Recent reviews by Barge

At some point, I am going to write a class that covers world history through video games.

When that happens, an essay based on this game will be the final.

Much like This War of Mine, 11 bit uses a tried a true game mechanic to a much greater artistic end. Ultimately challenging the players worldview in the process.

It is a more than capable city builder with a narrative twist and some cool post-apocolpytic game mechanics.

You will never think about Theocracies or Totalitarianism the same.

Absolutely brilliant game, great level of challange, slick art style, great use of time stress to make decisions a little mor hectic. Crewwipes are not the end of the game, more of a setback. You definitely have to work the games systems well in order to advance in the later stages.

Fans of FTL will absolutely fall in love with this game.

This game is an absolute gem of brilliant design.

You lead a group of randomized survivors through a civil war. Not that they are fighting in it, you are not a combatant, you are just trying to get through to the next day and there are plenty of things to trip you up as you go. The game has several distinct phases that will change up what challanges you face as you go. The whole time you have to feed and arm your survivors as well as fortify your base.

You will find yourselve in a variety of precarious moral situations (who gets to eat, do you help your neighbor, do you help a perfect stranger, among MANY more).

This game has a very rogue-like quality as you are balancing several very limited resources every day.

Each day has two parts:

Day - Is a sort of resource managing survival game where you create the tools you need to survive.

Night - Plays out as a 2D stealth game where you scavange, steal, barter or raid for whatever you can to survive.

By the end of this game you will be limping forward, my playthrough ended with all 4 of my party barely alive.

The difficulty is brutal and mistakes are punished severely, death of a party member can happen in a matter of moments and losing that one party member can cause everything to spiral out of control.

I have exactly one knock on the game, when your base is attacked, it is simulated. I would have loved to have had to defend my base in the 2D combat engine the scavenging uses.

The game has a ton a replay value via random events, party members and resources.

If you like survival games, you will love this game. If you like resource management games, you will love this game. If you like games that make you think about your actions, you will love this game . If you like to feel like a complete bastard, you will love this game.

I cannont recommend this game highly enough. My achievement for getting my party through all the way is among my favorites.

This game takes two of my favorite games Crusader Kings II and XCOM and mashes them together in a way that fixes some of the glaring flaws in XCOMs design.

This game takes place over Hundreds of years and you are managing a nation and stable of heroes across multiple generations. Through out the game you will build keeps to further bloodlines, crucibles for training and Sagewrights guild for research.

You will also engage in some genetic engineering through selective pairing to get the best possible heroes.
The heroes you pair do a few things. 1. They have a chance to pass along some of their traits (positive and negative) to their kids. 2. They pass along some of their XP. This alone fixes the massive flaw in XCOM, by the midgame of XCOM any new recruit you get is useless to you. Now your new recruits are able to scale in power as the game progresses.

The other big flaw involves "losing" a battle. While there is no "ironman" mode that I can see, I play with it self imposed on myself. In XCOM ironman mode, a team wipe is essentially a loss state. You likely have no team of soldiers that can adequately replace a team that fought something tough enough to get wiped by. In MC, a team wipe hurts, you spread more "corruption" (Panic) and obviously you lost your heroes, BUT it is not a game over scenario as you have a team to fight with comeing through the ranks (at least you should) infact, losing members of your team can result in the creation of a "Relic", a weapon that it bound to the bloodline of the hero, can critical strike, and grows stronger as you use it.

The game is a blast to manage if you love XCOM and CKII. It is still unfinished at this time, the only feature that I can tell is missing is hybrid classes, but the game plays great without it right now. If there was one thing I would add to this game it would be an active/reactive combat system like Gladius, but that is just me being wishful for Gladius II...

The actual tactical battles are cleverly done with some cool maps and the different types of enemies add some good depth to the combat, certain enemies need to be approached the right way or they can really cause problems at different points in the game. Lapses in the late game are nasty, wrinklers in the mid game, Bulwarks in the early game. They all attack very differently (especially in the case of Lapses and Wrinklers) and in ways that are thematically appropriate (messing with time) and not simply a case of one just hitting harder. The one knock I do have is once the 5-6 different enemies are rolled out it kinda stops, eventually they all become "advanced" versions of the same thing, no reskins, no different mechanics. That is an area for improvement as the game moves to launch.

There is no difficulty setting I can see, but the games difficulty is more than adequate, however as you get a bit more familiar with the items you can equip, you can use the imformation about the types of enemies you are facing to give your guys a leg up. In future playthroughs I am going to try and not look at that information before battles as the game got a lot easier once I started really looking at the types of enemies I would face pre-battle.

One successful playthrough (3rd try) took me about 25 hours and it already has great replay value in the randomness of it's design. As it sits right now it is worth the price of admission and this game will only improve as it gets closer to launch.

The short version is that this game took XCOM and made it better in almost every way, even in it's presently unfinished state.

A truly great game, addressed a lot of the annoying issues in other Telltale games, the storyline is flexible and amazing. Probably about 10-12 hours of awesome depending on how much you play through to see different story paths