2.8 hours played
Written 1 month and 20 days ago
Stalin, please, forgive me for being such an incompetent manager...
(If you don't want to read it, just go to the last paragraph that you will understand my point)
I'm sorry.
I got this game through a 2 in 1 bundle, was very interested in playing the other one, so this one cost me... 1 dollar? So yea, it was pretty cheap. And the premise looked rather interesting to be honest. Some kind of visual novel with management and strategy elements? Alright! Looks worth it.
Anyway, after a couple of days, finishing the game I bought, there was this game. And what got me playing was a review saying it only took 3 hours to end it, so no worries, it would be rather quick to finish this. And I played.
Booted up the game, and there I was, staring at this menu screen. I mean... They even tried? I saw the images on steam and it looked ok, an indie game with some care, the art looked fine, but come on. This menu screen looked horrid, I'm sorry devs, but you did not had a designer within the team am I right? At least the cursor looked interesting. Anyway, new game.
They presented the opening with some arts introducing the whole setting as any other game, and they looked fine, I wouldn't say they looked splendid, but only fine. Then I was at my office. It looked ok (they really took care of the telephone, it has more details than anything else), then this absolutely hottie came into my office and presented herself, Rosie, my secretary, and she told me to look into things. The menus looked cheap, but no worries, I can see they tried a little bit, but in disacordance with the rest of the art, some menus introduce a little bit of 3d that does not fit within the rest of the art, looking out of place.
I started working. Deciding things, sending different agents to missions (they all looked the same to me tho) and managing resources. There was so much to read that I quickly got tired (And I have played already games that I really had to read ok? The life of Sir Brante, the game that came with this one was one of those!) To be honest, I was having a little bit of trouble in playing the game, the resources were a little bit wonky, so I did not knew if I was doing right or not (And the user experience of this menu is really something, god...)
And then another intro. I think the only thing I looked forward in this game were the intros as the art looked the best there, with it taking the whole screen and with some one or two filters that hid the effect that digital art sometimes has, the absence of texture.
Kept playing it, blazing through some conversations and ignoring others because I simply did not care enough. Then came the day of the budget decision... and then I was left with absolutely nothing on my budget. Why? No idea. This pissed me off as I couldn't make any decision that involved cash, I must have ignored something when blazing through those chats or something, but come on, 400k gone in two decisions? That's crazy. And this only led me to wanting to finish this game no matter the ending the sooner I could.
And there I was, I failed the city. I failed with my inhabitants as I didn't read every little thing that this game threw at me. I failed it because I couldn't understand the system correctly. And I failed it because I didn't care enough to have the effort to learn. And this game failed it's mission with me, it did not make me care enough about it. It just made me want to finish it to be be done with this chore. (As I'm hyperfocused in writing reviews these days)
This game is a tale of a good concept, but not so good execution. The ux is horrid. The art is ok. The systems within the game are all scattered around, lacking polishing, and to be fair, maybe some didn't even need to appear in the game, for example the agents one? Couldn't care less about them. And this is a game that couldn't make me care, as hot as the assistant was, the loads and loads of random texts just got me less and less interested in what was going on and well, I'm sorry developers, but sometimes you gotta focus and improve things, maybe one system was enough to this game, you didn't need to make 3 or 4 to beef it up, but instead focus that energy on other things, such as the story. Anyway, it is a promising game, but I'd rather play anything else. Suzerain for example is a well done game with a similar idea. I hope your next game will be better, because yall had good ideas and I can see you guys could execute it, but it just lacks polishing. Anyway, bye! And sorry!
