If anyone is curious about this, the demo is _absurdly_ long. It just keeps going. You think it’ll be the first zone around the town but it’s like a full act of the game. I played for twenty hours before I got to the end of the demo. Check it out. It’s good.
If the demo includes all of chapter 1 then that's definitely more than enough to give a potential player a great idea of whether the full game is worth picking up or not. That said... I really don't know how you got 20 hours out of chapter 1 unless you just sat idle for most of it. It only took me about 4 hours even on my original underdog difficulty run, and that included all the sidequests except for the courthouse fights.
Given the niche nature of the game I don’t think I’d play it, but the setting is interesting and how some of the NPCs look reminds me of what some of the older Command and Conquer games were going for.
This game is alot better than this review states. It got a great world and writing. Sure all the points are valid to some degree but no where near as game breaking as this review suggest. I will highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys tactical RPGs. For me this is one of the best in 2024. And I am looking forward to the next titles the studio release.
It's fun... mechanics are fun, like meant to be broken, exploited, stats stacked, characters becoming nearly demigods by the end, able to solo anything in their path. But game itself is super short. Like, you can finish it in one sitting, while exploring every bit of content it has, doing all side quests ect. If determined enough (~4-5 hours of gameplay). It kinda leaves you disappointed after the whole thing.
Side quests are definitely easier to write. They're generally self-contained while main story quests need to leave room for the player to access side content.
To be fair, the devs themselves provide the formulae for the combat calculations right on the Steam store page. But yes, I have quite a lot of RPG experience. Dabbled in them throughout the 90s and Arcanum cemented my love of the genre in 2001.
What do you think of egosoft's "X" series? I am playing through Terran Conflict right now and never realized being a trucker in space could be this addictive and fun.
Just returned from a video from "Tim Cain" (creator of Fallout) where he discusses the drawbacks of Voice Over. It takes longer, many steps hinter making adjustments and changes etc. Also you get less of dialogue. I mean it's not like dialogue in Games is really deep, with the overhead of voice over it just gets worse. I really don't mind text based dialogue as long as it means the game designers can go more into depth without needing to constantly crunch and eventually scrap all nuances, because they lack the time.
The graphics look pretty darn good actually. The only thing I don't like is the neon outlines on the characters during combat. Does it give you an option to disable that?
I see this game as an inspiration for Cyberpunk Pen and Paper :D See how and where the skills are applied etc. Also the character sheets look very nice and orderly :-)
This is on my list to play for quitw a long time, im likely to watch the review sometime after i start it (fear of spoilers even if minimal), but i have high expectarions, i LOVED age of decadence more than any other rpg ive played on the 2010s save maybe Disco elysium, the setting, replayabilty, charming writing,etc... Was on par, if this is atleast on a similar level i would love it
I put 250 hours in this finishing it with different builds. As a solo couldn't beat it but with 2 ppl builds yes. Recently they added the last update with various addons. Feel the itch to do another playtrough but felt a little bit tired in my last walkthrough so probably I pass on it lol. Great game overall, but the devs plan to close down end year so probably no sequel. Such a shame.
Totally off topic but have you heard of Hands of Necromancy DW? If you haven't, it's a fairly recent Hexen clone but not tedious and annoying. And no class selection so you get a bigger arsenal. Oh yeah, and transformations into other creatures, and of course you're a necromancer so you can raise fallen enemies to fight for you. It's about $1 on gog at the moment because the sequel just dropped.
Oof, that playtime and the issues with combat sure make things difficult... oh yeah, that price too. There's no way I could complete adventure stories like this without action, realistically, sometimes things just go wrong, or somebody asks for trouble really hard. Despite it's problems, the game looks interesting enough that I will get it eventually, but definetely not anytime soon.
If nothing else, give the demo a try and then make a decision from there. The game's on sale right now and at the discounted price point is considerably more palatable.
The title of the game gave me Classic Fallout vibes but due to the problems the game has I may just skip this one unless I can pick it up for pretty cheap. Thanks DW.
At this point, I belive the issues this reviewer and a lot of other people have with this game are, in fact, conscious design choices - and it's because Age of Decadence was plagued by exactly the same problems. I really wanted to love that game, I miss good old choice-and-consequence roleplaying and it seems the writing was solid, but combat was an equivalent of playing tabletop RPG with the worst sadistic teenager GM you can imagine. "Splat, haha, you're all dead".
Honestly this looks like a Fallout Van Buren, but more Scifi :D Just purchased the game. Let's see if it's something for an CRPG loving retro gamer :-)
I think it's a really interesting game. so was age of decadence. "interesting" and "a pleasant playing experience" aren't exactly the same thing though.
They rarely align, but as long as the experience isn't too rough the "interesting" part can outweigh the unpleasantness. Colony Ship doesn't really manage that balancing act though.
I dunno about the 12 hours. I've squeezed 110 out of this thing and I've only just hit the endgame. Granted I played strictly solo, but something told me putting up specialists for everything would have only trivialized the entire game.
Even playing solo, I can see no conceivable way anyone would be able to get more than maybe 20-25 hours out of it unless you just leave the game running in the menu for days on end.
A lot of games with "tactical" combat have adopted an interface similar to Firaxis' XCOM games lately. To be fair it was one of the relatively few things those games did well.
You make several good points but I think some of your opinions are quite unjust. Regarding your remarks regarding skills: Percentage chance ment you would have savescummed, which means you might as well not have randomness at all. The fixed checks are, imo, much better than the random rolls in a game like that with limited content. Note that Tim Cain (Fallout) also says that this is the way to go for skill checks. So calling this inferior is quite arbitrary. You do have a point that choosing electronics vs computer vs lockpick is a completely arbitrary choice that you can't make with knowledge of what it entails. As for combat, I completely disagree with you. I find it extremely fun. You have to learn the system but I don't find it overwhelmingly difficult. The hardest fights you can avoid anyway. Same for stealth. I think players need to like puzzles more than you do to appreciate these systems. I think the game has a lot of replayability in terms of builds and a few choices, but if you don't like it, of course, you wouldn't replay much.
1. Why are you acting like savescumming is a problem? If someone wants to spend an arbitrary amount of time reloading saves until they successfully complete a check, that's entirely their choice. Fixed checks don't actually prevent savescumming anyway. 1b. Tim Cain says a lot of things. He also said the Fallout TV show was good, and anyone with a functioning brain could tell you that's utter horseshit. He might've been lead on Fallout and Arcanum but he's far from infallible. 2. Even after you learn the mechanics, the combat encounters themselves are poorly designed and often downright punishingly unfair to the player unless you're playing on "hero" difficulty. There's no amount of mechanical depth that can make up for bad design.
@@DWTerminator We disagree. Savescumming is a problem because it's a massive waste of time. The problem isn't the fixed checks but the facts that you make choices to use/increase skills blindly. I love the combat. Your saying the design is bad doesn't make it so.
Savescumming is entirely a choice made by the player. The developer has absolutely no control over whether the player will do it or not, so there's no reason to be concerned about it. If you don't like savescumming, just don't savescum. This really isn't hard to understand but you keep acting like it's something the developers must "destroy." I said the encounter design is bad. If you can't differentiate the encounter design from the combat mechanics themselves then I really can't help you.
@@DWTerminator the devs can make something about it and often that will make part of the development process of a game The idea of "its the player's fault to savescum" really won't apply when you notice that the game itself won't generate good results out of a bad roll with often only benefits if you suceed and cons if you fail, at that point, the game is asking you to savescum. Fixed skillchecks are the way to go nowadays, which is something most game designers tend to agree with (specially when going in depth about seeing what worked on New vegas for example) I never believed on the idea that everything is "player's choice" tho, choosing an easy mode is a thing, allowing you to exploit a game in such an obvious way is laziness. This is on the same vein of the ability to abuse resting mechanics on BG1, outright a casual feature that doesn't improve the overall experience. I never played Colony ship, but the one problem AoD had with this (that new vegas lack) wasnt the exostence of fixed checks, but the lack of non-combat itemization which work to grant the player opportunities to boost their skills by equipping items or temporarily (im NV, throught the usage of skillbooks), because the game was hard and your only way of getting points was throught "levelling up", it was easy to get stuck on a non-combat playtrought.
People use exploits in games all the time. They're usually unfair in multiplayer games and those should certainly be punished and fixed... but frankly it's none of your damn business what someone chooses to do when they're playing a singleplayer game. Fixed skill checks are simplistic and, when handled poorly, prone to exactly the problem I described in this video. Colony Ship doesn't have any items that improve your skills either so you're just stuck loading an older save and scouring the game for any skill checks you can make to increase the skill's level. Guess what: that's still technically savescumming, and it's still something people will do if they come across skill checks they can't pass with their current skill level. If the intent is to prevent savescumming, then fixed skill checks aren't sufficient. If you're so convinced savescumming is such a game-destroying behavior that it must be eradicated at all costs... then the only way to prevent it is to make every single game only have checkpoint and other forms of autosave that the player has no control over. Who cares if you lose large amounts of progress upon dying or get stuck in a soft or hard lock situation and have no choice but to restart the game from the beginning, anyway? It fixes the REAL problem of savescumming, after all. Bonus points against those of us who need to go back to previous points and record more general gameplay footage or alternative choice examples for our reviews and such since clearly we should just restart the game entirely to record whatever we need.
Its a really flawed game but the parts that are good make it worthwhile .But the price is asking way to much for the content at 40$ full value and 24$ when its on sale , for a game with no voice acting , and annoying combat its hard to recommend to anyone .
![[TLI] Make More Flame Elementium with the Arcana Season Mechanic in Torchlight Infinite](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/d_OCeYpDk7k/mqdefault.jpg)
great timing on the review... was looking into this one and the sale as of the posting of the video.
It's rare that the timing works out that well, but it's really cool when it does. Hope the review helps.
@@DarkxAssassin255 Same
Thanks for putting this together, I've been following Colony Ship for a bit now, planning on buying it once my gaming plate is clean
If anyone is curious about this,
the demo is _absurdly_ long.
It just keeps going. You think it’ll be the first zone around the town but it’s like a full act of the game.
I played for twenty hours before I got to the end of the demo.
Check it out. It’s good.
If the demo includes all of chapter 1 then that's definitely more than enough to give a potential player a great idea of whether the full game is worth picking up or not.
That said... I really don't know how you got 20 hours out of chapter 1 unless you just sat idle for most of it. It only took me about 4 hours even on my original underdog difficulty run, and that included all the sidequests except for the courthouse fights.
Given the niche nature of the game I don’t think I’d play it, but the setting is interesting and how some of the NPCs look reminds me of what some of the older Command and Conquer games were going for.
This game is alot better than this review states. It got a great world and writing. Sure all the points are valid to some degree but no where near as game breaking as this review suggest. I will highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys tactical RPGs. For me this is one of the best in 2024. And I am looking forward to the next titles the studio release.
It's fun... mechanics are fun, like meant to be broken, exploited, stats stacked, characters becoming nearly demigods by the end, able to solo anything in their path. But game itself is super short.
Like, you can finish it in one sitting, while exploring every bit of content it has, doing all side quests ect. If determined enough (~4-5 hours of gameplay). It kinda leaves you disappointed after the whole thing.
Its funny how many rpgs have a weak main plot , maybe its more easy to write sides quests
Side quests are definitely easier to write. They're generally self-contained while main story quests need to leave room for the player to access side content.
Seems like you have your fair share of RPG experience, given how you descirbed all the buffs and debuffs and what goes into the damage calculation.
To be fair, the devs themselves provide the formulae for the combat calculations right on the Steam store page.
But yes, I have quite a lot of RPG experience. Dabbled in them throughout the 90s and Arcanum cemented my love of the genre in 2001.
What do you think of egosoft's "X" series? I am playing through Terran Conflict right now and never realized being a trucker in space could be this addictive and fun.
I've got them all except for the Timelines expansion for X4, but haven't gotten around to messing with them yet.
Me too! What a gem. I can't believe I waited so long to try the X series.
Just returned from a video from "Tim Cain" (creator of Fallout) where he discusses the drawbacks of Voice Over. It takes longer, many steps hinter making adjustments and changes etc. Also you get less of dialogue. I mean it's not like dialogue in Games is really deep, with the overhead of voice over it just gets worse. I really don't mind text based dialogue as long as it means the game designers can go more into depth without needing to constantly crunch and eventually scrap all nuances, because they lack the time.
The graphics look pretty darn good actually. The only thing I don't like is the neon outlines on the characters during combat. Does it give you an option to disable that?
If I remember correctly there's an option to disable the outlines.
I see this game as an inspiration for Cyberpunk Pen and Paper :D See how and where the skills are applied etc. Also the character sheets look very nice and orderly :-)
Everything about the Game reminds me of Cyberpunk RED somehow. Stats, turn based combat etc. Super curious.
Cyberpunk Red is just the newest version of an RPG that's been around since 1988 and has definitely inspired its fair share of CRPGs.
This is on my list to play for quitw a long time, im likely to watch the review sometime after i start it (fear of spoilers even if minimal), but i have high expectarions, i LOVED age of decadence more than any other rpg ive played on the 2010s save maybe Disco elysium, the setting, replayabilty, charming writing,etc... Was on par, if this is atleast on a similar level i would love it
If you're really that concerned about spoilers then you can always listen to my commentary and not watch the gameplay footage.
Me listening to chargen: Tf is this, shadowrun?
Inspired by it, maybe.
I put 250 hours in this finishing it with different builds. As a solo couldn't beat it but with 2 ppl builds yes. Recently they added the last update with various addons. Feel the itch to do another playtrough but felt a little bit tired in my last walkthrough so probably I pass on it lol. Great game overall, but the devs plan to close down end year so probably no sequel. Such a shame.
Totally off topic but have you heard of Hands of Necromancy DW? If you haven't, it's a fairly recent Hexen clone but not tedious and annoying. And no class selection so you get a bigger arsenal. Oh yeah, and transformations into other creatures, and of course you're a necromancer so you can raise fallen enemies to fight for you. It's about $1 on gog at the moment because the sequel just dropped.
Not sure when I'll get around to Hands of Necromancy but I've had a copy of the game for a while.
Oof, that playtime and the issues with combat sure make things difficult... oh yeah, that price too. There's no way I could complete adventure stories like this without action, realistically, sometimes things just go wrong, or somebody asks for trouble really hard. Despite it's problems, the game looks interesting enough that I will get it eventually, but definetely not anytime soon.
If nothing else, give the demo a try and then make a decision from there. The game's on sale right now and at the discounted price point is considerably more palatable.
The title of the game gave me Classic Fallout vibes but due to the problems the game has I may just skip this one unless I can pick it up for pretty cheap. Thanks DW.
The title's definitely meant to give that vibe. Can always check out the demo and then make a decision afterward.
At this point, I belive the issues this reviewer and a lot of other people have with this game are, in fact, conscious design choices - and it's because Age of Decadence was plagued by exactly the same problems. I really wanted to love that game, I miss good old choice-and-consequence roleplaying and it seems the writing was solid, but combat was an equivalent of playing tabletop RPG with the worst sadistic teenager GM you can imagine. "Splat, haha, you're all dead".
Hey! I'm developing a sim game. Can i send you a copy when it's ready?
Honestly this looks like a Fallout Van Buren, but more Scifi :D Just purchased the game. Let's see if it's something for an CRPG loving retro gamer :-)
akin to insomnia the ark
Really fun game; I love it :)
I think it's a really interesting game. so was age of decadence. "interesting" and "a pleasant playing experience" aren't exactly the same thing though.
They rarely align, but as long as the experience isn't too rough the "interesting" part can outweigh the unpleasantness. Colony Ship doesn't really manage that balancing act though.
I dunno about the 12 hours. I've squeezed 110 out of this thing and I've only just hit the endgame. Granted I played strictly solo, but something told me putting up specialists for everything would have only trivialized the entire game.
Even playing solo, I can see no conceivable way anyone would be able to get more than maybe 20-25 hours out of it unless you just leave the game running in the menu for days on end.
This game kinda looks like Xcom ngl.
A lot of games with "tactical" combat have adopted an interface similar to Firaxis' XCOM games lately. To be fair it was one of the relatively few things those games did well.
You make several good points but I think some of your opinions are quite unjust.
Regarding your remarks regarding skills:
Percentage chance ment you would have savescummed, which means you might as well not have randomness at all. The fixed checks are, imo, much better than the random rolls in a game like that with limited content. Note that Tim Cain (Fallout) also says that this is the way to go for skill checks. So calling this inferior is quite arbitrary. You do have a point that choosing electronics vs computer vs lockpick is a completely arbitrary choice that you can't make with knowledge of what it entails.
As for combat, I completely disagree with you. I find it extremely fun. You have to learn the system but I don't find it overwhelmingly difficult. The hardest fights you can avoid anyway.
Same for stealth. I think players need to like puzzles more than you do to appreciate these systems.
I think the game has a lot of replayability in terms of builds and a few choices, but if you don't like it, of course, you wouldn't replay much.
1. Why are you acting like savescumming is a problem? If someone wants to spend an arbitrary amount of time reloading saves until they successfully complete a check, that's entirely their choice. Fixed checks don't actually prevent savescumming anyway.
1b. Tim Cain says a lot of things. He also said the Fallout TV show was good, and anyone with a functioning brain could tell you that's utter horseshit. He might've been lead on Fallout and Arcanum but he's far from infallible.
2. Even after you learn the mechanics, the combat encounters themselves are poorly designed and often downright punishingly unfair to the player unless you're playing on "hero" difficulty. There's no amount of mechanical depth that can make up for bad design.
@@DWTerminator We disagree. Savescumming is a problem because it's a massive waste of time. The problem isn't the fixed checks but the facts that you make choices to use/increase skills blindly.
I love the combat. Your saying the design is bad doesn't make it so.
Savescumming is entirely a choice made by the player. The developer has absolutely no control over whether the player will do it or not, so there's no reason to be concerned about it. If you don't like savescumming, just don't savescum. This really isn't hard to understand but you keep acting like it's something the developers must "destroy."
I said the encounter design is bad. If you can't differentiate the encounter design from the combat mechanics themselves then I really can't help you.
@@DWTerminator the devs can make something about it and often that will make part of the development process of a game
The idea of "its the player's fault to savescum" really won't apply when you notice that the game itself won't generate good results out of a bad roll with often only benefits if you suceed and cons if you fail, at that point, the game is asking you to savescum.
Fixed skillchecks are the way to go nowadays, which is something most game designers tend to agree with (specially when going in depth about seeing what worked on New vegas for example)
I never believed on the idea that everything is "player's choice" tho, choosing an easy mode is a thing, allowing you to exploit a game in such an obvious way is laziness.
This is on the same vein of the ability to abuse resting mechanics on BG1, outright a casual feature that doesn't improve the overall experience.
I never played Colony ship, but the one problem AoD had with this (that new vegas lack) wasnt the exostence of fixed checks, but the lack of non-combat itemization which work to grant the player opportunities to boost their skills by equipping items or temporarily (im NV, throught the usage of skillbooks), because the game was hard and your only way of getting points was throught "levelling up", it was easy to get stuck on a non-combat playtrought.
People use exploits in games all the time. They're usually unfair in multiplayer games and those should certainly be punished and fixed... but frankly it's none of your damn business what someone chooses to do when they're playing a singleplayer game.
Fixed skill checks are simplistic and, when handled poorly, prone to exactly the problem I described in this video. Colony Ship doesn't have any items that improve your skills either so you're just stuck loading an older save and scouring the game for any skill checks you can make to increase the skill's level. Guess what: that's still technically savescumming, and it's still something people will do if they come across skill checks they can't pass with their current skill level. If the intent is to prevent savescumming, then fixed skill checks aren't sufficient.
If you're so convinced savescumming is such a game-destroying behavior that it must be eradicated at all costs... then the only way to prevent it is to make every single game only have checkpoint and other forms of autosave that the player has no control over. Who cares if you lose large amounts of progress upon dying or get stuck in a soft or hard lock situation and have no choice but to restart the game from the beginning, anyway? It fixes the REAL problem of savescumming, after all. Bonus points against those of us who need to go back to previous points and record more general gameplay footage or alternative choice examples for our reviews and such since clearly we should just restart the game entirely to record whatever we need.
Its a really flawed game but the parts that are good make it worthwhile .But the price is asking way to much for the content at 40$ full value and 24$ when its on sale , for a game with no voice acting , and annoying combat its hard to recommend to anyone .