LinuxGameCast Reviews – Torn Tales

Your intrepid heroes click on enemies, get killed to death, and opt-out. Torn Tales faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Torn Tales
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/388960/Torn_Tales/
Devel: Twist Play
Engine: Unity
Price: 12.99 / CDN 13.99

Wazzat: Lead your party of 3 heroes on their quest to repair the torn pages of folklore. Evil has destroyed the tales you love. Hack monsters and slash enemies throughout the Torn Tales in this real time squad based RPG.

Disclosure: They sent us keys.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Not the biggest fan of op-out anonymized statistics.

J-

P-

You can tell it’s Unity because it always spawns on the wrong screen and just outright refuses to remember the resolution is supposed to be 1920×1080 and not 2560×1080

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Not the worst jaggies i’ve ever seen but FFS give me some anti aliasing options.
It’s well done programmer art,take from that what you will.
The loading screen is a special blend of WTF.
- Green Arrow and Young Sanchez look alright but Snowflame, wow… what is wrong with your face-organ.
It has sounds, this I can confirm, however I put on the soundtrack from Emerald City, a fine show that was unjustly canceled by the ass-banjos at NBC.

J-

This game looks like baldur’s gate done in unity
Torment and Pillars get a pass on this, because they’re explicitly homages to the infinity engine
Here, it’s just kinda meh
There are some sounds. Not good enough to warrant any real attention
Oh my god I don’t care about the book reading stuff.

P-

You do get antialiasing but you can’t pick it since it’s tied to the presets, and it doesn’t work.
You can get some MSAA and or SSAA if you add __GL_FSAA_MODE=<number> %command% to the game’s advanced launch options on Steam.
- nvidia-settings –query=fsaa –verbose will let you know what <number> to put in.
But lack of AA is the least of this game’s problems when it comes to aesthetics.
The sound effects can be summed up into grunts and jingles.
The background music is the same 15 second loop repeated ad nauseum
The effect you get as the rest of the map pops in was supposed to look like someone was drawing it in a book. What it does look like is that the wireframe pops in before the textures do.
Also, what do the in-game proper aesthetics add to the narrative when the whole plot is told in still cutscenes?

Total-

Control

V-

Everything “works” but that’s really stretching the definition.
I’ve lost track of how many times the AI has flipped out after I gave it an order.
Never really feel in control, it’s more like issuing suggestions.

J-

You click things and occasionally press 1-3 or qwer
Other things then happen, sometimes how you direct them to, other times no
Camera rotation only works if you don’t have the map up

P-

Controlling a character is pointless.
I wish the game would give me an option to unselect all characters in combat and just let them do the fighting.
Because it seems when I have direct control of a character, at one point it just stands there gormlessly doing fuck and all while the AI controlled ones automatically readjust their targetting to the next enemy over.
I don’t feel like I’m control of that character, I feel like I’m actively cockblocking it.
That may also be because the combat has no impact to it.
Dr. Jekyll so far has only transformed into Mr. Hyde right at the end of combat, so that’s pointless.
And the moment you start the game, you’re bombarded with percentages and other MOBA-like terms and item stats which feel so out of place it’s not even pretty.

Total-

FUN

V-

Short and simple, here we go.
Play as one character with three bodies.
Yes, that controls about as well as you might imagine.
Learn the leveling and skills system that clearly had more thought put it in than the rest of the game.
Click on enemies and make some tea since the AI will nope them without your input.
Watch the aforementioned AI get stuck in new and interesting places.
Get extremely bored and prey for a unrecoverable bug that will prevent you playing the game any further.
Get dumped into the first boss battle equipped with all the skills I just mentioned.
Die, die, DIE.
The difficulty curve in Torn Tales resembles a hockey stick with half the business end cut off.
You put me on cruise control for the first 45 minutes and expect me to get good at the drop of a hat?
Yeah, no.
I spent 20 minutes learning how to nope the Big Bad Wolf only to FK right off.
Unlike Hollow Knight from last week I didn’t have the slightest desire to revisit it.
Why? Because this is generic RPG indie action adventure, the game.
And if we’re being honest, it does a shite job of pulling that off.

J-

There’s really not that much variety in this game
The levels are all labyrinthine, but unlike hollow knight where it was ultimately all connected, this is a straight line with a few false leads dropped here or there
Sure, sometimes it’s a treasure chest, but most of the items suck, and you only get 3 slots
Beyond that, click, wait, occasionally kite if the enemy blows up when they die. Repeat
Sometimes you get overwhelmed and need to pick a different lead
Hyde is by far the most fun, but you gotta load up on abilities that boost his blood toxicity, otherwise he’s pretty useless, being the only character without a cheap ranged attack
Storywise, it makes zero sense either
What do a medieval folk hero, a scottish science fiction character, and the subject of an 1800s german fairy tale have to do with each other?
Well, they’re all in books, and all part of the public domain. Beyond that, I don’t really get what this game is going for
All in all, I felt the game was kind of brainless, and not in a good way
If I can pay half attention to your game while watching youtube videos, I’ve either spent far too much time playing it, or I’m not being engaged
This is a case of the latter

P-

It’s hard to find a game that manages to do everything wrong.
It always starts on the wrong monitor. In-game Anti-Aliasing doesn’t work.
The in-game visuals look horrible, the sound is annoying and repetitive.
The story is told completely separate from gameplay in non-interactive cutscenes, which I don’t think I need to remind everyone how bad that is when we’re talking about an interactive medium.
Character art for Dr. Jekyll and Robin Hood look alright, Snow White and Mr. Hyde on the other hand look like they were beaten with several iterations of the ugly stick.
The combat, read: the only thing you do in this game, is either piss easy or fuck you, because fuck you hard and has absolutely no meat to it.
And even though the levels seem to have forks on the road, they are the laziest possible way to have branching paths in level design.
Last week I talked about negative space in level design, in broad strokes that is the dead ends when you’re trying to navigate a labyrinth.
But in videogames, that can also be applied to entire areas which while not exactly dead ends, they serve no mechanical purpose at that point or ever.
There are only ever 2 options in those branches, you either find a dead end, which may or may not have a chest, or you find the way to progress.
That is elementary school grade level design.
It’s really hard to get any and every thing that could save your videogame wrong, yet here we are.