Post
Sun Mar 12, 2017 8:31 am
#74
by Zanteogo
I just finished my first play through of Tides of Numenara. (I didn't play it during early access, seemed silly to play a partly complete story based game before it was finished)
Overall, I liked the game.
It's certainly a niche game. You have to like reading, as in full length novels type reading. Combat and character building took a massive back seat. If you play these games to level up, collect loot, and test your characters in combat, pass this game. You won't like it.
It kept the original Torment "feel". Everything is strange, weird and alien. It takes some time to get the "feel" of this strange universe. The game eases you into it by taking a page out of the original Torment, your character starts with no memory. Everything is just as strange and new to your character as it is to the player. The universe is complex, and I actually caught the game breaking it's own internal consistency at least twice. For example your character is pretty much immortal (not much of a spoiler, you find this out 2 minutes into the game), as well as other characters who belong to your characters "race", only extreme things can actually kill them, however, the game forgets about this fact at least once. (not to the main character)
One page it didn't take from the original was the lack of wacky party members. You got some crazy extreme ones in the original, (a floating scull, a succubus, a man who burns forever..) Nothing like this here. In fact I found them to be "ok". The exception to this would be Rhin. Though she is a normal human, her character differs enough the she breaks the mold from the rest. Not that the other characters you take on are all boring and dull. They all have backstories and little mysteries attached to them.
The game can be progressed in various ways. You can avoid 75% of the combat with your choices, character skills, and some luck. When you are actually in combat the in game system is passible for certain. One thing that bothered me with combat was there was no in game explanation as to what all the damage types did. Combat was also very buggy. Certain functions just stop working and cannot be access for no in game reason and random times. This bringing me to my next point...
BUGS!!! Combat had the most of them, (stealth for example, sometimes I would not be able to select it, sometimes the menu would come up, I would have a good percentage of success, but the "ok" button would not work) If there was an in game reason for this I had no idea why it didn't work. Other abilities seemed to be prone to this. Twice the game got "stuck" on the enemies turn. A couple times I would somehow break the combat rules and do something not allowed that usually got my character stuck and unable to end their turn. Outside of combat the game gave me issues saving, sometimes it just would not allow me to create a new save file. (thankfully "quick save" always seemed to work) Sometimes I would be unable to select anything for some reason. The only way to fix this was to save and reload. Another frustrating bug was if you look at something then shortly afterwards move to a new area, the window giving feedback gets stuck on your screen. The only way to fix this is to go back and look at the same object and allow the window to close on it's own. Had the game lock up randomly at least 5 times.
One thing I have to bring up, the game creators have a video showing a slice of the game. In this slice they show pretty much every NPC spoken to using actual spoken lines. The game has hardly any spoken lines at all when you actually play it. Worse still, once you arrive at the same slice of the game, none of the characters who spoke in the video speak any of the same lines, (it's all just text reading). I'm not sure what's up with that. I don't mind reading everything, but I don't like being tricked into thinking the game has certain features it does not.
To summarize; if you liked the original Torment, you will like this. If you like reading/story heavy RPGs, you will like this.
My Signature