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by ???????? 06/26/2024, 6:46pm PDT |
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Slav devs wrote a game based on some author's ideas of a cosmology with different planetary vibes 'music of the spheres' style being related to different dimensions full of demon hell influences in their specific flavors, and if certain things happen in a given location you get a Hellgate London/original Doom eruption into reality. This metaphysics does not mesh well with an anarchocapitalist solar system that's run by corporations that set the laws with a terrorist underground that represents the remaining factions fighting to restore national sovereignty and concepts like citizenship.
But that's for fucking nerds, because YOU, the player, are a deniable asset PMC company that's so off the books it doesn't even get to trade in money. What you do to earn you permanent exile from the holy marketplace utopia of dont-tread-on-me heaven is unleash cloned supersoldiers you print out like polaroids, with their metabolisms so torqued up for doing crazy superhuman shit that clearing a building story without a stack of MREs means in your bag requires resorting to cannibalism just to get through your workday without immediate atrophy turning you into the cryptkeeper.
Problem is, this and other fucked up ultraviolent murderhobo behavior that your merc operator functions spell out a constant need for ups a counter which, when it hits the right threshold, turns your day into an Event Horizon reenactment with real demons. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. style solutions include "functional" alcoholic binges, smoking like a chimney, and...murdering the demons works too I guess. Then you gather up all the shit you can cram in your pack and trade it to the various corps that don't currently hate you, and they pay you in decent gear for more PMC adventures, at a value in proportion to how bad they needed what you brought them and its current market price; you also get paid kinda like this when you succeed in a job for a corp. There's a Sseth video about the game for more if you want the whole nine yards aside from this bit I've laid out concerning the core gameplay loop, google a bit and you'll find it if you want.
It plays...okay. Not sure yet, keymapping might need rethinking. No mods yet, they said after 1.0, which is fine. Half the solar system's not in at this point, not sure if it's coming, so. Murdering people with an axe and eating their flesh with decent class progression and clean understandings about being a disposable clone with nobody to blame but yourself and no chance of extraction without good loot or a mission victory in a top-down, turn-based tactical game is def the Vampire: The Masquerade sorta thing I'd have expected we'd get by now about some bunch of ghoul servants of clan whatever, though this has the benefit of being in space.
The current reviews and guides are a cycle of arguments about which version was better in terms of balance. Lots better than constant horror stories about gamebreaking bugs and arguments about whether or not the game is too broken to ask a price for and all that rehash bullshit we've all seen every side of, but not terribly clarifying about how everyone feels. The discord isn't totally useless but is kinda meh for getting quick answers. Props for letting me have a burst pistol that chambers shotgun rounds, including specials like Dragon's Breath, and having low-tier craftables include chemical bombs based on mixing acid and unflushed solids your superhuman clone gets to menially grab and carry around in a used food tin with a fuse sticking out, probably smelling fumes it gives off while they find some corp slave menials in their way to get sky-high on their jenkem grenades. Jarate didn't go far enough to bring sad fetishes into gaming, I guess.
Otherwise...It has sufficient differences in classes and characters that I'm pretty damn happy with it. I'm still figuring out the economy. It's a brutal enough roguelike that I'd feel perfectly fine savescumming, but it's fair enough that I don't really want to so far in that if I was in a position to die by random chance I probably put myself there, and if I was dumb enough to take my best gear on a vulnerable build into a situation I didn't understand how to handle I earned what I got that way too. And I'm still on the newb planet. |
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