. The only exception are shotguns, which aren’t subject to accuracy, and distance only influences their damage, while spraying blindly into the fog of war can actually hurt enemies beyond the 6-tile limit. It can also be extremely effective if you manage to lay your hands on a long-range shotgun.
Where Jupiter Hell strays from its predecessor is in its inclusion of cover mechanics. Anything between you and your opponent will act as cover – this includes props, walls and other enemies. Shooting something behind cover significantly influences accuracy, which makes positioning in combat a vital factor, especially since a number of perks also have an impact on cover, either by reducing it for your targets, or increasing its effectiveness for you. Thus, hunkering down behind some walls, spinning up your chaingun and using an extra action or two to aim can help you withstand even the most unfavourable odds. Similarly, a stupid zombie grunt with a handgun can become a much bigger nuisance when behind cover.
The maps in Jupiter Hell are generally rather tight as well, with big open rooms being a rarity, so cover is something to always keep in mind as you plan your approach. Plus, even in the bigger rooms you’ll find plenty of props, such as chairs or crates, to provide cover, though these are all destructible.
But that’s not to say that (ab)using cover is the ultimate way to go. It’s obviously going to be much less useful if you’re playing a running man. And even if you’re focused on entrenchment, there’s still plenty of things that can smoke you out, particularly acid pools and poison clouds that can be thrown by various enemies. Plus, no matter how much of a living bunker you are, some attacks will still go through and keep chipping away at your health – cover may be important, but it’s still just an individual mechanic, and not god mode, and Jupiter Hell is fortunately not a cover shooter.
Another thing to keep in mind is pain. As you get damaged, you’ll accumulate pain – some enemies even have special abilities that leave you in pain just by looking at you. Pain is a percentage that reduces your accuracy, so the more you get whacked, the worse your performance becomes. In my experience, this mechanic is primarily there to punish your mistakes – if you’re standing in the open like a dumbass, or you keep shooting at a fiend that’s in your face and slashing you, your pain will ramp up, and well, it’s exactly something you deserve. As mentioned before, the marine can cleanse pain and convert it into healing with his special ability, while other classes will have to either wait it out or use a medkit to remove all pain. Oftentimes, waiting it out in the middle of a slaughterfest is not an option.
One thing that I’ve come to realise is a bit of a bummer is that pain applies only to you. The game is generally fair and symmetrical when it comes to its mechanics, but pain is an exception that can sometimes be annoying when facing enemies with high health pools. With more straight-forward builds, the best thing you can do is take cover behind a corner, keep shooting and pray that none of their attacks go through – it feels a little arbitrary, especially when you reach a ceiling where your damage won’t be getting higher, but you’ll still encounter tougher enemies, which leaves you without some additional way to mitigate the risks.
Nevertheless, playing carefully and managing the risks is an important part of Jupiter Hell, since just like most other roguelikes, it’s extremely unforgiving when it comes to dumb mistakes. I’d say that most of my runs are interrupted by a sudden bout of dying due to losing focus. You keep tapping those movement keys like stupid, you run into an armoured ravager, you get blasted with rockets and die. You can’t be bothered to take a step aside and duck behind cover – that former CRI sergeant will be more than glad to spray you with lead. Even worse if you forget about the stuff you’re carrying, and realise only after dying that you could have teleported to safety with a phase kit or run away in a smokescreen. But you were actually too much of a cheapskate to use them, so quit whining.
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Codex Review - posted by Darth Roxor on Fri 13 May 2022, 18:10:12
Tags: SoulashI'm not exactly an aficionado of roguelikes, so I don't even know what to put here. Instead, I'll just let the text speak for itself.
While this can make planning a bit harder, it’s nothing truly major. You might find some weak troglodytes with decent spears in one of the caves. You return there in the next life, hoping to loot their weapons, only to find bugs instead. It will hamper your early game if you were set on using spears, but you’ll obtain decent weapons soon enough.
There is one random factor that can easily kill you if you don’t pay attention. Every piece of equipment, be it crafted or generated in the world (on enemies), can be upgraded into an artifact. That scythe-swinging peasant can poke quite a hole in your body when he spawns with a unique spear.
There is no mechanic that will make you stronger on subsequent runs. There are no unlockables, secret powers or anything of that sort. The only difference is that during character creation, the game will show the talents that a given class can learn at the appropriate levels, provided you’ve reached that level first yourself. If anything, I found that obfuscation annoying, although it can be easily fixed if you navigate to your data files. In general, the configs aren’t hidden and the game seems easy to mod.
With the world being same-ish with each run, you become stronger only by not repeating the same mistakes. Though it can be annoying if your mistake was being ambushed by an enemy with some nasty artifact. In general, you’ll learn to run into more newbie-friendly areas. There you’ll establish a base with food, water and a bed, and then proceed to clear out nearby enemies so that your beauty sleep won’t be interrupted. Those sleeping in the woods usually get ambushed.
Artifact-wielding yokels are definitely a part of my definition of 'fun'. The article also examines the game's crafting system, world-building, general gameplay paradigms and the ecological repercussions of devouring gods responsible for certain aspects of the natural order. Read on here: RPG Codex Review: Soulash
[Quickie No. 007] A Look at Railway Empire
Codex Review - posted by Darth Roxor on Sat 16 April 2022, 17:00:36
Tags: Gaming Minds Studios; Kalypso Media; Quickie; Railway Empire; Tacticular CancerIf you're only looking for the gist of it:

Railway Empire (from now on, R.E.) is a tycoon-type “simulation” game – in quotes, since it doesn’t actually simulate much – where you take up the role of a railroad baron tasked with connecting the East Coast of the United States with the West Coast.
For those of you who have no intention of reading the whole review: if you enjoyed Railroad Tycoon and Sid Meier’s Railroads!, or generally like railroad baron games, or have a thing for the First Transcontinental Railroad, you’re probably going to enjoy this game, for a while. If instead you’re expecting a proper simulation, down to micromanaging stuff, then you will not enjoy R.E., as it will be a bit too simplistic for you.
I, for one, am always grateful when someone gives me the tl;dr right at the start of an article. For those of you with more patience and greater attention spans, you can read the full review here: [Quickie No. 007] A Look at Railway Empire
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Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sat 12 March 2022, 22:02:09
Tags: inXile Entertainment; Wasteland 3Wasteland 3's CLASSIC attribute system has also been modified from its predecessor. In Wasteland 2, the system encouraged only two kinds of builds: a useless-or-less-useful-in-combat charismatic skillmaster and a character who puts a roughly equal investment into attributes that maximize initiative, action points, and skill points. The initiative system that gave individual characters multiple combat turns in comparison to their opponents excessively rewarded high-initiative builds and excessively punished low-initiative builds; that's been replaced with the characters on each side going at once, though occasionally you may get lucky and receive a free use of action points. Action points themselves, while still important, aren't absolutely necessary to max out on every character; there are incentives to put those points elsewhere. Putting points into intelligence gives you one skill point per level of intelligence instead of modifying the number of points you get per level. Overall, viable build variety with regard to attributes has noticeably improved.
The skill system has been streamlined; the era of multiple container-unlocking skills is over. Lockpicking and Safecracking are now just Lockpicking, Handguns and Shotguns have been folded into Small Arms, Assault Rifles and Submachine Guns form Automatic Weapons, Bladed and Blunt Weapons are now Melee, Field Medic and Surgeon have been combined into First Aid (and it's no longer a requirement for reviving downed rangers), and Alarm Disarming and Perception have become Sneaky Shit. Brute Force is gone; now if you can't be bothered to invest in Lockpicking but still want to open a locked door, just attack it normally. The Smart Ass talking skill is also gone. They did add Armor Modding as a skill to complement Weapon Modding, but that's the only new one. Even with the fewer number of skills, a perfectly-optimized party won't be able to max out everything by the endgame; at least four skills won't be able to hit those final numbers (at least as far as the base game experience curve goes).
Additionally, annoyances like skill timers, chance-based skill checks, critical failures, and gun jamming are gone. I could take or leave the last two, but I don't miss the first two at all. Using a skill isn't quite instantaneous, but it's fast enough, and not having to keep clicking on an object until you succeed or critically fail is a welcome relief.
The inclusion of quirks and perks from the Director's Cut of Wasteland 2 has been carried over, and they've also added backgrounds that provide a small bonus. There are some good, great, and lousy options all around, so it's a pretty typical assortment for an RPG. With knowledge of the system, you can synergize all three to excel at a given role, so there's a decent amount of options here for the powergamers.
Inventory is now shared by the entire party and items no longer have weight, so encumbrance is no longer a factor. However, there are strength requirements to wear the strongest kinds of armor without penalty. While you can look at the inventory during combat, you can't equip anything you didn't have in your weapon and quick slots when combat started, so things aren't totally balanced in your favor.
Crafting was added in one of the patches. It saves you the trouble of having to backtrack to a store if you run out of a particular kind of consumable or ammo while out in the field as long as you meet the particular skill prerequisites. It's also used for making unique joke items that are worth a bit more than standard junk items, weapon and armor mods you absolutely want to have, and unique weapons, including final upgrades for the best weapons in the game. I'm usually not one for crafting, but I liked having it here. The presentation for weapon and armor mods could have been better though; there are roughly two dozen armor mods and fifty weapon mods and they're listed in alphabetical order instead of organized by type and rank. As a result, it's irritating to scroll through them while holding shift to look at their stats to find what you want.
[...] If "reactivity and choice" was the mantra for Wasteland 2, then Wasteland 3 adds "transparency and accessibility" as another design pillar. inXile pulled off a heavily-reactive turn-based, party-based RPG that looks and sounds slick and is largely frustration-free when it comes to starting and playing. They re-examined their systems and modified them without throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in contrast to other studios who have tried to do the same in the past. Sure, it's not the second coming of Jagged Alliance 2, and no, it's not a party-based Fallout, but it's my favorite Wasteland game. Its status as the 2020 RPG Codex Game of the Year is well-deserved.
Read the full article: RPG Codex Review: Wasteland 3
RPG Codex GOTY 2021: Results & Cool Graphs
Community - posted by felipepepe on Mon 28 February 2022, 14:47:05
Tags: GOTY 2021This year we had 569 voters, who rated 154 releases from 2021. This is the largest numbers of games we ever had in the poll. It was a bit harder to vote, but I think it worked well to help us sort what's worth a second look outside of the obvious big releases.
Best 2021 RPGs
The competition for GOTY this year was tight, three titles stood out - Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous was the most popular, The Chronicles Of Myrtana: Archolos had extremely positive reviews, and ATOM RPG: Trudograd was right between them in popularity & positive reviews.
Since the voting system was made to reward quality over popularity, Archolos was the big winner. Only 20% of voters played it, but over 90% rated it positively - almost 85% of votes being 4/4! Congratulations to the team, it's an impressive result for a mod that got released just 2 months ago.
Pathfinder was second. It's a good place, but it performed a bit worse than the first game. Kingmaker was played by 54% of voters and had a 67% of positive votes back in 2018, while Wrath was played by almost exactly the same percentage (53%) but only got 54% positive votes.
On the other hand, ATOM: Trudograd kept almost exactly the same results - the original ATOM had 88% positive votes in 2017, Trudograd got 85%. The % of people who played it also only had a slight decreased from 35% to 33%.
Honestly, it's remarkable how the Codex is consistent in its interests, with sequels getting almost exactly the same play % as the first games.
Here's the Top 10:

Read the full article: RPG Codex GOTY 2021: Results & Cool Graphs
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RPG Codex Review: Maneater - The Mutant Shark Vendetta
Codex Review - posted by Darth Roxor on Mon 7 February 2022, 17:06:53
Tags: Maneater; Tripwire InteractiveFortunately one such game is Maneater, the subject of our most recent review submitted by Lukaszek. If you ever felt like morphing into a monstrous shark and ravaging the land and sea alike, this game might just be for you. As the noble reviewer would put it:
Will you carry out your revenge? Will you lose or keep your
(...)
Eventually you’ll be dealing with explosives. They start with dynamite, then progress into some sort of proximity explosive devices and eventually end in torpedoes. All of those can be grabbed in your jaws, delaying the explosion a bit. This leads to my favorite playstyle of grabbing random objects and tail-catapulting them at my targets. Once you grab anything, you can toss it both underwater and in the air if you jump upward.
Sounds like there's plenty excitement ahead, but, in the end, is it actually good or just gimmicky? For more details, read the full article here: Maneater Review - The Mutant Shark Vendetta
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Redaxium - a feature-rich RPG unlike anything else, made by a truly visionary artist
Codex Review - posted by DarkUnderlord on Mon 24 January 2022, 00:42:00
Tags: prosper; RedaxiumMoonrise subjected herself to the full experience so she could write a review for the Codex:
Close your eyes, take a deep breathe, and find out about the feature-rich world of Redaxium.
Read the full article: Redaxium - a feature-rich RPG unlike anything else, made by a truly visionary artist
RPG Codex Review: Trials of Fire
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sun 22 August 2021, 23:32:08
Tags: Trials of Fire; Whatboy GamesOn your journeys, you will come across various events that give you food, currency, mystic herbs, items, and crafting materials (some events might also hurt you). I've already covered food; obsidian coins can be spent in settlements across the map to acquire anything you can think of, to hire companions, or in narrative events for specific outcomes. Mystic herbs are used for upgrading cards and healing persistent wounds (represented by harmful cards in your deck). The items give you armor (bonus health) and cards. This is a particularly genius move. It raises the value of equipment tremendously and pulls them up from the mire of being only stat sticks. There are no randomly-generated items. They are all unique and each item will give you the exact same card in every playthrough. Which items you get however is random, and not every class can equip every type. This is where the most impactful RNG lies. You can not pre-plan your builds because you don't know which items you will get.
I'd argue this is a right way to provoke "item fever". Hear that, Swen? There's a place and time for everything. You may take notes. Getting certain items can dramatically change your playstyle in unexpected ways, and this is the norm, not the exception. Items are technically classified in five tiers and are MMO color-coded for your convenience. Grey, green, blue, purple, and orange. Guess which color corresponds to which tier. Grey items are only the starting armor of the classes. You will never find them while adventuring. The higher the tier, the more cards (up to three at purple) and armor an item gives. Orange items, being legendaries, also grant you unique passive traits that are triggered in battle under certain circumstances. The most straightforward example is +2 damage on the first magical attack each turn. It gets wild after that. But wait! There's a twist. An item of a more prestigious color doesn't automatically mean it's better than the one below it, even if they give the same cards + the extra one(s). I'll explain why momentarily. Which brings me to the last strategic resource - crafting materials.
They are used to upgrade and "hone" equipment, or to permanently add a card granted by an item to a character's deck (i.e. you don't need to have it equipped anymore). Upgrading an item only improves the card(s) it gives, not armor or any traits (if legendary). Cards can only be upgraded once and each one has a unique way it improves. Sometimes it's very plain, like +1 damage or -1 willpower cost, but other times it even acquires additional effects. Honing is where it gets interesting. Remember how I said higher tier items aren't automatically better? The reason is you don't always want to fill your deck with junk cards which waste space in your hand and don't contribute to a build or tactic you are conceptualizing. The deadliest killer in this game in my opinion is having too many cards in your deck. This is where honing comes into play. Honing uses the crafting materials to remove a single card from an item. This allows you to keep cards you want and discard cards that uselessly take up space. This is not to say some cards are always garbage and unusable. I've found all cards have utility in some situations. It depends on your build and what other cards you have. There is one more thing in the strategic portion - followers. These are characters which you hire or get from quests that come along with you and provide you with passive non-combat buffs, like more health while resting or reducing the amount of crafting materials you need. There isn't much to say about these. They are a nice bonus, but nothing game-changing.
I can't get through a strategic overview without mentioning the classes. There are nine, but you start out being able to select just three (the Warrior, the Hunter, and the Elementalist) and you have to unlock the others through play. This is something I've always been fond of in roguelikes harking back to Tales of Maj'Eyal. It gives you very significant rewards for playing the game without lowering the difficulty of subsequent runs. These classes are much easier to unlock than in something like ToME however, and you are given an option to just unlock everything from the start (which I advise against). I suspect this is for players who once unlocked everything, but have long lost the save files and have no way to get them back. ToF's optional online feature doesn't track this kind of progress like ToME's does (but I digress). Each class has its own starting set of cards and special ability. The Warrior, for example, gives +2 defense to all heroes after playing a card while adjacent to an enemy. Even though this may seem abysmal, there are ways to make these abilities very powerful and the cornerstone of your build. The starting set is always very basic and mostly consists of universal cards like a melee attack or movement, but every class has some unique cards in the starting arsenal and is always given unique cards when leveling up, up to four you can choose at each level. You can opt to either replace a card you already know (cards from items don't count) or upgrade an existing one. This keeps the decks from growing exponentially and wards off power creep.
Outside of character levels in the current adventure, there's also a soul level that persists through runs. This is where the roguelite element (one element) appears. When you win or lose a run, each character individually gains soul experience which contributes to the soul level. Each soul level up to 10 grants you a unique class card which you can choose while leveling your characters in an adventure. I didn't get a card at soul level 11, so it either stops at 10 or granting cards gets more infrequent the higher level you are. As far as I can tell, this is something the developers implemented fairly recently. I was able to find forum threads in which people ask what the soul level does (during Early Access) and a developer responds with "nothing right now". Here's the kicker however. This can potentially make subsequent runs harder and not easier. I argued in the beginning that the roguelite element is a wolf in sheep's clothing and the reason is that it could oversaturate your class pool and make it harder to get the class card you want while leveling up. It's quite paradoxical and I'm not sure whether this is a con or simply neutral. For now, I'm going to say it's neutral because adapting to what RNGesus gives you is half the game. I haven't yet lost a run because I couldn't get the class card I want, but I also haven't played on a higher difficulty than hard (which is the third out of 13 difficulty levels). As a bouncing off point to talking about the battles, it's worth mentioning that some classes have mechanics and resources that others don't. Combined with the uniqueness of the classes themselves, this makes every party composition surprisingly diverse in terms of playstyle.
Read the full article: RPG Codex Review: Trials of Fire
RPG Codex Review: The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk
Codex Review - posted by Infinitron on Sun 11 July 2021, 14:17:23
Tags: Artefacts Studio; The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: Ruins of Limis; The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of ChaosYes, the combat is nu-XCOM in the sense that it has half- and full-cover mechanics as well as the “move and hit or move twice” simplified action system. But it also places immense importance on a character's facing: your characters can face in 8 directions on the tile-based battle maps, and three different rules govern attacks from the front, from the sides and from behind. Even without factoring in the game's other positional rules, facing alone means a level of positional complexity that very few RPGs can match, and it is is all handled by an interface so intuitive that you soon forget how utterly annoying you thought constantly controlling your characters' facing would be when the game first introduced the concept.
The game’s abilities are also of the nu-XCOM variety: they are cooldown-based and most characters have a maximum of around seven at any time – more realistically 3-5. But they also cost resources like Astral Energy or Stamina and their effects are incredibly impactful. Most of them have branching upgrades in the talent tree that change their effects fairly drastically.
The attribute system is another tug-of-war between tactical modernity and oldschool RPG affinity: on the one hand, Dungeon of Naheulbeuk sports 6 different attributes which you can assign points into, and they have a massive impact on the characters' ability to deal damage or even hit their target. On the other hand, an attempt has been made to make all attributes have some use for all characters, giving you reasons to put points into all six stats for every character. This attempt is less successful, however – you will only ever put points into Intelligence on your mage, and for nearly everyone else it’s a numbers game about having just enough Agility, then just enough Constitution (if necessary), and then dumping the rest into Strength. Still, no stat is useless for anyone and only Agility is really required on some. In the same vein, some stats have unique effects for certain characters, like Charisma being the primary stat for the elf's healing power. I'm sure someone out there made it through the highest difficulty with a team going all-in on Charisma.
The core attributes lead up to a flurry of derived stats – everything from simple things like “Health”, which is just your pool of hit points, to less obvious stats like “Support”, which governs how much a character improves a party member’s ability to hit targets that they are both adjacent to.
There are more examples, but the point is that Dungeon of Naheulbeuk is a game with very modern and simple systems - but there are a lot of them, and the interplay between them gives the game's combat a very real complexity. To this mix, the game adds sufficient enemy variety that throw wrenches with different levels of ingenuity into your well laid plans, ensuring that fights do not become too alike even if they draw their paint from the same palette of colours.
Many haters of the nu-XCOM model undoubtedly stopped reading when they read about the cover system, which feels ubiquitous to so many games today. However I’ve never seen the practical gameplay results that this system has in Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. The enemy variety is great enough, and your characters’ toolbox so deep, that in some fights you literally don’t notice the existence of the cover system at all, while in some fights it is essential. Mostly, cover is a luxury you take when you can afford it, but it is not mandatory and you often ignore it. As such, the cover system ends up speaking to what Dungeon of Naheulbeuk does well: it encourages tactical diversity and each encounter dictates a different pace of play and strategy of attack.
The way the game does this is through the connectivity of its systems. For example, the reason you might want to take cover is obviously due to the shelter it grants you from ranged attacks, but the reasons you might not want to do it are plentiful. Firstly, cover is often very sparsely placed throughout the battle maps and since positioning has such a defining importance in Dungeon of Naheulbeuk, often it is not worth giving up the great placement of an ability or an aggressive formation to gain the cover bonus. Secondly, there are plenty of enemy abilities that simply don't care about cover. Thirdly, full cover blocks valuable line of sight. And fourthly, cover restricts your characters own abilities depending on their function, so it's a tradeoff. The result is that you spend time thinking about whether to take cover or not, and as we all know, that daft cunt Sid Meier said something about good games being a series of interesting choices or some such nonsense.
Now add to this knowledge that the game's basic design consists of having a lot of these subsystems that play off of each other, and you feel yourself being constantly pulled in different directions, having multiple options in each round of each fight.
Read the full article: RPG Codex Review: The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk
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