I played a few hours recently and it felt fine, the story did feel a little flat from what I played. I admittedly didn’t get far, maybe 18 or so levels, though.
I’m in the camp of ‘I’ll wait for reviews’ on this one. Indiana Jones is a character with a controversial past and many of his character traits are not exactly modern. The puzzle stuff looked kinda fun and I’d be interested to see just how many there are in the game. Solving what looks like a blood sacrifice bowl with a bottle of wine is neat. Or it will be if that isn’t a telegraphed narrative. If there are point and click vibes where you pick up a clown nose in the first ten minutes of the game and then use It in the 9th hour, that kinda puzzle-bypass would be great.
I will say, ‘The Great Circle’ is such a boring name when they have ‘Circuli Magni’ right there. They give a clear translation in the trailer but ‘Indiana Jones and the Circuli Magni’ is significantly more interesting. SEO considerations I guess.
So much talk about "what makes a Mana game" in there, and yet for me the one thing that made Secret of Mana a game that I cared about was the 3 player co-op that absolutely ruled. Still no indication that this game even has 2 player action. I was super disappointed when I could finally play a fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 on PC back in the day and it was only 2 player, and lately I've been increasingly disappointed as everything since has been a single player affair.
Call me crazy, but the series hasn't been great (it's still been good, just shy of great) since the SNES outings and I am really wish they'd get the game back to the multiplayer that made it great.
Interesting. I didn’t even know the Mana games had multiplayer. I’ve always played them for the replayability and character building (and the story, of course).
Being able to play the fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 in the early aughts was what really cemented my love for the series. I was ecstatic to learn that its remake was made so faithfully.
Yeah, I own Collection of Mana and Trials of Mana and played it both ways. Trials in particular has got me very excited for Visions, but I really hope that they're doing multiplayer and ideally 3 player to throw back to the greatest aspect of Secret.
I own the same haha. Trials not having multiplayer was a bit of a letdown. More detail would have been nice too but it was fun to see it all in 3d. I made it pretty far but never ended up beating that one.
Whilst your opinion here is totally valid, it’s worth knowing that as a coop player of the mana games, you are a very, very small minority of players.
Almost everyone plays these games single-player, so they need to focus on that first. You’re right that the secret of mana means coop for a lot of people, but also, it’s worth understanding that almost everyone doesn’t experience that.
Yeah, this is the real rub here. Without the co-op it's not really anything special, there are even games out there doing Action RPG better these days so I can't imagine why you'd choose to not embrace the couch/online co-op crowd that'd put this back at the head of the pack.
Seriously, I’ve been dying to find a good couch co-op game and I straight up can’t. I’m just gonna get two or three Bluetooth controllers and do secret of mana with my phone.
dev said last night on a q&a stream they planned to make the steam deck a target even if they don’t officially support linux.
They said that they have already improved the controller integration
I hope they fix multiplayer. Played the story and some more with friends in 0.9 and the delayed map switching and other bugs we ran into killed it for at least one of us. Good thing that person still wants to give it another try at release.
I’ve been playing it in early access and even patch 0.9 had it in a really good state.
Complexity is about halfway between PoE and Diablo meaning there’s decent build variety without needing to keep a guide or spreadsheet open on another monitor. Very easy to make your own build and if you brick it you can refund skill points without much hassle.
Looking forward to seeing what new end game content this brings.
The game is great. The only downside is the older released classes really don’t seem as polished as the newer ones. Runmaster was so fun I don’t think I’d play any of the other mage options unless they revamped them. We’ll see how the last two end up. The company is good with updates though so there’s a lot of promise.
How is the difficulty/grind curve for the end-endgame content? PoE is an amazing game but for a casual-but-skilled gamer the very top-tier content is locked behind insane grind or RMT.
The main endgame, Monolith of Fate where you run echos, is very easy when you complete the story. I’ve usually been under-levelled by 10+. They path off in different directions and have different rewards types (e.g. gloves) so you can target gear that you most need. In this respect it’s a much better system than PoE as there’s far less layers of rng. You also don’t have to worry about map sustain, the echos don’t cost any type of resource.
Once you’ve completed the level 90 timelines you start farming empowered echos and have control over the difficulty based on how far from the starting point you go. The main issue is that this gets pretty monotonous having gone through so many echos already to get to that point.
There are also dungeons which require keys. These are accessible much earlier on the game and you unlock new difficulty levels by completing it each time. Lowest level is 20 but keys are relatively rare at that stage.
With PoE I sometimes just get bored of facerolling maps and stop playing early, but I think a big part of it for me is that I have no feasible way to farm a particular item I need (playing almost always on SSF). Being able to target farm things sounds good and what I’ve seen about the crafting also looks promising. I’ve been thinking of giving Last Epoch a go.
Yeah I prefer ssf. Cleared all the normal end game bosses plus Uber elder, but I probably spent as much time in path of building as I did in game. There’s a lot of depth but it’s a massive commitment if you have a goal in mind.
Honestly blasting through endless delve became my favourite way to play but that only happens a couple of time a year.
I get what you mean, though PoE is a lot about what build you pick. I’ve been able to clear everything on a couple of leagues on SSF and not playing that much (10 to 20 hours per week). I’ve been playing for a long ass time though and there’s definitely a bunch of leagues I haven’t got that for reason or other.
Good video, although the “polymer melts causing inaccuracy” bit is still disputed. As far as I know in the German military lawsuit against HK, there was no testing provided showing that, and HK provided the initial adoption results and standards in its defense.
The melting is essentially a supposition that has been treated as fact.
Knowing how knowledgeable Ahoy seems to be about weapon history, I feel like he was being extremely cheeky about that in the video. Near the end, “It wasn’t perfect. It melted sometimes.”, and, “The G36: …Cool.” had me cracking up.
The graphics look just as good in my eyes, it just looks like the trailer used more flattering shots compared to proper gameplay. Still looks great, honestly.
This will actually be the first ARPG that I play. I bought it and played 10 hours of the early access earlier this year and have decided to wait for full release.
I was so excited for Cities: Skylines II, and it is a shell of the former game. So many systems seem to fake the economy, and it also feels impossible to make your city fail.
Waiting until I see evidence of a good game post-release before I board any kind of hype train.
It was definitely possible to tank a city in Skylines 1. That said, it’s also not the most challenging game.
But with Skylines II, I can’t even tank one when I try. Hundreds of thousands in the red? The game throws free money at you in the form of “government subsidies” to compensate. And they cannot be disabled. Absolute shit show.
The subsidies have never saved me from failing before, they only make me fail slower (if that makes sense). It might just be something I’m experiencing though.
Yeah, I’ve heard of people having a different experience (the economy just never picking up enough to succeed) – I think both are indicative of a borked simulation.
For me, I can even be completely in the black, with 100k+ income, and I’ll still be getting hundreds of grand in subsidies. Ruins any challenge.
I have a pretty large city, but something is wrong with my tax calculations? I have one industry pumping out 150x the taxes of everything else combine. Just a blanket of $5m from lumber an in-game hour, next best is Metals at $45k a day.
Doesn’t surprise me, if you read their forums there are a ton of folks reporting issues either being outright ignored or told that the game-breaking bug they found is “as designed”.
I mean, usually they’re already active as soon as the game starts, so I don’t really think it could be considered that way. Ideally I’d just like to be able to turn them off, which I think would provide some challenge to the budget.
I feel like whenever i “tanked” a city in cities skylines, it was because of some awkwardness in the traffic system that comes about from chaos theory rather than anything city builderey, just not really about that.
In CS 1 I purposely poisoned the entire city and it took a remarkably long time for that to have any real repercussions and can be immediately and cheaply fixed. Like you can tank a city, but it takes a concerted effort. If you just keep building roads and painting RCI the game just kinda plays itself.
I still haven’t bought that, and looks like I won’t be for a while at least, maybe never if it doesn’t pan out. I was so excited for Victoria 3 but reading the reviews they indicate that it’s also a shell of the former game. Waiting until the game is fully released before letting in any hype has served me well lately.
Vic3 certainly isn’t a shell of Vic2. It’s a considerably more complex and interesting game.
There are however some frustrating and obtuse mechanics, particularly related to warfare. It’s not even that bad once you get into it properly, but as a new player it’s definitely a bit frustrating and it’s definitely different from what players were used to from Vic2.
Ah, that’s good to hear! I myself haven’t played Victoria 2, I’ve played EU4, CK2 and CK3 a lot and was really excited about focusing on economy and population rather than map painting in Vic3. I saw the lackluster reviews on release and beyond and assumed it just missed the mark like so many sequels do. I’ll check it out some more. Thanks for your input!
I recommend watching some YouTubers playing the game (not reviewing them). One Proud Bavarian has some fun playthroughs, and Laith is one I quite like too. Those videos give good impressions of what the game is like I think.
I checked out one proud bavarian and some beginner’s guide videos to see what the gameplay is actually about and ended up buying it. Thanks for taking the time to respond, I might’ve slept on this title otherwise.
youtube.com
Aktywne