L.G.C. |Reviews| — MASSIVE CHALICE

This week your intrepid heroes wait their turn, point-and-click, and suffer another overly ambitious project from Double Fine that fails to deliver. MASSIVE CHALICE faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Massive Chalice
Webzone: http://www.massivechalice.com/
Devel: Double Fine
Engine: Buddha
Price: US$/€ 19.99 – CAD$ 21.99

Wazzat: MASSIVE CHALICE is a tactical strategy game set on an epic timeline from Double Fine Productions. As the Immortal Ruler of the nation, you’ll take command of its heroes, forge heroic marriages to strengthen your Bloodlines, and battle a mysterious enemy known as the Cadence in a 300 year war.

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CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Everything worked ..unfortunately

J-

P-

When a tactics game has trouble maintaining 60 FPS on a 970 Strix, FX 8370E at 4GHz and 2 Samsung EVO in YOL0 RAID, you know there’s something wrong with the engine.
- Which since it’s the same as The Cave, Brutal Legend, Stacking, etc. it makes me wonder…
Fortunately, this is a turn-based tactics game, so as long as it’s not jerking around below 30 FerPS, it’s all good.

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Shiny / Sounds

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At 3840×2160 it manages to hold a steady 30FERPS using standard AA
Enabling SSAA even at 2X will curb-check that to 15.
Like most DoubleFine games the colour palette consists of multiple shades of brown with a peppering of bright reds and blues pastels.
I’m not a huge fan of the overall art style.
The best way I can think to describe it is 3D Broken Age with a low poly count.
As expected, the voice acting is impeccable.
Unfortunately we have DoubleFine Humour.
Think regular humour, except forced, and cringeworthy.

J-

It’s a double fine game, so the voicework is great as ALWAYS
The Visuals are typical of Double fine’s house style. I have no problem with it
Yeah, anything beyond SSAA kills performance

P-

There’s a reasonable amount of voice acting, but when you get half-way through the game it’ll get a bit repetitious.
The aforementioned Double Fine humour is there, for whatever that’s worth.
The graphics will glitch out if you’re playing the game fullscreen and Alt-Tab out, though.

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Control

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It’s point-and-click (shocker) so you point, and click.
My only beef-organ is the lack of free-range camera rotation.

J-

Point and click, Click and point

P-

You click and clicky things happen.
There are supposedly hotkeys for specific actions set to EFQR but, for some reason, it doesn’t recognize those if I hit the buttons on my mouse which I have mapped to those same keys.
It’s the first Linux game I’ve tried with this mouse to outright refuse to recognize ANY of them.
Even the Elder Scrolls Online through WINE recognizes them, what the hell?

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FUN?

V-

You can’t mix Double Fine casual with TBS.
Well, you can, but you’ll end up with this.
In all fairness I loathe TBS and this did nothing to change that.
I’m not keeping a spreadsheet to track who is shagging who.
Another overly ambitious project from Double Fine that failed to deliver.

J-

The combat is the game’s strong suit, but it can get fairly repeatative at times
I will give the game this: Playing for an hour feels like playing for about 20 minutes. You can get your money’s worth out of this game pretty easily
The breeding mechanic is really where it falls flat. For such a crucial part of the game, they really don’t go into it too much
And I breed competitive pokemon.
By no means a terrible game, just Meh. Hence two chairs

P-

My favorite part of both this game and XCom is the combat
The micro-management and bullshittery you do in between missions never really appealed to me.
This game, seems to place an even heavier focus on the bullshittery in-between than the combat.
And the combat is seems to be… lacking somewhat.
Maybe because it’s not as hard as XCom’s, or maybe because they spent most of their time on the “fucking by the numbers” simulator and combat was a second thought
I suppose that if XCom was a solid 4 for the fun, this one should get 3 chairs!
But it doesn’t.
I played all the way through the game today and that final mission is just stupid.
“Oh, we need to call the cadence here to set off a chain reaction!”
What that means is they’ll throw you in the middle of a room with no cover and a shitton of monsters and say “Have at, bitch!”
The game all the way up to that point was… competent.

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Final –