Played 3 hours or so with a custom party and got halfway or so through the AgCentre. I put it on Hard difficulty but turns out it was on Medium all this time, so looking forward to how that changes. Was too easy on Medium. Going through with Nietzsche the blunt weapon brawler (very effective), a sniper character, Marx the lockpicker/shotgun and Ayn Rand the talker/pistol.
Not super impressed but conforming to my "will be a fun romp, not a super classic" expectations so far. I don't see a lot of special types of attacks making the combat rather repetitive, not having found any demolitions or 'special use' items yet. The encounter design in the AgCentre isn't great often leaving you with open spaces and a few enemies. The one where you tackle a few supaflies and pod people with the exploding pods nearby is a good one, though, and I expect a pretty hair-raising one on Hard difficulty. Generally the areas didn't seem particularly special in any way.
Writing is OK, need to finish at least AgCentre to see how the twists and turns pan out.
Big fan of the indoor environments, the outdoor ones tend to look less impressive and more budget. But then, it's hard to make brown desert rocky areas look great under these conditions.
Camera is fine for me, but I'd rather full tilt functionally so I can use middle mouse button to freely adjust as I go. It's also the best way to deal with NWN2 camera. Indoors there's a lot of clipping.
UI is bad. Or rather, functional but ugly.
- Party shared inventory. Please. All this swapping around when moving inventory items across players doesn't even cost AP in battle. There's no point.
- Basic issue is nothing is exactly easy on the eyes, yet there isn't a whole lot of consistency in style. And what style there is, is an ugly style anyhow. It's like Fallout but worse.
- I thought item comparisons were in? Maybe I just don't know how to do it?
- Dragging ammo clips into gun slots in inventory is tedious, why not draw ammo from inventory directly?
A few bugs like the rabbits animation freezing leaving them in the air Matrix-style; the East Airlock area seems generally buggy with the 4th fan button (starting from centre) hard to select and I could never get the middle conecting doors to work properly so had to move everyone through the fans. Frequent crashes at random places, and other usual Beta stuff, but it's not unplayable.
Will keep going, seems like a competent game and there's a while of development to go yet.
