gaussgunner
Arcane
...am I right?Another glowing review, which saves its highest praise for the game's art direction, with visuals that look "as though they were taken directly from Unity Asset Store."
...am I right?Another glowing review, which saves its highest praise for the game's art direction, with visuals that look "as though they were taken directly from Unity Asset Store."
Well ... I don't care about their sales, just whether it's worth looking at as a game I want to play. So far SIGNS POINT TO NO.I think the art actually looks quite okay. Not that it matters much, after a week from launch they don't even have enough reviews to have a score (lol), while steam spy tracks them at about 500 copies and peak numbers at the weekend had a total of 5 people playing. It's dead Jim.
Look at the level design and tell me all the repeating floor tiles and pillars don't make you want to gouge your eyes out. I guess the building exteriors look nice but not the stuff you're staring at in gameplay. The GUI is so busy and kitschy it just looks like mud.I think the art actually looks quite okay.
Pretty much, yeah. Unless they had capitalized on press to let people know what the hell it was they had made, buyers will judge by what they see.So the setting is the game's biggest problem? #informative
As a recent convert to RPG-style games, I am still somewhat intrigued by the various innovations developers come up with to make them slightly more real-time. To be fair, it is possible that more interactive RPGs have existed all along and it has been my own ignorance of the depths of the genre that caused me to see them as nothing more than multiple choice tests and remain blissfully unaware of a form of RPG that allows for more real-time activity on the part of the player. Empyre: Lord of the Sea Gates is a case in point. ... A quick google revealed the existence of a 56-second trailer on YouTube. Said trailer demonstrated the means by which the player, having made severe tactical mistakes during their planning of their turn, can pause the motion and rectify, or at least mitigate, any regrettable decisions.
Regarding the actual style of gameplay, I would describe the fundamentals as “turn-based until it isn’t.” That sounds a little odd, or at least it felt that way to me, but it actually works quite well. The “turn-based until it isn't mode” is used in combat scenarios to allow for a more tactical approach to managing individual members of your team. This kind of turn-based mode is different from the more traditional “plan it all out, hit the ‘go’ button, then scream in anguish as your opponents moot your carefully laid plans by doing something unexpected.” In Empyre’s turn-based world, you can pause the action and change your player’s actions in response to the immediate situation, whatever it may be. That’s a pretty big deal when the AI goes in different directions than you had planned for.
Also sheltering under the “turn-based until it isn’t” umbrella are the many periods during which you aren’t in combat but have long distances to cross. With a team of up to six characters, moving each of them individually would be extraordinarily burdensome. In travel mode, the team travels as a bunch ...
About Author
I've been fascinated with video games and computers for as long as I can remember. It was always a treat to get dragged to the mall with my parents because I'd get to play for a few minutes on the Atari 2600. I partially blame Asteroids, the crack cocaine of arcade games, for my low GPA in college which eventually led me to temporarily ditch academics and join the USAF to "see the world." The rest of the blame goes to my passion for all things aviation, and the opportunity to work on work on the truly awesome SR-71 Blackbird sealed the deal.
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 that I bought in 1977 when they first came out. At that time you had to order them through a Radio Shack store - Tandy didn't think they'd sell enough to justify stocking them in the retail stores. My favorite game then was the SubLogic Flight Simulator, which was the great Grandaddy of the Microsoft flight sims.
While I was in the military, I bought a Commodore 64. From there I moved on up through the PC line, always buying just enough machine to support the latest version of the flight sims. I never really paid much attention to consoles until the Dreamcast came out. I now have an Xbox for my console games, and a 1ghz Celeron with a GeForce4 for graphics. Being married and having a very expensive toy (my airplane) means I don't get to spend a lot of money on the lastest/greatest PC and console hardware.
My interests these days are primarily auto racing and flying sims on the PC. I'm too old and slow to do well at the FPS twitchers or fighting games, but I do enjoy online Rainbow 6 or the like now and then, although I had to give up Americas Army due to my complete inability to discern friend from foe. I have the Xbox mostly to play games with my daughter and for the sports games.
Having been gaming since I upped the RAM in my TRS-80 Model I to a massive 16k and consequently lived through decades of desperately wanting ever higher resolution, it literally offends me to see games like Minecraft revel in their return to ugly, blocky graphics
Yeah, I feel like it's all forgiven when you hit the about the author and discover he really may have just missed out on RPGs for 30 years for good reason rather than bad taste.
I always thought it would be fun to be a king. The raw power of an army that reports directly to me, the ability to mete out summary judgments as suited my mood of the moment, and the big castle to hold massive banquets in. Then came Game of Thrones, after which I decided it might be better to just play at being an all powerful potentate. Kings, it seems, have pretty short lifespans
It is difficult to share the news of a soon-to-be-released puzzle game with any level of detail without getting into "spoiler" territory. One must tread very carefully indeed when it comes to talking about this kind of thing. In fact, there are only a handful of other conversations that are as fraught with the risk of getting oneself into trouble. You know, conversations like that one where your significant other drops the incredibly dangerous question regarding whether or not "these pants make my rear look big." Having tripped over that very question myself a number of times prior to getting married, I was well-prepared for it when my spouse eventually asked the very same thing. My thinking is that situations like these are very similar to removing a Band-Aid: just yank it off and be done with it. It will only hurt for a minute, or so I thought. While I can recommend adopting this strategy should you ever find yourself in this situation, I would vehemently suggest not using my specific answer, which was "It's hard to say, Hon, but something is definitely doing it."
On the plus side, she never asked again.
All Walls Must Fall is described by its developers as being a “tech-noir spy thriller.” Being a fan of both noir and spy thrillers, I was more than happy to take a look at it. Developed as the result of a very successful crowdfunding campaign, this early access game certainly lives up to that description; this access is so early that only a portion of the eventual feature set is in place
Please bear with me as I begin this review with a caveat: RPG games are not my forte, which means Japanese-style RPGs are completely, well… foreign to me. In fact, I have always had a mild aversion to Manga-style things in general as, in my opinion, they often carry with them a type of sharp and brittle anger that gets under my skin. Maybe it’s the eyes. Creepy!
I went in with certain preconceived notions, chief among them being the idea that the translations from the Japanese language to English would be similar to the nearly incomprehensible and often hilarious instructions that sometimes come with foreign made products that require assembly before use.
I would describe the overall story as being very much like Harry Potter goes to Japan. I started out on a train heading to a mysterious school (Thor’s Military Academy) and possessing very little knowledge as to what to expect. I ended up being put in a special class at the school based on by tremendous innate abilities, the presence of which had been completely unknown to me. And sure enough, the class I was assigned to was an experiment in removing the social class/status distinctions between nobility and commoner that were causing so much trouble in the world, which naturally led to the type of friction extant between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. The parallels weren’t too close to wreck the story, though, and the natural differences of viewpoint were handled well by the writers. For the most part I found the story to be interesting and well-paced. Again, with a majority of the time spent in the game being very similar to reading a graphic novel, it is important that the story be an enjoyable component of the game. With the reading/activity ratio being so heavily biased to the reading, I soon started viewing the game as something like a Stephen King novel: enjoy the journey because the ending is probably going to pale by comparison.