The fack that he registered to write a post warning people against the game would make for a hell of a review introduction.
To add to that: I cannot find a single completed playthrough of this game anywhere, nor advice going further than what you would automatically discover on your own after an hour or two of play. Pretty much nobody is talking about it. The Steam forums, the GoG forums, the Official_Mechajammer subreddit, all are dead. On Youtube, I've found one playthrough aborted after roughly four hours of play; all the others videos are either short form reviews (mostly negative, or suspiciously glossing over the massive, glaring issues), or someone attempting to play but stopping shortly after the introduction, or the usual, dreadful and cringe-filled 'Look at this game, wow, all aboard the hypetrain' youtuber facecam fare.
Out of spite and sheer stupidity, I'm almost compelled to wade through the nauseating bog of bugs this game is just to finish it, because at this point I seriously doubt anyone has or ever will. It's like being fascinated by an unexpected, blood-soaked scene of absolute carnage: I want to look away, but can't.
The review posted earlier is accurate.
But I feel the need to pile on a bit and gripe about another system that utterly sucks: Item durability. Not a big fan of this in games in general. At best, it serves as a resource sink that doesn't waste too much of your time. But this is, by a wide margin, the worst implementation I've ever seen.
Fully agreed.
I'll heap some more things on that landfill. I need to get this out of my system. It's exceptionnal when it happens, but this annoys me to an unreasonable degree.
— Drugs and cybernetics —
There are some drugs that, if I understand what's going on correctly, give you a temporary boost to this or that. Think in terms of better social skills. But in twenty hours of play, I've only found 9 units of those drugs out in the wild. So they're quite rare. There are also clinics of sorts to be found, that is merchants who only peddle health kits and drugs, but then the benefits of using these drugs is—from what I can see—so minimal that there's no real incentive to consume any; rather they simply take valuable space inventory.
And I have found one guy, at a manner of cyber-clinic, who very briefly mentionned implants. I'll be honest, for a heartbeat I got real excited there, thinking I could roleplay as Glory from Shadowrun: Dragonfall. But nope, that guy only sold health kits and drugs. Perhaps later on in the game there's something with cyber implants? Because when I stumbled upon the boss of the Cyberfreaks faction, and somehow, with a single line of dialogue, managed to strike an alliance with him, he replied with something to the tune of, "Yes. Allies. You and I, same. Metal and flesh." I don't know, so far it's a mystery to me.
— Companions and projectiles weapons —
Giving a companion a weapon happens very much like in Fallout 1 & 2; talk to them, then select the option to open the inventory, then drag the weapon from yours to theirs. Of course they also need ammo, but at least in my game—not sure if it was a bug or intended behavior—I was unable to give them more than one magazine worth of ammo at a time. Meaning I would give them a slug smg with a capacity for 16 rounds, after which I could give them a stack of 16 bullets and not one more. 16 rounds fired later, I would have to re-do the whole 'open their inventory and give them ammo' stuff. Not sure how the game manages weapon durability when it comes to companions; I couldn't be fucked to find out, and seeing how the weapon they use outright disappears from their inventory after giving it to them, I don't have the faintest idea on how I would go about investigating something like this.
— Health, healing, and wounds —
For every dice in the Pain Threshold attribute (well,
virtue, as the game calls it), you get 10 health points. The base is 50 points, and that's what I played with. Health regenerates naturally, a feature I very much dislike in games, and it regenerates
very quickly. If you're left with 1HP, all you have to do is wait a handful of seconds, and you're back at full health. You can also heal yourself with health kits, which heal a lot and contrary to repair kits apparently do not require a roll to succeed. I don't know what the action cost of using a health kit mid-fight is, but I can tell you I've used one in the middle of a fight when standing right next to a guy, and seemingly no time passed during my action. You can also go to your medic, who will heal you to full for the cost of letting 8 in-game hours fly by.
Wounds could have been interesting, and in fact are to a small extent, but that too is a terrible mess. Your head might get wounded, in which case you suffer quite a severe malus to your Learning attribute; for example, any dice in Learning is added to Hacking when you try to hack something, but with a head wound, three out of four or my dices in Learning were reddened, and unused. Or a leg wound might see you reduced to not walking, but actually hobbling, visually limping your way through the streets. As well, wounds lower the ceiling of the maximum regenerable health.
So that's pretty nice, you
have to heal wounds, you
have to use those health kits (whose commonness is not really high, nor really low). Only, sometimes, wounds heal... on their own? Honestly I'm baffled as to what exactly is supposed to happen. I've had head wounds stay on until I take care of them; I've had head wounds disappear on their own before I could so much as open the character sheet to check it. Same with every kind of wound of there is.
At one point I found a room with nothing but empty crates in it. Ah! but the back wall can be broken, and reveals a passage of rotten planks. With my companion in close proximity, traps were promptly detected, laid all over said planks. But moving my character being the crapshoot that is is, I walked straight into a bear trap. Cue my character being stuck for a second, taking big damage, and the appearance of a wound icon over her portrait. Traps are dangerous. That's good. But, well, no. About three seconds later, my character was free from the bear trap, healed to full health, with not even the memory of a wound to be seen anywhere—all that with
no input whatsoever on my part.
Managing companion health and potential wounds in this game, in my opinion, should be a mandatory trial for any real-life monk trying to attain a higher state of inner calm and comprehension of the fundamentalities. Companions heal naturally—until they don't anymore. It's confusing, but I've an inkling of an idea as to what's going on there. I've seen a companion regenerate from near-death to full health much like my own character, that is in a matter of seconds. But I've also seen companions only being able to regenerate a portion of their health.
Thus I suspect wounds are involved; the problem being that while wounds that pain you are displayed on your portrait and explained in your character sheet, it is not the case for companions. I say this because I had a companion limp behind me, evidently wounded at the leg, and unable to regenerate more than three quarters of his health, but I could not find about him any icon or text mentionning a wound.
So of course I tried to heal him. I clicked on him to initiate a conversation, and picked the 'heal' option. A health kit disappeared from my inventory, but the companion was not healed in the least. The game's log indicated something in the vicinity of Rolled [2] Organics, target [32]. So in order to heal myself with a health kit, no check is required; just use the kit and voilà. But there's a check for companions? Also a target of 32 is so fucking high in this game. You'd need six dices, or a perfect roll on 5d6+2 to succeed. Also, when trying to heal another companion, the target was 29. Why 29? Do
I have to pass that check? Or is it the companion's stats that matter? Who the fuck knows.
The proverbial nail in the lead-lined coffin being this little gem: after this I trekked all the way back to the base to require the help of the medic, but apparently he can't heal companions. Or at least I've not found the option to do that, but really I think it's just not there at all.
Good review. If you've been lurking here and this isn't an alt, you should consider staying. Always need more new blood with critical thinking skills.
Not an alt. I've lurked here a couple of years now, and read through more interesting and valuable conversations then on pretty much any other forums dedicated to RPGs, or even games in general. Would be glad to contribute what I might.
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