A fun game thats absolutely *wrecked* to the seabed with horrible camera and controls. Which is a shame, because the concept of the game takes a lot of the old Pulp Dime novels and feels right in the world of The Mummy, Phantom or The Shadow. Visually its even has its own tone with a slight comic book look to the character designs, each being an archetype of the dime novel hero. Character abilities tie together well, and the Tarot deck cards work in interesting ways to bring more synergy to your squad to better fight the enemy. Hell, even the story of Good VS Evil, while a rethread of the usual tale, is interesting and fun but this is where the fun part ends.
What it tries to be, is an X-Com game. What it is, is a corpse wearing the torn, bruised skin of an X-Com game after gutting it in a side alley.
Let me explain the two *main* issues it has:
The Camera- Absolutely horrible controls in which you cannot zoom in or out, pivot or change the angle (except rotate, only to get a building or terrain stuck in front of it so you cant see anything) but are stuck far to close to your characters to really plan ahead. A "Recon" camera is available that this time actually detaches from following your squad and lets you roam the map freely, albeit extremely slowly too which makes it utterly useless in the end. The camera is also linked to your characters, meaning that you cant move the camera on its own as it will ALSO move your characters along. This makes it even more frustrating when the camera is so close to your team and blocked by all the terrain of the levels (and there's a lot of it since it uses the X-Com formula of chest-high and tall walls as a Cover mechanic) that it can become genuinely a camera carousel to find the right angle to see where you're even going...or at least desperately TRYING to.
The Controls- I dont understand how its possible to mess up a control scheme THIS badly. Your characters are *mostly* responsive, when they arent busy walking right into enemies, hoping over terrain instead of hiding, walking in a line all together like they're in a Scooby Doo episode or just straight up standing in the same spot when you're trying to move them. Add this the camera tie-down and youre basically trying to steer a cruise ♥♥♥♥ on dry land. You can move your squad "grouped" or "ungrouped", meaning that they either follow your selected "lead" character, or you move them independently. However, even this is a mess because if you have one character selected and say send them somewhere then press TAB to switch to the next one, the previous character will simply stop dead in their tracks, no matter how far they've gone. They could stop in cover, in front of a patrol or simple 2 steps away from their starting position. The problem with this is, the game gives you the option to move covertly or go into combat instantly. Sounds great on paper, except when it becomes nigh impossible to actually plan an ambush because none of the characters are actually able to follow simple movement points. Now, speaking of cover. This barely works either as well, as i've mentioned earlier. You'd think that making a simple grid-base system would be easy right (it worked in Shadowrun after all?) where you click a grid square behind cover and your characters moves to it. Ha ha no, they instead will gladly run up to it, vault right over it in front of guards and trigger combat despite the fact that you CLEARLY clicked behind the cover, out of sight.
Its mindblowing that such basic, simple mechanics can be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ this hard into the abyss that it would make the entire thing near-unplayable. Im currently trying to force through just because i know there's a good game behind it, but the closest i can compare it to is trying to feed your cat their medicine. Its a struggle, even if it comes with good intentions.
If you want to risk it, PLEASE do yourself a favor and get in on the deepest sale possible so at least the sting of it wont hurt as much as full price.
I've put a few more hours into it, trying to like it but just no. Between the insanely high difficulty skip where you move from 3-5 to relatively easy enemies to waves of 15+ of them, half of which are immune to your combat effects (like fire or shock or even stress), the 3 Doomsday clocks advancing so fast that you're basically stuck spending more time trying to keep them in check via side missions VS the main ones, the game straight up just messing up your save files, there's just no saving it. I WANTED to like this game, i really did, but the list of negatives outweigh the positives.
