Underrail is a game with tons of fetch quests which are explained as follows: go fetch this, go fix this, go do that, as if the player was a post office worker. The problem is there is no other path to complete the quests and no meaningful consequences for completing them.
So what? It's kinda like most rpgs that have ever been created. Plus it's just a video game. Games are for entertainment.
no meaningful consequences
What's a meaningful consequence? If I kill a guy in a cave and then loot their belongings and sell it, that's pretty meaningful. If I pickpocket everyone in town for more money, drugs, and ammo, that's pretty meaningful too! If I complete a quest and get paid for it, that's really meaningful since now I can buy more stuff that can be used to improve my chances in combat.
You are forced to complete the quest in one way, the developer obviously intends unlike Vampire's, Fallout's, Planescape...
It is impossible to complete a quest in any way other than a way the developer intends in any game. But there's no reason why a developer has to have a multiple completion conditions for quests. It's cool when it's done. But the lack of it isn't anything to hold against a game.
There is no interaction between NPCs, whereas Arcanum, released 14 years before, does have.
Interactions between npcs were always fluff. It's a cool thing to see. But it was never necessary and whether or not it's present in a game is never a reason to judge a game. If you want interactions between NPCs however... Try movies or plays. They are full of NPCs interacting! What else could you want here anyways. Do you want the Oblivion NPC conversations at random in every game? For example:
"There are rumors that the Nords are attempting to capture the whole of Solstheim, and remove the imperial fort on the island."
"The Nords have always been protective of their territory. It's no wonder why they get involved in such disputes."
"Greetings!"
"Oh. It's you..."
"Bye!"
"Goodbye."
There are only 2 different maps: Bunkers and caves.
And then there is the underrail maps. The maps in the cities like the sewer.
The game tricks the player into thinking there is a lot of building variety until you discover that many skills and feats are useless.
All skills are used in Underrail. Whether or not a feat is useful is whether or not you've figured out how to use it in conjunction with other feats to pull of a gimmick that lets you one-shot enemies in Dominating. The vast majority of feats are useful whether or not they are preferable for a certain difficulty or whether your build needs it.
For example, what's the benefit of Persuasion? None.
There are immediate benefits. For example, high enough persuasion means you can essentially choose your starting weapon. There are also a variety of speech checks that allow you to bypass having to kill someone, can get you more money, or some other useful benefit. However, unlike Intimidation, it doesn't have direct benefits in combat.
What's the benefit of Intimidation? None.
Intimidation has some speech checks like persuasion. It's also used for Yell.
What's the benefit of Mercantile? None. ( you get rich pretty fast)
More is not always better.
Mercantile unlocks higher quality items at a few merchants which is good both for crafters and people who don't craft.
And most of the builds end up poorly, so like most players you dig for recommendations on the forums.
Underrail is overloaded with junk, much like Witcher 3, you gather tons of crap with little reason why.
It's for crafting... Like in the Witcher 3. You can also sell it or leave it on the ground (it doesn't despawn)--who would've guessed that you don't have to take every piece of loot you find if you don't need it.
Underrail offers crafting but imagine picking Arcanum's crafting system and draining all the imagination it has, you get underrail's crafting.
Underrail does have a more detailed crafting system than Arcanum.
Walls in underrail make it difficult for the player to aim a target, an issue Fallout 1-2 doesn't have.
Press tab to highlight everything. Enemies are highlighted in red. The only real problem the walls that aren't made opaque when standing next to is the difficulty seeing some traps.
What a shame, I wanted to love it but it's not for me.
That's probably the only correct thing you're said so far.
the number of builds it lures the player into thinking it has
There are a good variety of builds. Just going off weapon types alone since each of these have special feats around them;
Hammers
Knifes
ARs
SMGs
Pistols
Chempistols
Spears
Machetes
Shotguns
Throwing knives (though most builds use some throwing anyways for grenades at least).
Xbows
Unarmed
Then there are Psionics which there are a few viable builds with them alone.
With each of those builds, the choice of a preference towards stealth + glass canon, agility+dodge+evasion stacking (often comes with stealth), or tin can where the choice makes sense adds on to that. AR+tin can is an OP option if you know what you're doing. Then there are the hybrids like Psihammer or Psimonk. Are you going to craft things? The choice as to whether or not you will at least doubles the amount of builds. You can choose to do a no-crafting run with the vast majority of builds and do fine.
So there are quite a lot of builds.
The fun in this game stems from min-max autism turned to an absurd degree
This is a combat and character building centered game. This is not a CYOA visual novel emulator like many of the "games" many mistake for rpgs.
The real problem with the game is the need for either someone to have nothing else to play and figure out everything themselves through failed runs or to look up builds. It's problems are that you cannot just naturally play through this game the first time figuring out how things work and what you can or cannot get away with in character building while still being able to complete the game. Though there's an easy mode for that I guess.
, if flip-flopping could generate electricity codex could power entire milky way galaxy.
