AstrinSchmidt
2019
Focuses on survival mechanics and seems to make the setting more conventional. As a fan of the first game, this one seems to go in the entirely wrong direction. Performance sucks, too, running worse on minimum setting than Classic HD on my 1070Ti. Maybe I'll try it again one day, but as is, I have many more promising games to play.
2017
After 27 hours, I have just beaten the main campaign, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what one can do in this game. Stats like Chemistry, Hardware and Medicine could potentially be useful, but I wouldn't know, because I never levelled them. This game allows for a lot of specialisation, and there are many ways to alter the game's world and story through your actions. This game is pretty much the ultimate janky RPG, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who loved the original Deus Ex, and is okay with the idea of not having straight-up stealth level design in a Deus Ex spiritual successor (it bugged me for a while, but Brigand manages to work well regardless).
(Copied from Steam)
(Copied from Steam)
2009
This game tales a few steps back from Gothic 3, in a good way, and brings a small, hand-crafted open world akin to the ones seen in Gothic 1 and 2. This time around, Piranha Bytes shake things up by introducing a legitimately great combat system into the game, and populating the game world with dungeons to fight your way through. Most of these dungeons, except the story-important endgame ones, are open to the player from Chapter 1, leading to the new Nameless Hero being able to get rich and powerful before even joining a faction.
Personal opinion: I like the combat system, and I enjoy dungeon crawlers such as the King's Field series and the last quarter of Arx Fatalis, and get bored by long dialogues such as what is seen in The Witcher 3 or in the first chapters of any Gothic game. As such, I definitely like this game, probably more than Gothic II, but if you think you would not enjoy an easier, more combat-oriented game (though, I have to say, this may be my favourite combat system in an RPG) then you might want to give this one a pass.
All in all, if you've enjoyed any of Piranha Bytes' games, I would recommend you to at least try this one out, as it retains the spirit of what makes the games great whilst providing a more focused experience, even if it is focused on dungeon crawling and combat, rather than character stories and dialogue.
(Copied from Steam)
Personal opinion: I like the combat system, and I enjoy dungeon crawlers such as the King's Field series and the last quarter of Arx Fatalis, and get bored by long dialogues such as what is seen in The Witcher 3 or in the first chapters of any Gothic game. As such, I definitely like this game, probably more than Gothic II, but if you think you would not enjoy an easier, more combat-oriented game (though, I have to say, this may be my favourite combat system in an RPG) then you might want to give this one a pass.
All in all, if you've enjoyed any of Piranha Bytes' games, I would recommend you to at least try this one out, as it retains the spirit of what makes the games great whilst providing a more focused experience, even if it is focused on dungeon crawling and combat, rather than character stories and dialogue.
(Copied from Steam)
2002
A nice game with a lot of content and some fun writing. It's way better than Torchlight II if you consider it an ARPG, and it's not overly complex and hard to play like the average CRPG, so it really can be a lot of fun. The game is a bit long, though, but if you see that as a negative, you could always do fewer side quests, since the XP rewards are not that significant, anyway. One thing I do have to warn you about, though, is that this game still has the stupid ARPG random loot system, even for unique gear, so if you do get a cool weapon or armour from a quest and it doesn't turn out to be so cool, just reload to before you got it and its stats will be different. I personally didn't do that, and (mild spoiler) got a frost effect on the Holy Weapon quest sword, so that even though the damage was garbage, I could freeze every enemy, even the final boss (/spoiler).
However, I'm sure my gear could have been a lot more impressive had I actually abused this system.
Still, if you can bear not really getting particularly powerful gear after the mid-game, and generally having progression slow down near the end when you unlock all the abilities you actually want and get decent enough gear to get through the rest of the game, it really is a fun one, and positively reminded me of Record of Lodoss War for the Dreamcast (if anyone except me actually played that). So, if you have played that, and were disappointed with Torchlight II, I can say from experience that you won't be so disappointed with this game.
However, I'm sure my gear could have been a lot more impressive had I actually abused this system.
Still, if you can bear not really getting particularly powerful gear after the mid-game, and generally having progression slow down near the end when you unlock all the abilities you actually want and get decent enough gear to get through the rest of the game, it really is a fun one, and positively reminded me of Record of Lodoss War for the Dreamcast (if anyone except me actually played that). So, if you have played that, and were disappointed with Torchlight II, I can say from experience that you won't be so disappointed with this game.
This is a long game. After the first forty hours or so, the novelty of it really starts to fade, and you're left with just the combat system to carry the experience.
The combat system itself is great, but alas, this also becomes dull pretty quickly. You'll spend most of your playtime using the same strategies and the same abilities to win battles, and your arsenal will be expanding so slowly that you may not notice how vast your hotbar has actually become.
That last statement summarises the game for me: It is long and slow. Progression is slow, combat is slow and methodical, your characters run around slowly. All of it adds up to make a very deliberate game. Combined with the design of the game frequently forcing you to go back to grind to level up before facing an encounter that you've already... encountered, and it always feels like there's always something to do, until the game just... ends.
All in all, the combat in this game is a lot of fun, and there are often somewhat imaginative ways to solve quests (depending on how imaginative cheesing things with deathfog and teleportation for the twentieth time seems to you) but the whole experience is just slow and meticulous, and you either need a specific mindset (something which I don't have, this being my first proper CRPG experience) or lots of free time to sink into the game to get the enjoyment out of it.
(Copied from Steam)
The combat system itself is great, but alas, this also becomes dull pretty quickly. You'll spend most of your playtime using the same strategies and the same abilities to win battles, and your arsenal will be expanding so slowly that you may not notice how vast your hotbar has actually become.
That last statement summarises the game for me: It is long and slow. Progression is slow, combat is slow and methodical, your characters run around slowly. All of it adds up to make a very deliberate game. Combined with the design of the game frequently forcing you to go back to grind to level up before facing an encounter that you've already... encountered, and it always feels like there's always something to do, until the game just... ends.
All in all, the combat in this game is a lot of fun, and there are often somewhat imaginative ways to solve quests (depending on how imaginative cheesing things with deathfog and teleportation for the twentieth time seems to you) but the whole experience is just slow and meticulous, and you either need a specific mindset (something which I don't have, this being my first proper CRPG experience) or lots of free time to sink into the game to get the enjoyment out of it.
(Copied from Steam)
2021
This review contains spoilers
This is more of a mixed review, as I feel that the game doesn't really reach its full potential with the experience it delivers. I'll try to focus on what the game is, rather than what it isn't, but it's hard for me not to feel frustrated with how unrewarding the game ended up feeling compared to what I feel it could have been. Let's break the experience down to its elements, starting from the elephant in the room:
The Aesthetics:
The game frankly looks and sounds pretty awful. It is obvious from the start that the game world represents a dark, dystopian cyberpunk society where everything is awful, human life has no value, and looking at things hurts your eyes. The soundtrack gives a similar feeling, where bar a few tracks which can invoke some emotion in you, most of the music sounds unpleasant to the ears, comprising of simple melodies constructed from painful-sounding chiptune synthesiser sounds. Overall, the aesthetics work well for the overall tone of the game, but end up feeling less surreal and dreamlike and more painful to experience, so the aesthetics aren't going to make me come back to the game. In short, they are bad on purpose, but that does not make them good, and I would say that hurting the experience to deliver the overall message (more on that later) wasn't really worth it, as it just makes the game unpleasant to play.
The Gameplay:
The gameplay just feels confused, leading to the "mixed" impression I have of the game. It has all the elements of an Immersive Sim, but seemingly none of the fun; I normally go for pure stealth in games, but this game barely has a stealth system, where alternative paths lend you close to enemies ready to spot you, and a lack of a light system and patrol patterns means that the best way to deal with enemies is with instant headshots, which already takes away from the ImSim spirit, and it only leads to a slippery slope of forgoing sneaking entirely and simply headshotting enemies before they can spot you, which seems to be the meta. One augmentation which helps with this is the invisibility suit, which makes you invisible up to a certain distance. This means that you can conceivably sneak around headshotting people without getting hitscanned across the map, which is pretty much a requirement to beat the game with relative ease.
The other option is going guns-blazing, which can be fun if you're into that kind of stuff, and the movement mechanics do lend themselves well to evading enemies. However, you still run the risk of being hitscanned across the map, and the result ends up being the same as if you had attempted to sneak around and headshot people.
The augmentations expand on the gameplay, but none of them really change it much, except for one: the Grappendix. This thing is broken, and kind of ruins the game. I had fun traversing levels with super-kickjumps before I got it, but that was quickly rendered pointless as this thing basically turned me into a demigod, allowing me to ignore enemies. I feel that it doesn't led itself well to an ImSim-style game, since it encourages you to ignore the kitchen sink and just throw your dishes straight in the toilet.
Overall, the gameplay feels confused, as the obvious best strategy is to exterminate everyone on your path to the target, and then kill the target with a headshot. It's easy, assuming you use the invisibility suit and headshot everyone on sight, and the game doesn't feel like it rewards creaivity much. I really feel like introducing more varied stealth mechanics could massively increase the fun factor of the game (just look at Deus Ex and Thief for inspiration: Guard movement patterns, voice lines to let you know where they are, levels which encourage using your powers to solve problems, rather than ♥♥♥♥ around, like it's a sandbox). Overall, it's decent, but I feel that it could be much more.
The Deep
This is definitely the hardest, and probably most controversial part of the game for me to talk about, but it's also what I feel is the most important aspect going in. For some background, I'm generally pretty pretentious, and put gameplay pretty low on the weighing when it comes to what I consider to be an "excellent" game, and what I consider to be a "good" game. Games like Dark Souls, OFF, The Void, and STALKER are all excellent games in my books, because I feel that they achieve the goal of using their elements to create storytelling beyond the possibilities of any non-interactive medium, and all left me with strong feelings of longing, sadness, existentialism, and everything in-between.
With that said, this game clearly attempts to deliver a message to the player, but I feel that it ends up falling somewhat short of its potential. The world of Cruelty Squad is, well, cruel. It's an assault on the senses; The environments don't make sense, the stories behind the missions range from satirical to ridiculous and nonsensical, the enemies are either abstract or (attempt to be) terrifying, and the entire game feels unpleasant to the core. This sends a message to the player: This is a cyberpunk world you absolutely do not want to live in, which is a great starting point. Unfortunately, I feel that the game doesn't really develop much beyond that.
The intro cutscene establishes the protagonist as a depressed mess after being fired from his hired assassin gig, It's pretty obvious that his job is the only thing which gives him fulfillment, and he shows no real emotion when he is hired by Cruelty Squad to do what he does best. What follows is his journey across bizarre levels assassinating people for increasingly bad reasons until it all devolves into a fever dream and culminates into the first ending, which is an assault on the senses and doesn't really make any sense within the context of the game.
The first ending essentially just shows that the player character has failed to achieve fulfillment through his journey. The reason I feel that this is not effective is that, as the player, I don't know this character. I was just going through the levels, enduring the assault on the senses, trying to have fun, and I feel no more or less fulfilled than I did at the start. The game shows me the world through the lens of a person I only really got to know in a trailer as well as the intro of the game, and I do not identify with it at all. It simply makes me go "So... was that the ending?"
This problem is only further highlighted by the fact that the "ending" does not end the game at all, and you still have much secret stuff to unpack and two more endings to experience before the game truly ends. What this essentially tells me as the player is that life in this world is pointless and I shouldn't really care about achieving anything, which I take to heart as I look to guides to unlocking the six levels remaining in the game. The other endings don't provide much closure, and overall, the message of the game seems quite clear: a globalised, profit-driven society controlled by money and technology will lead to the eradication of happiness, and life will have no purpose other than suffering and cruelty. This is fair, but it all culminates in your interactions with the world boiling down to the player feeling that there is no catharsis to be found, which makes the experience feel hollow which, in my eyes, is not a good goal to strive towards.
Cruelty Squad should be treated as a sandbox designed to allow you to mess around with the mechanics, laugh at the satirical dialogue, and maybe hunt for secrets. It is a game to be experienced, and not enjoyed. Of course, you could always find something more if you were to play it yourself, and by all means, do. Just don't expect that the 97% rating would mean that it's necessarily a game that you would enjoy, and be prepared for horrible hitscan and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AOE attacks in corridors to bring you true PUNISHMENT.
(Review copied from Steam)
The Aesthetics:
The game frankly looks and sounds pretty awful. It is obvious from the start that the game world represents a dark, dystopian cyberpunk society where everything is awful, human life has no value, and looking at things hurts your eyes. The soundtrack gives a similar feeling, where bar a few tracks which can invoke some emotion in you, most of the music sounds unpleasant to the ears, comprising of simple melodies constructed from painful-sounding chiptune synthesiser sounds. Overall, the aesthetics work well for the overall tone of the game, but end up feeling less surreal and dreamlike and more painful to experience, so the aesthetics aren't going to make me come back to the game. In short, they are bad on purpose, but that does not make them good, and I would say that hurting the experience to deliver the overall message (more on that later) wasn't really worth it, as it just makes the game unpleasant to play.
The Gameplay:
The gameplay just feels confused, leading to the "mixed" impression I have of the game. It has all the elements of an Immersive Sim, but seemingly none of the fun; I normally go for pure stealth in games, but this game barely has a stealth system, where alternative paths lend you close to enemies ready to spot you, and a lack of a light system and patrol patterns means that the best way to deal with enemies is with instant headshots, which already takes away from the ImSim spirit, and it only leads to a slippery slope of forgoing sneaking entirely and simply headshotting enemies before they can spot you, which seems to be the meta. One augmentation which helps with this is the invisibility suit, which makes you invisible up to a certain distance. This means that you can conceivably sneak around headshotting people without getting hitscanned across the map, which is pretty much a requirement to beat the game with relative ease.
The other option is going guns-blazing, which can be fun if you're into that kind of stuff, and the movement mechanics do lend themselves well to evading enemies. However, you still run the risk of being hitscanned across the map, and the result ends up being the same as if you had attempted to sneak around and headshot people.
The augmentations expand on the gameplay, but none of them really change it much, except for one: the Grappendix. This thing is broken, and kind of ruins the game. I had fun traversing levels with super-kickjumps before I got it, but that was quickly rendered pointless as this thing basically turned me into a demigod, allowing me to ignore enemies. I feel that it doesn't led itself well to an ImSim-style game, since it encourages you to ignore the kitchen sink and just throw your dishes straight in the toilet.
Overall, the gameplay feels confused, as the obvious best strategy is to exterminate everyone on your path to the target, and then kill the target with a headshot. It's easy, assuming you use the invisibility suit and headshot everyone on sight, and the game doesn't feel like it rewards creaivity much. I really feel like introducing more varied stealth mechanics could massively increase the fun factor of the game (just look at Deus Ex and Thief for inspiration: Guard movement patterns, voice lines to let you know where they are, levels which encourage using your powers to solve problems, rather than ♥♥♥♥ around, like it's a sandbox). Overall, it's decent, but I feel that it could be much more.
The Deep
This is definitely the hardest, and probably most controversial part of the game for me to talk about, but it's also what I feel is the most important aspect going in. For some background, I'm generally pretty pretentious, and put gameplay pretty low on the weighing when it comes to what I consider to be an "excellent" game, and what I consider to be a "good" game. Games like Dark Souls, OFF, The Void, and STALKER are all excellent games in my books, because I feel that they achieve the goal of using their elements to create storytelling beyond the possibilities of any non-interactive medium, and all left me with strong feelings of longing, sadness, existentialism, and everything in-between.
With that said, this game clearly attempts to deliver a message to the player, but I feel that it ends up falling somewhat short of its potential. The world of Cruelty Squad is, well, cruel. It's an assault on the senses; The environments don't make sense, the stories behind the missions range from satirical to ridiculous and nonsensical, the enemies are either abstract or (attempt to be) terrifying, and the entire game feels unpleasant to the core. This sends a message to the player: This is a cyberpunk world you absolutely do not want to live in, which is a great starting point. Unfortunately, I feel that the game doesn't really develop much beyond that.
The intro cutscene establishes the protagonist as a depressed mess after being fired from his hired assassin gig, It's pretty obvious that his job is the only thing which gives him fulfillment, and he shows no real emotion when he is hired by Cruelty Squad to do what he does best. What follows is his journey across bizarre levels assassinating people for increasingly bad reasons until it all devolves into a fever dream and culminates into the first ending, which is an assault on the senses and doesn't really make any sense within the context of the game.
The first ending essentially just shows that the player character has failed to achieve fulfillment through his journey. The reason I feel that this is not effective is that, as the player, I don't know this character. I was just going through the levels, enduring the assault on the senses, trying to have fun, and I feel no more or less fulfilled than I did at the start. The game shows me the world through the lens of a person I only really got to know in a trailer as well as the intro of the game, and I do not identify with it at all. It simply makes me go "So... was that the ending?"
This problem is only further highlighted by the fact that the "ending" does not end the game at all, and you still have much secret stuff to unpack and two more endings to experience before the game truly ends. What this essentially tells me as the player is that life in this world is pointless and I shouldn't really care about achieving anything, which I take to heart as I look to guides to unlocking the six levels remaining in the game. The other endings don't provide much closure, and overall, the message of the game seems quite clear: a globalised, profit-driven society controlled by money and technology will lead to the eradication of happiness, and life will have no purpose other than suffering and cruelty. This is fair, but it all culminates in your interactions with the world boiling down to the player feeling that there is no catharsis to be found, which makes the experience feel hollow which, in my eyes, is not a good goal to strive towards.
Cruelty Squad should be treated as a sandbox designed to allow you to mess around with the mechanics, laugh at the satirical dialogue, and maybe hunt for secrets. It is a game to be experienced, and not enjoyed. Of course, you could always find something more if you were to play it yourself, and by all means, do. Just don't expect that the 97% rating would mean that it's necessarily a game that you would enjoy, and be prepared for horrible hitscan and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AOE attacks in corridors to bring you true PUNISHMENT.
(Review copied from Steam)
This review contains spoilers
No.
2012
Made me wish I was asleep instead of awake and playing the game. I am much too stubborn to give up on games unless I get stuck (this game never provided much of a challenge on the normal difficulty) but damn it, I regret spending 20-odd hours on this slog. My advice is, do literally anything other than playing the game, as this is about as engaging as dragging your mouse around your desktop.
2011
I played BFE Devolved in Fusion, and it was actually pretty good.