Gametrodon

Category: Video Games

  • Grim Dawn

    Grim Dawn is an ARPG that is probably intended to be in the vein of Diablo 2. I honestly don’t know. I never played Diablo 2.

    What I do know is that after 11 hours, 17 deaths, and one kill on the final boss, I do not recommend it. In fact, I actively loathe Grim Dawn. I have a lot of problems with the game, but upon reflection, I think they break down to two large gripes.

    The Good Bits

    Before I devote a large amount of time to eviscerating every other aspect of this game, I’d like to take a moment to say some nice things about Grim Dawn. Don’t worry, it won’t be long, because there aren’t very many.

    I like how the game can run without an internet connection. If the apocalypse happens and I happen to have Grim Dawn installed, I’d have a reason to kidnap people to run in a giant hamster wheel and charge my computer.

    I like that the game has auto-pickup for certain types of loot, like currency and certain crafting items. Not having to click every time I want to grab something is nice.

    Fundamental Problems

    Grim Dawn has two fundamental problems as an ARPG. Every other issue I have with the game is either the result of these problems, or caused by them, and they are as follows:

    1. Movement is slow.
    2. Skills are fundamentally uninteresting.

    Movement speed in Grim Dawn is really slow. Like, incredibly slow. One of the few really interesting items I found in my 11 hours was a pair of boots that gave 17% movement speed. They also had the downside that if you got hit, you lost 20% movement speed. I ended the game with a pair of drawback free 11% movement speed boots, and 6% buff. The end result is that the game feels incredibly slow.

    This matters because of all the problems that spiral out of it. Every quest is a fetch or kill quest that requires you to go out, find something, and then teleport back home to turn it in, so you’re going to spend a lot of time walking around.

    Also, in terms of finding things, the maps are large, confusing, and generally janky messes. Sometimes if you click somewhere, you will be autopathed to where you need to go! Sometimes, you will not.

    A fully zoomed out view of Blood Groves.

    Maps cannot be overlaid on top of the game screen unlike in many other ARPG’s, adding to the difficultly of exploration. Instead, you’ll have to constantly open the map and check your location, or leave it open the middle of screen.

    Finally, the GUI isn’t modifiable. Meaning that if you play on an Ultrawide, some HUD elements like pet health will be the in VERY far corner of the screen, but the map can’t be moved around and will always sit dead center.

    None of this would be as big a problem, though, if you could move faster than molasses.

    There’s also one other thing that prevents fast movement. Unlike Path of Exile or Diablo 3, there are no skills that offer mobility or movement in the base game.

    This brings us to the other big thing that Grim Dawn doesn’t have: fun skills.

    I wanted to try to make a summoner build, as I usually play Necromancers in ARPG’s. I do this so I can live out my deepest, darkest fantasy: being in upper management. I come up with high level strategic objectives (murder people for loot) and delegate responsibilities to my HMZ (highly mobile zombies) to fulfill them.

    So how did that work in Grim Dawn? Pretty unimpressively.

    I got through Grim Dawn on Veteran Normal difficulty using a total of 7 skills. Skills 1-3 summoned pets, but only one pet each, so I would just cast them each time my other pets died. Skill 4 was an aura, so I would toggle it on and forget about it. Skill 5 was a temporary buff, that I would just activate every 30 seconds or so, and skill 6 was a small orb that did poison in an AOE. Skill 7 was a swarming dot/right click skill.

    But for those who are counting, there are only 2 skills I would use actively: the poison orb, and the buff. And only one of those had to be aimed.

    By the end of the game, my character was less entertaining and satisfying to play than pretty much any Dota 2 hero or any build I’ve done in PoE. The skills just felt bad.

    This led to a bunch of my other problems. Trying to find specific key locations or waypoints when you have to slog through tons of bad combat is annoying. Every boss fight being the same “poke, walk away, poke” for 3 minutes is annoying and boring. Speaking of which: what’s up with every boss fight (except 2) just being a dude in armor?

    Also, this is the first ARPG I’ve ever played where I was enviously looking at the NPC’s and going “Wow, that skill seems fun, or at least more useful. Wish I could use that!”

    Some Other Nitpicks

    These are all minor, and frankly, they’re all the sorts of things that I would overlook if I had fun with the game. But I didn’t, so let’s complain!

    Nobody has ever enjoyed back tracking to turn in quests. Lost Ark solved this for ARPG’s, and the solution very simple. I pickup the quest in Area A, Go to Area B, and when I finish, I turn in at Area C, the area I’m going to next. Stop making me backtrack.

    Also, the quests!

    These were all the quests I had unfinished by the end of the game.

    I think that Grim Dawn is trying to do a thing where you have to really read the dialogue of each quest, and then carefully do it. This would be interesting if quests were ever anything more than “Kill the Dude” or “Find The Obtusely Hidden Thing.” But it means that if you don’t remember exactly what that quest giver said, good luck. Also the rewards are pretty shit, and you can’t hide individual quests on the UI.

    By the final 75% of the game, I just stopped picking them up all together, mostly because I didn’t care about these people or the story.

    Which brings us to the story. I think the story of Grim Dawn is trying to be all spooky and grimdark. It mostly fails. There’s only so many times a poor survivor can be all “Please, find my family/pet/Jays” and then you get there and they’re killed/eaten/creased before I stop caring.

    Also, there’s some sort of “Actions have consequences” system, but I want to stress something: I don’t know who gives a shit about actions/morality in an ARPG. Presumably the same person who thought I’d read all that quest text. Most ARPG players I know would kill every NPC in the starting zone for a 5% item quantity boost. 5% exp boost? You bet your ass I’m decking Deckard Cain.

    The story is also unsatisfying! You start out fighting monster group A, and then it turns out that monster group B is also here, and you have to stop their evil plans. And then you fail, and have to kill their resurrected god instead. So you do, but then the world is still shit. PoE didn’t have the greatest story in the world, but at least after you completed the story mode, there was a single map where everyone throws a great big party. (Also, Kitava’s head goes in the middle of table like a gorey centerpiece, which I’ve always enjoyed.)

    Also, the enemies are boring. There are like 5 of them, and most of the bosses are just dude in armor, or a tentacle thing. There’s a whole section near the end of the game where you find a bunch of ruined pre-industrial tank things that have been tipped over and destroyed. For a moment you’ll be like “Oh, are we gonna have to fight one of those? Are we gonna ride one of those?” No, no we’re not. They’re just there to build ambiance.

    In Conclusion

    Back when I played PoE, sometimes after grinding for several hours, or trying to power through the game’s campaign to get to the rest of the game, I would reach a sort of fugue state. I would get tired, drained, lose interest, and feel like my brain was melting out of my ears.

    Grim Dawn managed to make feel like this before the first boss.

    There were moments of amusement, or interest, but they were few and far between. And they were massively outweighed by the thoughts of “I could be playing PoE/D3/Don’t Die, Collect Loot instead of this.”

    I am $12 poorer, and have 12 hours less life, but you dear reader need not make my mistake.

    Grim Dawn is 50% off on Steam at time of writing, but you can save even more money by not buying it.

    PS: It’s possible that some of the DLC solves the issues I have with this game. To which I say, if it makes the game not garbage, maybe just include it in the actual game.

  • Treasure And Truth – A Dota 2 Mod

    Diablo 4 is out! So long as you’re willing to pay $20 plus the $70 price tag to Blizzard. Blizzard, a company that’s been notable for an unending parade of scandals related to sexual assault and employee mistreatment.

    Unfun Fact! Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick threatened over voicemail to kill his personal assistant! But don’t worry, it was settled out of court. I’m sure it was a fair and reasonable settlement, as there’s never been a power imbalance between an employee and their multi-millionaire boss.

    Any, where was I? Oh, yes. You could buy Diablo 4, a game that despite costing $70 on release already has a cash shop, and season battle pass.

    Or instead of supporting the shambling corpse of a once-loved company whose external face might have always been a lie, you could join me in Treasure and Truth.

    Treasure and Truth is a mod for Dota 2. Like Diablo 4, it’s an ARPG, and unfortunately also like Diablo 4, it also has a cash shop, but I’ll get to that part in a bit. Unlike Diablo 4, it’s free!

    This is a mod.

    Also, I’m going to say some rude things about Treasure and Truth in this review, but I am 100% using the game as Diablo withdrawal methadone at the moment. Ultimately, I do recommend playing. If nothing else, it’s an incredible demonstration of both the potential, and some of the drawbacks of a Dota 2 mod.

    Core Gameplay

    Treasure and Truth is an action role playing game, which is to say it has no roleplaying, and some action. And since it’s a mod for Dota 2, the standard Dota 2 mechanics and controls mostly apply. It’s top down and semi-isometric.

    It’s also Chinese. This is relevant for a number of reasons, but most importantly because of the translation. Or lack of thereof.

    I’m not sure what “White Character” means here. I’m almost positive it’s not a buff that only applies if you’re Caucasian.

    The game is translated into English, but not all of it, and not always correctly. Some parts are fully translated and make sense. Some parts are translated but not localized. And as a result you end up fighting “Pliers of the Hole,” which is probably supposed to be something like “Jaws of the Abyss.”

    Not exactly the most intimidating enemy.

    And sometimes, it’s very important when it turns out that #wings2_start_system is supposed to be text telling you how to unlock an entire alternate end-game power system for heavily scaling certain stats.

    But anyway: on to core gameplay! There are kinda three modes in Treasure and Truth, but two are the same, so we’re going to cover them as one thing.

    The two modes are story and key mode. All this really boils down to is that you go into a big non-changing map, kill monsters until a boss portal opens up, and kill that boss. Rinse and repeat three times, and you’ve cleared the level.

    In story mode, enemies give you loot. In the key mode, there’s a timer, and the quality and amount of loot scales with how fast you can finish. There are five base levels, and in classic ARPG style, once you finish a set of them, you unlock the next difficulty.

    The other mode is raids.

    Raids are a test of your patience, and your ability to find 2-4 other human beings who are capable of understanding concepts like what a circle is, and that sometimes in order to win, you need to stop doing damage for a bit.

    Sarcasm and my sanity aside, raids are the most interesting mode, as they actively require paying attention, and knowing certain mechanics. They are also kind of janky, and unlike the other modes, don’t scale stats with player count, so you really need other people to work with.

    Heart of the Game

    At its core, Treasure and Truth is a gear chase game about making number go up. There are a bunch of systems for doing this, but they all contribute to the same end result. Collecting sets of gear will activate passives, that make numbers go up. Upgrading and collecting pets will make your numbers go up. Clearing the raid will drop unique gear, which as long as another party member who isn’t even of the right class doesn’t fucking “need” it, will make numbers go up.

    Look at these numbers.

    And collecting the artifacts from the Gacha will make numbers go up. So let’s go back to that monetization for a moment.

    Money, Money, Money*

    Treasure and Truth has a cash shop. It also has a set of resource systems that I’ll save a lot time by summarizing, “You can’t directly pay to win, but you can buy upgrade materials and items that you would otherwise have to farm, in order to skip grinding.” In addition, you can also buy certain in-game market currency with a system that works the same way as a WoW token.

    There are also paid supporter roles that grant in-game buffs, a Gacha for rolling artifacts, and yes, and a paid Battlepass.

    You might be wondering why I’m giving Treasure and Truth less shit for this when I opened by ripping Diablo 4 for doing it. Well, for starters, Treasure and Truth isn’t $70.

    I might have a bit of a double standard here, but implementing an entire cash shop is something I find impressive when done as part of a mod, and scummy when done as part of full priced retail game. The shitty monetization also isn’t relevant until late game, which I’d imagine most people might not even reach.

    In Conclusion

    If nothing else, I find Treasure and Truth fascinating as a project. It feels incredibly high effort for a mod on top of someone else’s game, and it’s also incredibly amusing to me as a sort of proto-MMO. As an example of this, one of the current raids has an entire set of mechanics that the community has discovered a way to skip, and this hasn’t been patched.

    It’s not a lifestyle game, or even something I can see playing long term, but it’s what I wanted in terms of something I can just turn off my brain and play. And I have had some really entertaining experiences guiding people through raids, and talking with other players trying to understand how the hell certain systems work because they’re not translated properly.

    Oh, and writing a set of AHK macros to farm points in the AFK mode.

    If you want to play Truth and Treasure, you’ll have to start by downloading Dota 2, then you’ll want to go install this mod from the community.

    Ultimately what I’ve really gotten out of Truth and Treasure is a sense of wonder and discovery that I enjoy. There are no guides to the raids. There aren’t any perfect builds. There is no checklist, or speed run of someone who got the game 4 days early reaching level cap before people who pre-ordered could play it.

    There is a poorly moderated Discord, untranslated patch notes, and esoteric systems that make no sense, and occasionally might break. And frankly, I love that sort of shit.

    Also, the cash shop. Which I don’t love.

    Postscript Ramblings

    I’ve seen a bunch of discussions on Reddit about pay-to-win MMOs are more common in Korea and China due to cultural differences. There does seem to be a pattern of pay-to-win in games that get ported from those regions. Lost Ark, Black Desert, and MapleStory are all great examples of this. But my only source for this is people saying shit on Reddit, so it’s entirely possible this is just some gamer orientalism. If it is true, Treasure and Truth definitely falls into this pattern with its monetization tactics.

    Also, while we’re on the subject of crackpot theories involving China, I really wonder if Treasure and Truth was developed as a mod (as opposed to a standalone game) in order to get around the video game licensing/distribution/censorship issues in China. After all, if you can’t release your own game, co-opting someone else’s game into providing your infrastructure and underlying matchmaking and everything is really clever, and might explain why Treasure and Truth exists as a mod in the first place.

  • Redfall

    Redfall is the newest game from Arkane Studios, best known for Prey and Dishonored. It’s their attempt at making a horde shooter/looter shooter, and I have thoughts about it.

    Lmao got em.

    They are “This is terrible,” and, “Why does this exist?” If you told me Redfall came out 10 years ago, I would have believed you.

    The first bad sign is the gunplay. It is not great. The aiming is tight, but the feedback from shooting and recoil is awful. Every enemy feels like a bullet sponge. Only two weapons feel right: the shotgun and sniper rifle. And both of those require headshots. While sloppy guns might be okay in other types of games, this is a horde shooter… it relies on its gunplay.

    In addition, there’s apparently no party scaling. So regardless of if you want to play in “single player” where you can’t pause, or with an actual team, it’s the same experience. In fact, you can never pause the game, so I hope nothing ever happens while you’re playing that might interrupt you, or you’ll die.

    The graphics are okay, and have a cartoony aesthetic, but the movement animations are all the same. Each special type of vampire feels pretty much the same.

    For example there’s one called Angler. Much like L4D’s Smoker, they have a grapple to reel you in with. But as far as I can tell, you they don’t have an obvious tell or signal. The ability is on a 20 second cooldown, and you need to just dodge it based on the timing, and circle strafe.

    Redfall could be redeemed by its story, but even after just seeing the opening, I have low hopes. The opening is incredibly stupid. The game opens with two vampires alive in front of the player character. The player has no guns or anything, and can only watch as the vampires turn another unlucky human into a buffet. Suddenly, one of the vampires notices you’re alive, and turns to deal with you.

    Then the most predictable thing to happen in the history the earth, happens. The thing that happens every day, and will happen every day for 7 million years after I die occurs: the sun the comes up.

    Which makes the vampires run away. Not die or anything. Just… run away. Because I guess they didn’t have sunscreen on. On the boat that we’re on. Because the game starts on a boat.

    Once you get off the boat, and go out to face your first enemy, things don’t get better. I chose to go full sneaky commando, because I selected the hardest difficultly I have available. I was prepped to deal with these bloodsuckin motherfuckin vampires, but the first enemy I ran into was actually a cultist.

    Here’s the thing though: apparently the children of the children of the night are deaf, because they can’t tell if someone straight ass sprints at them at full speed from behind. For some reason the game doesn’t have an assassination animation or anything; you just thwack them in the back of the head and they fall down dead.

    There are some signs that this was made by Arkane, of course. There are a bunch of interactable objects, common in the immersive sim genre, but unlike actual immersive sims (and any game from last 10 years) you can’t actually do interesting things with them. For example, there are more oil spills in the environments than the gulf of Mexico, but you can’t throw gas canisters at enemies, you can only shoot the canisters when enemies walk by.

    Some other things that suck:
    1. The quippy dialogue. It made me want to root for the vampires.
    2. The enemy AI. Maybe it got copied from Fallout 76, and then made worse, somehow. A non-zero portion of the time enemies don’t do anything, and just stand still. The rest of the time enemies wander toward you like geriatric hobos.
    3.The questing loop. There seem to be 2-3 options for each mission: i.e. go in guns blazing, sneak in, or sneak in with lockpicks or electric lockpicks via hacking. These are your only options.
    4. An open world made out of absolutely nothing between the points of interest. Every other mile has one to two enemies. Apparently everyone thinks you’re a Mormon missionary, because no one will come within six miles of you.

    Why make an open world game if it’s all empty? Just give us a mission select. It was good enough for Doom, it can be good enough for you.

    Maybe the game would get better if I played another 7 hours. Here’s the thing: I played 7 hours. That’s enough time to watch the entire Lord Rings Trilogy. There are other games that are better, sooner. I’m not continuing to smack myself in the nuts for another full workday to see if it gets fun.

    If you want a better horde shooter, go play Back 4 Blood. And I’ll see you on the servers, because I’m the only other person that likes it. But I can’t stomach another minute of Redfall.

    If, for some reason, you want to play Redfall, you could buy it with money. Or you could get a game pass subscription, so that after you uninstall, you can go play something good instead.

  • Catch the Fox

    Disclosure: I received a key for free on Lurkit.

    Let it never be said that I’m a hack reviewer. Developers, if you give me a key to your game, rest assured I will play the entire thing before I review it. Even if that means I spend 93 minutes of my life on a generic repeatable task in an Unreal 5 demo map.

    Don’t conflate that with me saying nice things about your game though. Instead, I’ve decided to title this review “Constructive Criticism.”

    For the people reading this review who aren’t the developers of Catch the Fox, here’s a brief overview of the game. The player is placed into a large level populated by shrubberies, foxes, and powerups. The goal is to get close enough to touch the foxes. After touching enough foxes, the next level is unlocked. When you touch a fox, its fur gets redder, and then it moves faster.

    Movement

    The core of Catch the Fox’s gameplay is movement. It’s really the only thing you can do. Getting airborne gives you a speed boost on returning to the ground. This allows the player to skate merrily along. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t for a few issues.

    The foxes you need to touch have a hitbox for collisions that’s only slightly smaller then the hitbox for “touching” them. And when you collide with them, you instantly lose all momentum. This absolutely kills any sense of pacing or chaining together multiple tags.

    It’s like if every time I stomped a goomba, I had to fill out a death certificate, and inform their next of kin before moving on. In addition, the player’s jump is miserable, capable of clearing a small subset of environmental obstacles and absolutely nothing else. It’s not high enough to jump over foxes, or up to any interesting areas.

    Environments and Level Design

    Speaking of environmental obstacles, let’s talk about the levels. I have two problems with them. The levels themselves are not laid out in such as a way as to actually encourage use of the movement mechanics. One level, Fractal, while quite pretty, has literally no capacity to gain speed or momentum, and might as well be flat once you reach the bottom layer.

    Visually appealing? Yes. Mechanically appealing? Absolutely not.

    Secondly, the other levels have been populated with a frankly ridiculous amount of what I’d politely call “environmental chaff.” The game is about touching foxes, not trying to touch foxes and slamming my wooden head into a tree every five inches.

    The strongest level had none of these at all. It’s a great big ocean of sand-dunes that form curving pits. This layout actually lets you leap around and gain speed. This level isn’t the most visually diverse, but that doesn’t matter, because this is a video game. It’s about the game mechanics, not the visuals.

    Performance and Bugs

    The game was actually fairly bug free, though I did once encounter invisible foxes that couldn’t be tagged. It was on the spooky level, so maybe it’s supposed to be like that? Still frustrating and annoying though.

    Performance is frankly terrible. I’m running on a 1080, on low graphics, windowed, and I got like 30 FPS. Maybe it’s my setup, but given how much my frame rate goes up when I’m looking at the ground, or not looking at trees, I don’t think that’s the case here. For a fast paced game based around movement, that’s not acceptable.

    The strongest level in the game. Is it because it’s not cluttered with trash? Quite possibly!

    And while we’re on the subject of graphics: motion blur sucks. No one likes motion blur. Maybe smearing makes things look neat, but in a game, I want to actually be able to see stuff.

    Conclusion – For the Devs

    You’ve made a movement based game where every aspect of the gameplay plays counter to that. Your level design doesn’t play with the surf and speed gain systems you’ve developed. All clutter and environmental garbage appears to tank the frame rate. Your primary mechanic of tagging plays counter to that movement.

    I liked the music, and there is a bit of zen feel to the game on levels like Ocean Outpost when I could get a flow going.

    Conclusion – For Everyone Else

    Catch the Fox is not currently worth buying. The most interesting thing I got out of playing it was doing this writeup, and reflecting on the interplay between level design and traversal mechanics. It’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit since the terrible game I made for Ludum Dare 53.

    If for some reason you read all of this, and still want to buy it, Catch the Fox is $3 on Steam.

    PS: All the screenshots in this review are from the Steam page. I’m not hugely interested in playing more of this game in its current state just for image captures.

  • Pit People

    Lets start this review by doing something fun. I’ll try to summarize my thoughts on Pit People while following the same general tone of Pit People’s writing.

    “Ah, Pit People, like a great big… garbage, yes, hmm, a great big garbage pile of trash and waste, all ready to get picked up by the garbage man, and driven in his garbage truck to the garbage dump, because that’s where all the garbage goes.”

    If it’s not obvious, I don’t like the game much.

    Pit People Splash Image

    Pit People is a turn based strategy game from The Behemoth. I think it’s worth noting that the Behemoth’s better known games, Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theater, were both action games. Castle Crashers was a side-scrolling brawler, and Battleblock Theater was a time attack platformer. They’re pretty good games! Which is why it surprises me that Pit People sucks as much as it does.

    Anyway, Pit People. Its major twist on the turn based strategy genre is that instead of moving your units, and choosing who they attack, you only get to move them, and the units randomly decide who to hit. While this sounds annoying, it’s actually not something about the game that frustrated me. Battles take place on a hex grid, and you build a team of up to six units.

    I say up to six because some of the more expensive and powerful units take up multiple slots. So instead of having 6 units, you might have 5, or 4, or even just 3. Units can have different equipment, and level up.

    Pit People Team Building Screen
    All these swords are the same, which is to say: worthless.

    Leveling Up: Mostly Pointless!

    You probably thought I was going to follow that up with saying something like “And equipment has different stats, and leveling up increases a units stats” but as far as I can tell: No. It actually doesn’t do that. Leveling up changes absolutely nothing about a unit as far as I can tell, except that if you level up in battle, you get full health. How helpful is this? Well, there’s no consumable items or anything, or any way to heal in combat outside of built-in passives, or including the dedicated healer unit. So it’s very helpful. And it would be nice if it wasn’t completely random.

    Pit People Battle Screen
    I stole this image from the steam page. I’m not playing any more of this game than I have to.

    This lack of meaningful power curve or reason to get any equipment means that there’s also no reason to fight random encounters. If they don’t progress the main story quest, and equipment is worthless, why do them? Of course, you can fight them if you want to capture an enemy unit. Pit People has a recruitment mechanic where if any enemy is the last unit left, and you have a cage with you, you can capture them, bring them home, and turn them into a fighter for you.

    And while this might seem similar to Pokémon for an instant, it’s only like Pokémon if there were only 17 Pokémon, and every single Pikachu was mechanically identical. Also, if you could only bring 8 Pokeballs with you every time you left town and went out into the overworld.

    The Overworld

    Pit People’s Overworld is one of the most vestigial things I’ve encountered in a game. There are three things you can encounter in it. Quest start markers, random encounters, and visual gags. There are two types of terrain. Tiles you can walk over, and tiles you can’t. And because you can’t move and have your map open at the same time, and the map doesn’t actually show things in very much detail, it’s frustrating to traverse. Not challenging, just “Oh, I guess that path is a dead end, wish I knew before walking down it.”

    Pit People Overworld Map
    Hey, would you like to get treasure, or capture units? You can’t do both. Why? Because we said so, that’s why.

    Anyway, back to item slots for a moment. You can carry 10 items. This includes the cages you need to capture units, and also any loot you might pick up. Except your inventory gets filled after doing a single quest. So every time you finish everything, you have to go back to the city, crossing the stupid frustrating map, and avoiding random encounters so you can drop off your loot.

    Which as we’ve already talk about, doesn’t really have stats. It might have elemental alignments, but you never get “better” equipment. Everything is just a side grade, or has some small other ability, but every sword is just a visual reskin of another sword. Which means everything is effectively a cosmetic.

    Pit People could redeem itself here with interesting combat. It doesn’t. The whole “you don’t get to pick which unit you attack” is an interesting idea, but doesn’t lead to interesting decisions. I saw a steam review noting that the game’s strategy never changes. Put tanks in front, put range in the back, and heal your guys. Repeat until you beat the game.

    Or get bored, because battles take forever, and units feel incredibly bullet spongy. There’s also not option to speed up the game, so I hope you enjoy the incredibly long walking and attack animations. There is an auto-battler, but it’s got the brains of one of those small yappy dogs that think they can take on a mountain lion. So turning that on will lead to your units getting pulped as the AI prances them into melee range of the entire enemy team, and keeps them sitting under airstrikes.

    The Plot: Doing Its Best

    There’s one last place the game has to salvage its dismal reputation, and that’s the story. Unfortunately, it flubs it pretty hard here as well, and I have a guess as to why. Pit People was an early access game. I know because I bought in early access seven or so years ago, played like 15 hours, went “This is great, I’ll play more later.”

    Then I came back last weekend, played through the whole game’s campaign in 8 hours, and went “This is trash. How did I ever willingly play more than 3 hours of this?” Anyway, the story. I suspect the story was added piecemeal over the game’s time in early access. The story is janky and disconnected. It randomly and unsatisfyingly opens and closes plot threads, and is also only 8 missions long. Some of these missions try to be interesting or have some unique gimmick, but many are just standard battles.

    Also, quite a few do that thing I hate where the game goes “Oh, you beat the enemies? Well, now I’m going to spawn in an extra pack!” Tactics games are about use and allocation of resources to deal with a given problem. Going “Surprise, extra problem” after I’ve cleaned out all the enemies, and I’m struggling to catch my breath is aggravating normally, and it’s double frustrating here.

    Some final complaints, and a conclusion

    Rapid fire mode for complaints. What’s the point of the weapon “triangle” that’s just “helmets vs non-helmets?” Why can’t I see what debuffs are on a unit in game? Why can’t I see armor type or other special info? Why are a non-zero number of the campaign quest maps literally designed in such a way that I cannot use my super unit on it, but I’m still allowed to bring it into the fight? Why are there daily quests?

    Pit People isn’t fun. It’s a joyless slog whose best selling point is an occasionally amusing story, albeit one with an incredibly inconsistent tone that concludes with a complete asspull. If you want a better tactics game, play literally any other tactics game on this blog. At least Pedigree Tactics is interesting.