Initial impressions...
My game blackscreened when changing the settings. And then it crashed trying to load the character create.
Two gameplay bugs I've run into: grenaded enemies taking no damage if they're clipping into other objects. Standing on the 2nd floor of a structure, my party was detected by some monsters in the fog war below, an area I didn't even know existed. Because the game shuffles everyone onto the grid for combat, half my party got sucked into the blackness - one floor below and outside - where they couldn't move or do anything (except be attacked, lulz). A simple reload and avoidance of the edge of the second floor 'solved' this. I did have a character do the spinning glitch just momentarily before shooting. Stuff like that doesn't really bother me, though. Other little minutiae is that for some reason if I switch weapons on a character with all-party selected, and then I click another character and try to switch out their weapon, it switches the weapon of that first-selected character instead. I have no idea why this happen. It's not gamebreaking or anything, though.
Other than, the game is pretty average. Combat is mundane as fuck. There's a startling
lack of design. Not that things are ill-designed, but that they aren't designed at all. Aside from just attacking, what else is there to do? It just feels very binary. The fighting bits have more in common with
Omerta than I bet most people even realize, and I'm sure those same people would (rightfully) consider that other game to be a pile of shit. That said, even a shit-game like Omerta had a lot of variability in how you can attack enemies, from fanning machine-guns, to shooting legs, knockbacks, etc. When half the enemies thus far have a single strategy of
swarm swarm swarm it would have been nice to, I don't know, put in some options for the player to counter-act that outside of just 'run away a bit.' I mean, there's not even a zone of control. You can run circles around your enemies and then stop and shoot. Kinda silly. Of course, because there's apparently no options (that I've seen) to manipulate positioning so a zone of control would probably make combat a major headache.
Without a doubt, the game becomes objectively bad whenever combat kicks in. The ad hoc nature of it, and the free roam transitioning to grids, doesn't help matters much. The game just always feels awkward going into that first turn of combat, like I'm experiencing a developer's experiment with how they want to implement future (incomplete) features. This is especially true when you run into unforeseen combat. Because the party moves around without a formation, instead just being a big blob that kinda squishes together, combat opens up with this sort of British humor-esque "oh I guess we're fighting now" feel. All the Rangers are just jammed together like sardines and there's almost no semblance of tactical forethought. Every enemy seemingly being able to move across the map in one turn adds to the structureless feel of it. Even fat, disgusting creatures just shuttle along the grid as well as
rabbits do
. Derp. I rarely feel like the 'grid' has added anything at all, as most combat scenarios pivot around my condensed firepower butting heads against whatever is coming at me.
Outside of combat the game is a little better. Marching about the world map is interesting. I wish more games utilized it. Even in the shittastic RoA HD remake I enjoyed climbing through the mountains (until the game crashed and erased my saves as well as my mental capacity to sustain digital torture). Skills are numerous enough to make me want to employ a fairly diverse party. That said, some of the skills seem redundant. Like bashing objects open vs. picking them; or just shooting traps instead of disarming them (particularly for doors). Traps in general seem too common. Like there's trapped shit right next to where civilians are holing up? How does that make sense? Y'all telling me researchers are across the hall from a major booby trap that ostensibly nobody knows about? Huh? And then there's traps for all the crates and shit. Someone used a high explosive, very valuable item to protect a veritable shoebox of garbage? Okay then.
Dialogue is nice and there's a lot of it. You can read it or skip past the boring shit if you want; it also feels as though you can go after the charisma checks or just ditch 'em altogether. The flavor writing is enjoyable - that is, the stuff you just kinda meander around and click on. I often forget about the combat 'writing' because there's no use for it. It lacks the directed humor of Fallout (I shot that guy in [X] body part and he did [Y]!") or the detailed nature of, say, Dwarf Fortress. It's not bad, I just don't feel like it has added anything to the game.
Other crap:
I had an instance where a guy wanted to be cut down from some stuff/he wanted me to kill him. Either way, I thought okay and put a knife to him, hoping for either result. He ended up just dying instead of being cut free. Alright no big deal - oh wait, everyone flipped their shit on me for killing the guy begging for death.
Whatdoyouwant.gif.
My second random encounter in the game pitted me against about five 120-150HP enemies that were throwing grenades. I'm not asking to be handheld, but
random encounters should never just
squash the player outright. That's quite literally just a waste of my time.
The game runs horribly which doesn't even make any fucking sense. It looks like shit even on high settings and there's not exactly a lot of whizzbang type stuff going on. The world is very static in a graphical sense. D:OS had all kinds of shenanigans going on from ground effects and characters being tossed about and rain and all kinds of cool things. Wasteland has some boxes that can be destroyed and that's about it. It should not run as poorly as it does.
Right now, I'm mostly just interested in seeing how the content moves along.
