Recent reviews by steevm

I had this game working many years ago (hence the play time), but upon re-installing it, I can't play the game because the main menu won't register any mouse clicks. Seems to be a frequent issue (I can find lots of posts on the subject, but no fix).

A potentially great game ruined by inept game design featuring a range of "gotchas". Highlights include:
- Being punished in the kingdom management for choosing any alignment other than lawful good. You now have a 10% penalty to all die rolls. There will be hundreds or thousands over the course of the game
- Insane difficulty even at normal level, featuring enemies that you can't hit and tips online to suggest you can kill them with spell X. Don't have spell X or the right companion in your party? You are probably SOL.
- Unhelpful quest info and timers that can lock you out of companions at the end game. Have fun replaying those 150 hours hahahahaha
- Multiple one-shot encounters in the opening chapter. Picked the wrong class for your main character? Have fun playing the reload game and hoping for the RNG gods to favour you. Things to get better when you have picked up a few companions. But of course, some of them are locked behind timers and depend on you going to a random location to get them. More stupid game design.
- "Choices" that tend to be "party is wiped out" vs "you progress the game"

There are also multiple bugs still in the game. That could be forgiven if the game design wasn't the abysmal mess it is.

Yes, I have 200+ hours, but the last few chapters have been an exasperating and frustrating mess of dealing with the poor game design.

The developers need to get some experienced game designers on board, and also ask themselves the question "Will this be fun?" when making design choices. If they answer is "no" (and quite a few design choices in this game have that answer), they need to bin the idea. If you read the forums, you'll notice that a lot of people who are struggling are being met by derisive "I can't believe you didn't use party member X for this encounter/I can't believe you don't have feat Y/I can't believe you didn't choose obscure spell Z" because it's so obvious that you will need it for some random encounter down the line.

Furthermore, the designers need to understand the meaning of "normal" and write *adequate* descriptions for the difficulty levels. Normal assumes that:
- You know the Pathfinder ruleset inside out
- You know how to build the optimum character and can mitigate the poor character building of your companions
- You have already played the game to the end at least once
- You enjoy savescumming

A well-designed game is challenging, to be sure, but doesn't feel unfair. And a well designed CRPG doesn't punish your for role-playing, making choices accordingly and not completing quests that appear optional until it transpires otherwise.

If you are a seasoned Pathfinder pro, enjoy saving every 10 seconds and reloading en mass, you'll get some mileage out of this game. If not, don't bother. It's an exercise in frustration. The developers rolled a 1 on their game design check and still haven't fixed the ensuing mess.

I've tried to get into this a few times now - it should be exactly my kinda of game, but I find the UI infuriatingly bad. Trying to lay tracks is a nightmare - you have to zoom in all the way to even have a 10% chance of creating branches rather than crossings, and even then it's terribly hit and miss. It doesn't matter how good the game has the potential to be if it makes completing what should be the simplest of tasks an absolute headache. You'd think that a game that is all about building a transportation network would have put some effort into making the building the transportation network bit a smooth and enjoyable experience. You would be wrong.

Most of my game time is playing the (not very helpful) tutorial and then laying tracks, ripping them up because they're not connected properly, relaying them again, having another section not connect properly and finally ragequitting.

Then, after you've actually got a functioning track set up, the running costs are higher than the income the trains make. So now you spent ages building up your transport network, have no money left and are unable to make money. As you can probably guess, this doesn't actually make for a fun game.

Please devs, put a bit more time into the actual playability and UX of your games - it's so easy to break a promising game by making simple tasks far too difficult to complete and making it far too challenging for new players. It's not like these problems haven't actually been solved before. This isn't the first transport game ever. Fail.

Should be renamed DLC Shop Simulator

Poor design choices spoil what could have been a great game. Needs QA and playtesting. Instead, it should have been called Loading Bar Simulator, as the only skills your party needs are quicksave and load.

Obscure mechanics, poor guides and a confusing interface means most of your time is spent trying to understand what is going on rather than playing the game. Not worth the effort.

I quite enjoyed playing through The Council, though it's not without a few minor issues.

The game itself is a blend of storytelling and adventure game with all that that involves - talking to characters, solving puzzles, collecting items; you know the drill. What sets the game apart from the rest of the genre is the setting and story. Without spoiling the experience, let's just say that you get to meet a bunch of interesting (and in part historical) characters, and for the most part, the story is compelling. It took me about 20 hours to play through as well, which is a decent amount of game time. There's also some replayability if you want to go back and make different choices and see how things play out, if that's your kind of thing. I've just played through it the once though.

Some minor issues include the voice acting and some translation issues from what is presumably a French original script. There's a couple of glaring grammatical errors which sit at odds with the overall mood of the game, referencing various examples of classic culture (art and literature). The voice acting is also strange. Your protagonist and one of the other characters you meet are supposed to be French, yet both speak with a modern American accent. The other characters have (for the most part at least) believable accents, but one of them isn't able to pronounce his own name properly (nor are the other voice actors for that matter). Some of the voice actors are better than others at pronouncing "foreign" words (i.e. non-English). A little bit more attention to QA and choosing the right voice actors for the characters would have gone a long way here.

There's also a little bit too much running around at times for my taste, but not enough to get boring. There's far worse in other adventure games, and at least there's not much of the generic "Take this item to location A" or "Talk to character B halfway across the game map" to contend with.

The environment the game takes place in is concise and well designed, evoking a suitable atmosphere. The puzzles are - for the most part - logical enough to solve. There were one or two that ended up being tedious and so I cheated using online walkthroughs. This was more a case of knowing what the solution ought to be, but not understanding how the game wants me to perform that solution, or the game expecting you to reference too many bits of information in different places. Examples include having to read a book and then using the information from that book to enter details on another screen (it would be nice if the information from the book was still visible!) or needing to visit a bunch of locations scattered about a level in a particular order - you know what the order is, but it's all too easy to forget which location is where and end up running around in circles. I don't want to reveal the actual puzzles here, but again this is maybe something that QA could have caught and streamlined so you aren't wasting as much time fighting the game rather than playing it.

If you're willing to forgive those rough edges, there's an enjoyable experience to be had that will also transport you to a different and interesting world. And maybe some of the art and events referenced in the story will get the one or other of you to go and read up on them, which is always a great thing. I definitely got my money's worth, so it's a solid thumbs up from me.

But if there's a sequel, I'd hope that the minor flaws would be addressed, as they would make for a more seamless experience - in particular getting believable voice actors for the French characters would go a long way!

There's a lot of potential here, but there are also numerous bugs that mean I can't recommend the game in its current incarnation. From what I can tell from the forums here and on the dev's website, he has made nothing more than token gestures promising to provide fixes. However, since announcing imminent fixes many moons ago, he seems to have absconded and started working on another project instead. When it comes to this game, the dev is conspicuous by his absence.

Given that the game isn't likely to be fixed, I would suggest that you stay clear rather than rewarding that kind of attitude and business practice. While there are some workarounds suggested for some for the bugs, such as abandoning a province and then recapturing it the same turn to stop the economy tanking, fixing the bug would be a much better approach. There's also no guarantee you won't be hit by other game-breaking bugs for which there is no workaround.

So in the absence of any hope of these bugs (that seem to affect lots of players) being fixed, I'd suggest you stay away, and treat any subsequent releases by the same dev with caution. Yes, it's a one-man show, so some leeway is fine. No one expects overnight fixes. But a certain amount of pride in one's work and a desire to deliver quality should be the foundation of any software product.

The reviews are generally positive, and that's because there's a great game here waiting to get out. It's a shame seeing it being left to rot in a semi-finished state. And while 5 smackeroos isn't a particularly painful amount to write off, you can still vote with your wallet and say no to dodgy devs who abscond leaving behind a half-finished game.

The UI is a complete mess, I didn't even finish the tutorial. Trying too hard to be hardcore for its own good. If you're going to make the UI that obtuse, make a better tutorial. But why make the UI that obtuse in the first place, when we've got 30+ years of tradition to build upon?

Social club required even for single player; GTA online is no fun as a noob. Whoever thought that being blown up constantly by players 100+ levels higher than you in a fighter jet is fun, while you are armed with a pistol and SMG and can't defend yourself is, to but it bluntly, an idiot.

The single player is great, it's a shame about the money grab that is GTA online, and the game designers would be well advised to prioritise making the online game fun for new players too.