This week your intrepid heroes manage resources, click on boxes, and search for RN Gesus.
Game: Dead Age stupid monkey RNG
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/363930/
Devel: Silent Dreams
Engine: Unity
Price:14.99 / CDN 16.99
Wazzat: Survive a zombie outbreak with “Final Fantasy”-like turn-based combat and permanent death. Manage survivors, craft materials, and make difficult decisions. Defend your camp against hordes of the undead to prevail in this non-linear rogue-lite (comparable to FTL). Innovative Indie Survival-RPG!
Disclosure: They sent us keys
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
V-
- Unity scream of nope -1 Chair.
- Run 60ish on 11.
J-
- The game can’t make up it’s mind about underrunning or not
P-
- Unity screen of nope: -1 chair
- Get to the main menu and the first thing I hear is static, opened pavucontrol and I see the game audio stream flickering in and out. Buffer Underruns! You know what means: PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 %command% and -1 chair.
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Shiny / Sounds
V-
- Why for the love of FK and all did you do this in 3D?
- The 2D art is passable but the 3D bits look like the side project of a teeager who has a mild interest in art / design.
- Seriously, even the rigging on the zombies is shite.
- Yeah, I know you were going for some humour but all you did was add to the fugly.
- You should have went mull-metal Darkest Dungeon.
- If this thing had sounds I didn’t notice.
J-
- Oh god the 3D models really stand out, and not in a good way
- It really does clash with the aesthetic of the combat system
- 3D final fantasy style games have moved away from the “dudes in a column” configuration and typically leverage the 3D camera to show a more dynamic scene
- Also, what’s with all the zombies just derping around in the background
- Sounds are definitely there.
P-
- First impressions with this game didn’t exactly sell it.
- The 3D models look like what you’d get from a $20 pack off of the Unity Asset Store.
- The combat animations are simple but different attacks all have different animations to some degree and they’re immediately recognizable after just a few rounds. So I guess that’s a positive.
- Sounds, though, are overly simplistic and obnoxiously loud.
- And that is if you can hear them, because if you don’t set that PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC to 60, they’re just a garbled, static-y mess.
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Control
V-
- Point-and-click.
- The combat menu is wicked simple.
- The resource management menu is a bit on the cluttered side.
J-
P-
Total-
FUN
V-
- It’s boring, Brad.
- All you do is fight zombies and buy / sell shite.
- And the fighting is the most generic click-and-wait one swing thing i’ve ever seen.
- I mean, you know if you can win the fight just by looking at whatever the RZG spits out.
- Then all you are left with is a resource management game that is passable at best.
- 477 positive reviews and 471 purchases is fishy as all hell.
J-
- I get what they’re trying to do, but I don’t think it really works
- The massive number of hit points your characters have in comparison with the enemy threw me off at first, but it’s how the game manages to pace itself.
- Still, I feel turn based final fantasy style combat isn’t the best match for zombie apocalypse
- The FTL influence is very clear, but I feel they missed a bit of the point
- Resources aren’t all that scarce in FTL. You’re guaranteed at least one shop, and there are other events that can give you resources
- Plus, one of the cool things about FTL is the exploration, which this game has none of. Just jump from encounter to encounter
- Resources here are uncommon (makes sense, zombie apocalypse and all), but
- It does what it can to emulate the conditions of zombie apocalypse in a turn based context, and it sort of works. It’s just not very fun
- Two games that do this a lot better are Organ Trail and Death Road to Canada. Play those instead
P-
- Honestly, the presentation was so bad I didn’t even feel like this game could do anything to change my opinion.
- But, as I keep saying, I’ll take a game which looks like complete ass and so long as the base mechanics are sound, chances are I’ll find something to enjoy and I’ll be damned!
- I did find something to enjoy with Dead Age.
- They say it’s got roguelite elements like you’d see in FTL but I think I can find an even better comparison.
- Dead Age is what This War of Mine would be if you put zombies in it and you don’t tell me that the people I was playing guardian angel for were miserable, all the goddamn time.
- This War of Mine was one of those games that, besides the already oppressive and overbearing atmosphere, would rather tell me people were feeling sad, or hungry, or cold, or miserable, than it did making me care about those “poor widdle people”.
- People in Dead Age are badass!
- Disproportionate Unity stock assets but badass, nonetheless.
- Even if the models aren’t store-bought, the default Unity shader configs make a lot of games look very similar.
- But Dead Age manages to show us that even with stock assets and default shader configs, so long as you make the mechanics of your game sound, players will find something to like about it.
- And while I didn’t hate the turn-based combat, the micro-management crap that you have to do while in camp is what killed it for me.
- Your character is rescued from the zombies and the moment he gets to camp with the complete strangers he is immediately put in charge, that right there threw any and all willing suspension of disbelief I had right out the window, and into a zombie’s ass!
Total-
Final –
