Bay 12 Games Forum

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Unferat is, by its own description, a "Warlock simulator". You play the role of a young man working under his father, a librarian and scholar in a small coastal town. The local miners uncover a strange scrap of metal, and after some examination and research your father manages to work out that this is in fact an ancient and terribly powerful artifact; the dagger "Unferat".

However, word spreads quickly in small communities like this, and your father quickly comes under scrutiny by the church. Not trusting the militant order to adequately respect the power held within the blade, your father resists handing it over to the anointed thugs and for his defiance is struck down on the spot. In his last moments he sends you away with the unholy artifact, and through its awakening power manage to escape the violence, eventually landing upon and laying claim to the abandoned lighthouse which was said to have once been inhabited by a powerful warlock in ages past. Frightened and enraged, you curse the township for selling your father out to the church and plot your revenge...


And it's at this point that the game really starts! How shall you go about taking that revenge, exactly? With Unferat gathering strength and binding itself to you, and the old warlock's ramshackle facilities available, you have several options at your disposal.

The game is predominantly split into two main mechanisms: Spellcasting and alchemy. Spellcasting is performed by bringing up a three-tiered wheel of arcane phrases, and then correctly selecting the appropriate words of power in order to align the wheel. The very first spell you learn, for shapechanging into a crow (and back into a human when you're done), is a succession of the words "Vita", "Orma", and "Atur" (and by this point I've heard that chanted enough times to recite it from memory). Failure here doesn't really mean a whole lot other than having to try again, but time doesn't stop when you're chanting and you can't move while focusing on the wheel, so you have to be careful about it. With rare exception, spells require you to have the appropriate spellcasting reagent available in your inventory, which will be consumed as a focus point for the spell's energies.

Alchemy requires a large brewing cauldron, of which there are two in the game. Luckily, you just happen to be the proud owner of one of those! Inserting the proper ingredients into the cauldron interface along with cauldron commands such as "Heat", "Mix" and "Filter in the correct order will allow you to brew potions and transmute materials into other states. Now, this bit is somewhat finicky, as failure here means not only that you lose all the ingredients put into the cauldron, but you also end up *damaging* the cauldron and will need to repair it using somewhat rare lumps of iron ore.

How sensitive is it to incorrect order? The recipe "Rat tail + Ungus + Mix" will infuse the rat tail with pestilent energies, meaning that when used in the appropriate summoning spell it will call forth enhanced plague rats that can poison your opponents, rather than weaker mundane rats. However, inserting "Ungus + Rat tail + Mix" will result in losing both ingredients and putting a sizeable dent in your cooking apparatus. This could probably do with some tweaking, in my opinion, but the gist of the matter is: Be careful and pay attention


And, really, that's more or less the main philosophy of the game. Be careful. Pay attention. Plan ahead. As a warlock, you have some very powerful energies at your disposal, but they're generally not great at helping you out of a sudden bind. Spy on the villagers, make note of their routines, prepare potions and enchantments ahead of time, and pick your battles.

It's a very slow-paced game, as there's generally a great deal of waiting involved. Also a lot of busywork running around and harvesting the specific herbs you need to enact your plan. And your little human legs move you sooooo sloooooowly... Crow form is generally the best way of getting around, but you need to either manage your crow feather usage carefully or invest enough skill points into the spell that you don't need them anymore.

Speaking of skill points: Skills! Through the death of named characters and a couple other means (sacrificing to old gods, conducting dark research, eating berries etc.), you earn skill points which can be invested into any of the four main schools of ability: Necromancy, Witchcraft, Alchemy, and Demonology. Each school has 6 skills to pick from, and three levels of mastery in each.

Necromancy is, of course, mainly about summoning various types of minions who will heed your command and can either follow you around or be set up to guard important locations. These vary from skeletons conjured from alchemically-treated bones, zombies raised directly from fresh corpses, and giant hulking monstrosities patched together from large amounts of various remains (and taking on different statistics depending on which components get used and in what amounts).

Witchcraft is mostly about transformation and utility. You start the game with one point in the crow spell, and there's also a book right in the tower that gives you a free point in Rat Master so you can summon a few rats by expending a rat's tail as a component. Other abilities include: Changing trees into giant evil flytraps, short-range teleportation, and turning into Sauron's war form.

Alchemy is, well... Alchemy. It's all about creating and improving various types of consumables, from healing potions to poisons, to lumps of chalk that you can inscribe deadly traps with. Potentially very powerful, but it can get rather expensive as far as herbs go and you need to use the concoctions carefully to get the best effect. That said, those rune traps have saved my bacon on a few occasions.

Demonology is a quirky one, and what I mostly focused on during my first run. Demonology is based around opening demonic portals, which do not require reagents but do take some of the warlock's current health in order to open and will close again if he ventures too far away (roughly a screen's length). With a portal, you can transmute certain items into cursed versions that are used in infernal spells, or sacrifice materials in order to summon forth fiendish allies. Demonology takes a lot of waiting and planning ahead in order to get to work, and it doesn't *really* come online until midway into the game when you have enough skill points to invest at least three into the school... But once it opens up, you have access to the strongest defensive emplacements/roadblocks in the game.


Now, I say "roadblock"... This is because it can occasionally be desirable to stop up a road and block anyone from traveling past that checkpoint. Not just in order to catch named targets that are patrolling the roads or to harvest some poor peasants for their juicy flesh and bones, but also because the game features a logistics system for the village itself.

The villagers aren't just meandering around aimlessly; the farmers are actually collecting food, the woodcutters are actually gathering lumber, and the herbalists are actually high off their asses on mushrooms that rightfully belong to you! They then venture back to the village in order to drop off their harvests in the square, where they get cooked, forged, or distilled into resources that benefit the townspeople and confer statistical advantages to them.

Plonking down an ambush at the mine doesn't just kill off those annoying miners, it also prevents the town from getting more iron ore. Without ore, the smith can't create new equipment. Without equipment, the village watchmen can't have their armor and weapons enhanced to become far deadlier than they otherwise would be.


Now, this is all very interesting in theory... But the issue is that, first of all, you cannot feasibly prevent certain resources from being harvested/utilized. Even if you *did* dedicate your entire day to hunting down the herbalists (they, unlike other professions, will just scatter and go frickin' everywhere), by the time you have the capacity to reliably kill them like that the village will already have an herb stockpile in the thousands that can be converted into scores upon scores of healing potions for the townsfolk to use. It'd be better to just kill off the healer himself, who has a much more reliable schedule and tends to spend a lot of time by himself in the back end of the village. But even then, due to respawns you'd have to dedicate a portion of just about every day in order to kill off each replacement as they come through, and that can get pretty expensive for you.

In addition to all that... Any death, whether it's a named target or some hapless villager, goes towards the kill count. The kill count is effectively the game's progression, and will unlock new named targets, new routines for the townsfolk, and other special events. Supposedly, this is meant to be a measure of how much influence you've pushed on the surrounding area, making it safer and more profitable for you.

This is a lie. There are exactly two milestones that I could list as being predominantly beneficial to you, and they both come with caveats. Outside of that there are things like increasing the number and quality of guards around the village, setting up patrols to scout the roads day and night, secret order assassins plonking down next to trees and camping there until you show up so they can snipe you, high-powered hero bands that rove the countryside, and angry torch-and-pitchfork mobs that assemble to try and knock over your tower themselves.


It's a niche little game, and while there's some definite room for improvement (beyond the aforementioned hiccups with supply and whatnot, the UI is... Not great. Almost as bad as the character controls), it's a compelling little title that has some absolutely fantastic potential to it.

The dev is Russian, as are most of the posts in the Steam forum, and with as little attention this game has received so far there aren't a lot of useful English-language resources for it. I'm trying to collect enough screenshots from my current playthrough to put together a map of all the Tricea berries (there are 30 in total, eating 15 will grant you a bonus skill point), but I'm honestly a teensy bit burned out after just having finished my first run in a pretty marathon gaming session...


I think this thing has some serious future to it!  The dev is still quite active (pushed out a new update just yesterday), so even though he's being modest and trying to not promise anything grandiose I do believe that there are improvements and expansions in store. With any luck, the rougher edges of this title can get rounded off and we'll have a very nice little gem on our hands.

If anyone does decide to give this thing a go, I'd be happy to try and assist with what experience I've managed to accrue thus far. There are a bunch of little tips and tricks that can make life for an aspiring dark sorcerer easier, and frankly... We need all the help we can get.


Until then, keep calm and Char Orma Reda

I suppose the final days of Humble's learn a new language bundle is as good enough a reason to start a thread of this nature...

Languages are like assholes; everyone has one, and some of them make some pretty weird noises. Whether you're looking to get some lingo advice, expand your mind with the amazing history and influence of language, or just want to point fingers and laugh at how incredibly cockamamie our various tongues can get; this is the thread to forget exists for such a purpose.


To start off, I'd like to point out some intricacies of the most beloved Scandinavian language: Norwegian.

Now, for the most part, Norwegian behaves reasonably well. A fair amount of the grammar is similar to English, and the words are actually pronounced the way they're spelled a good half of the time (there are, of course, completely illogical exceptions). It is a gendered language however, and as with many gendered languages the gendering of words often makes no goddamn sense and you basically just have to memorize it all so that you don't sound like an idiot all the time. This gets harder when certain dialects have their own, different rules for the gendering of words.

Ah yes, the dialects... You see, not wanting to be boring, Norwegians decided that they would garble and mangle the language with dozens of distinct, regional dialects. They then spent generations refining and distilling these dialects to the point that nobody outside of their immediate families could possibly understand the nonsense they were vibrating.

For example, to say "I", as in "I don't understand this silly language", you would use the Bokmål word "Jeg" (say "yeah" but change your mind halfway through and finish with "I" instead of "-ah"). Or you would, at least, if you lived in the capital... Go outside those safe boundaries, and you'll end up encountering peasants. Peasants who will instead substitute any of "Eg", "Æ", "Æg", or even "I" (pronounced "EE") to demonstrate their barbarism.

But let's leave them to their potatoes and their working-class words, and focus on the enlightened vocabulary of bog-standard proper Norwegian.

Words in Norwegian (Bokmål):

Tre
Both a noun meaning "tree" or "wood", and an adjective meaning "wooden". It is also the number three much like in Irish.

Tren
Specifically a military supply convoy. One of the more ridiculous words, it's probably only still used by the military because it's cheaper than the alternatives.

Trene
The act of training or working out, this is the preferred hobby of vacuous sporty types across the country.

Trener
The verb "working out", and the noun "personal trainer". So far so good, right?

Trenere
The nonspecific plural of personal trainers. Also the verb "(to) abbreviate".

Trenerer
"Abbreviating", or the adjective "in the act of abbreviating something".

Trenererende
Adjective. "This thing which abbreviates".

Trenert
Adjective. At last, we have successfully abbreviated something.



Other classic examples of Norwegian supremacy include:

Gift
Noun. "Poison"
Adjective. "Married"

Hell
Noun. "Luck"; "fortune"

Ass
Conversational. Used at the end of a sentence to denote emphasis, ass.

Orddelingsfeil
"Mistakes made in relation to the separation of compound words"



In summary, I am upset with Duolingo after accidentally losing my month-long Spanish streak. This happened several months ago.

HellSign (formerly Hellhunters) is a game about being a paranormal investigator/exterminator in the wild outback of Steam Early Access Releases (it's called SEAR because if you're not careful, you'll get burned), and I'd been following the project for a few years before it finally released in early November.

Or, rather, I've been trying to follow it, but the game's official website, forum, Twitter account and Steam page have had absolutely fuckall updates since the project's inception as a failed Kickstarter. There were a couple text updates toward the end where the devs said "We had to change the name because of copyright concerns, so now we're gonna make the game EXTRA SPOOKY with PLOT and STORYLINE, and COMIC BOOKS!", and another update saying that they were working like mad and getting loads of stuff done, but no proof of any such thing. The game was still left with the prerecorded trailer footage and 3 screenshot it'd had for several years...

But enough about the past, the game's been released in Early Access now! And according to field recon, it even boots up! To celebrate the event, I nabbed a copy and have decided to document my first delves into Perfectly Everyday Normal Australian Living for the betterment of mankind and the entertainment of a few greasy gits. Let's dig in, shall we?

In true Aussie fashion, we will be playing without the mature language filter (it's a bit confused anyways, and will censor "cocky" to "@#!&y", but won't censor "shitty"). I'm not entirely sure why it's there to begin with in a singleplayer game, but there you are.



Upon starting the game, we are met with our first real challenge: Defining the character.

Judging from the creation screen, we'll be playing a gritty, bad-to-the-bone, pills-for-breakfast, leatherskinned, broody, rowdy, less-legal-more-lethal, grimdark, no-nonsense-and-no-prisoners fellow. He probably listens to Powderfinger unironically, the bogan.

There's not a great deal to decide here aside from portrait (of which there are three, and none of them have eyes), class, and name. Sex/Gender isn't implemented yet, and as such Australia is entirely populated by men. The manliest men. With no eyes.

We'll be playing as the Stalker class, because it's the only one to start with a shotgun. Stalkers start at level 3, with their two pre-purchased abilities being the usage of traps and the usage of throwable items. Because we need specialist training to hurl rotten meat at someone.


But... Well, a rose by any other name would smell as sweetly, only we're not a rose. We're a bad enough dude. I need to pick an appropriately Aus name so as to blend in with the vibrant and multifaceted characters we'll meet ingame, but as a non-Australian I'm at a loss for suitable, commonplace, average Australian names. Bruce Jr.? Wazza Dundee? Peter Peter Kiwi-Eater? Hmm...

I eventually decided to honor a certain individual we all know and love, a man whose passion for animals and the natural world would give us the upper hand in accurately identifying and safely relocating all manner of naughty beastie and spook in the untamed wilds of urban Australia.


With that settled, the game is officially afoot. This is indicated to us by a short comic strip and some isolated sound effects.

As you can see, Australians have developed advanced eco-friendly materials and processing through their inherent communion with nature. Banning nasty and polluting synthetics like hard plastics and processed metals, Australians instead make most household items out of refined Parkinson's Disease. The mysteries of how a person can transmute a muscle tremor into a physical object are kept secret and are unknown to most of the world, but their results are plain for all to see.

Finishing with the comic, we go to meet this shadowy individual who claims that we're the "scout" he had spoken to previously. It is at this point we get into the real meat of the game; the loading screens!

Or, I should say, loading screen. Singular. I suppose it works, with a spooky house and all... I'm just a little bit confused about the frog-person in the upper left who appears to have Kermitted suicide.

Anyways...

We arrive at the designated rendezvous point, and already the spookiness has reached dangerous levels... Not only has our levitating vehicle managed to settle down in someone's yard without driving into any of the trees or heavy shrubs blockading the property nor indeed leaving any tire tracks or signs of a road, but it has in fact flipped into a mirror-image of itself! The advertising logo and text have flipped their ends around, and are now illegible to anyone who isn't a modern Australian Leonardo da Vinci! The accursed thing probably has the steering wheel on the left side now!

Recovering from the shock, we sift through the bush and find a cunt.

Ken Ham: "Scout?"

Banjo: "Look cunt, you see this automatic rifle on my back... I've had a hell of a week and I ain't here to waste time, even lost my cat! So tell me you're bloody jokin' before I lose my shit!"

Ken Ham: "Relax mate... Yeah, I'm the scout you spoke to"

(recovering from our earlier faux pas, with a few carefully-placed untruths we manage to play Banjo like a fiddle)

Having finished a rippin' good chat with our friend Banjo, we ran back to our mirror-van to find our EMF reader, which we apparently need for something or other. Fuck if I know, I'm not a scout.

At the van, Eddie from Iron Maiden's promotional art suddenly appears and walks us through the complicated motions of picking up the single item we left behind in the vehicle and putting it in our specially-shaped EMF pocket. With that out of the way, we're good to actually enter the house and do our job of looking at things.

With our handy-dandy electro-magnetic frequency reader, we can easily detect normal everyday household objects such as chairs, lamps, decapitated corpses, paintings and such that have been unreasonably fondled by paranormal critters! Once you've found a hotspot, you can investigate it more closely by shouting random words at it like "Fingerprints?", "Evidence?" or even "Suspicious?", in the hopes that any clues will feel trapped by your pointed interrogation and will surrender themselves willingly. Doing this, we can find hidden objects that are important to the investigation, such as cursed amulets and ancient statuettes with hidden meaning. And that's exactly what we found, as it turns out.

We can also use a glowstick fluorescent blacklight tube to find hidden trails of droplets, smears, pawprints, or even eldritch symbols that are invisible to the naked eye. These lead us to other potential clue locations where we can find items much like the ones discovered using the EMF reader, only with a blue filter applied to them.

Considering the fact that we haven't used any Luminol or similar chemical agent, we can only assume that these clues are left in a medium that naturally responds to blacklight, such as semen. This is reinforced by the fact that the random headless bodies that are scattered all around the property only have a few random spatters light up, while the gigantic pools of blood they're sitting in do not react to the blacklight at all.

Curiously, non-haunted power boxes do not generate an electromagnetic field of any kind. It's probably Parkinson's energy, which is greener than regular electricity.


Returning to Banjo, he tells us to grommet a flanno stubbie, servo, and she'll be right. Taking heed, we open our Cryptonomicon™ to better understand the raging clues we discovered in our investigation.

Eddie appears again and shows us how to drag things into other things, in this case by shoving jewelry into a book so that words pop out. This allows us to identify what type of activity is haunting this area, and how we can best combat it.

One of the clues requires us to make a determination of its meaning, using the bookmarked sections of the Cryptonomicon™. Properly identifying these clues lets us make an informed decision as to what the source of the haunting must be, and therefore how best to shoot at it. Unfortunately, the Cryptonomicon™ was written and published in Austria, which is not Australia, so attempting to read it in The Land Down Under results in all the text being flipped upside-down.

Finding the appropriate page and recognizing the symbol, we accurately determine this to be a Cryptic haunting. Taken together with the other clues, this reveals to us that the source of the haunting is in fact a Banshee (Bean Sidhe, also known as a Sickie Beano in Australia). We report our findings to Mr. Kazooie.

Banjo: "Okay and you're sure it's a Banshee right? Last time I trusted the new guy in town... let's just say it didn't end well..."

Ken Ham: "Well you see, there's this book..."

Banjo accepts the reasoning for our confidence, and gets ready to kill the thing we spent all of a couple minutes identifying for him. Naturally, we ask him when to expect our payment for the effort.

Banjo: "Look we got our hands full here, so I'll tell ya what... head back to town and find "The Shaggy Jackal" down on Valley Road. I'll meet you there once I'm done with this poltergeist and we can sort out your pay..."


With nothing left for us here, we hop back into the Mirrory Van and zip back to town to give this Shaggy Jackal place a burl. Opening the vehicles's interface, Eddie shows us how to push a button and start the engine.

We apparently drive like an idiot, because by the time we make it to the watering hole Banjo has not only already finished the job, but has even arrived ahead of us and gotten comfortable. We quickly find him, thanks to his being one of the few people who lights up when moused over.

Banjo: "Sup, who are you?"

Ken Ham: "What is this, bush week? I didn't come down in the last shower, where's my motsa ya bloody drongo?"

Banjo: "Whoa whoa, fair suck of the sauce bottle, mate... You see that bludger over there? With the black hoodie and the crappy shades. That's Redback, and he'll inexplicably buy all the random junk you consider 'clues' that you find during an investigation. Right boofhead, he is."

Some rambling about a missing ear, $5000 and a cat later, we talk to Redback and discover that he is indeed willing to purchase a pre-haunted gold necklace for about four bucks.

As you can see, Redback also offers wares of his own, including most of the pages in our Cryptonomicon™. Apparently our book is the abridged version, and he happens to be a bridge salesman...


This part of the tutorial is basically just to clue you in on the fact that you can sell clues, even if you do only get a piddling amount of money for them. I'm still not entirely sure how we managed to sell a symbol to him, since that's presumably just a picture of something we found smeared onto the underside of a folding chair in demon semen... But whatever. Cash is cash.

After talking to Redback, we have to return to our safehouse (due to the bar closing after last call) and open a bunch of menus to prove that we can, and to show us that they exist. Having touched all the menus, we go straight back to the bar which has... Reopened, for some reason.

Apparently our only payment for the struggle and pain of looking at a couple old paintings and looting someone's house was the 16 bucks Redback gave us, so now we need to go looking for "more work". We talk to Banjo again, who tells us to slap another shrimp on the barby and steal a mysterious puzzlebox from the friendly local arms dealer. We venture off to the Guns n' Baits ammo store...

...and, uh... I guess we steal it? I mean, the guy also sells nails for $0, and the nailgun to fire them is also $0, so unless we're just stealthily pocketing hundreds upon hundreds of nails, I don't think we're actually stealing anything. He just gives us the puzzlebox for free so long as we're not going to give it to Banjo, because he hates Banjo.

We're going to give it to Banjo. We're also going to "buy" a nailgun and a thousand nails, because why not? It's not like we can afford anything else here with $16 to our name.

Back at the bar, Banjo says that introducing us to the arms dealer was payment enough for us retrieving his Rubik's Cube, and tells us to go grovel with Redback for a job. Redback, in contrast to Banjo, actually pulls through and lands us a job.

Redback: "Rattle your dags out to this address on Tin Alley Road and clean out the critters, then come back here and I'll pay you."

Ken Ham: "Fair dinkum, mate. I'm off like a bride's nightie."

Drive van, find property, scratch nuts, kick down door. This map is the combat tutorial, and we get to practice our gunmanship and rolling-aroundmanship by shooting a few rats, in standard RPG tradition.

Rats.

Rats.

Rats.

I'd also like to mention that we're experiencing THREE GLORIOUS FRAMES of reload animation. It's like living in an anime!

Making our way through the house, we kick/shoot down doors and shoot more rats as they crawl out of their webs and scutter along the ground with their eight legs. Pretty standard breach and clear procedure.

Oops. I think something was wrong with that door...


Welp, we died. But it's okay! Much like Jesus, we recovered from the condition after some bed rest...



Note:
Since the game's dialogue is currently pretty horrible both in content and in composition, after the first few dozen ellipses I decided to represent characters in more the spirit of what they were trying to say, rather than the actual substance... In doing this, I may have introduced one or two more instances of slang than was in the original script. I apologize profusely for the Hamfistedness of this process.

In my defense, Banjo did refer to me with a "You rippa!" at least once in the actual game, so he's beyond saving even without my help.


And yes, some of it is just gibberish, because the characters really weren't talking about anything anyways and this is at least more entertaining. It's a low bar.

So, there was a movement started by one of the developers of We Need To Go Deeper, wherein they wanted to define a better search/organizational term for the specific subgenre that the game fell into (because, let's be honest, Steam's "Online Co-op" list is a complete mess). To do this, he encouraged all interested parties to label similar games with the tag "Crew Sim".

A Crew Sim is a game, like WNTGD, where a number of players work together at doing specific tasks as part of a greater unit. Things like Blackwake and Guns of Icarus, where individuals play the part of captain or pilot while other players work on repairing and maintaining the necessary subsystems, or aiming, firing and reloading the weapons. Other examples include Pulsar: Lost Colony, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Barotrauma, Airmen, "shipless" games like Overcooked or No Heroes Here, and of course Star Trek Bridge Crew for VR.


Personally, I'm a huge fan of games like this. I even thoroughly enjoyed my time as a powder monkey on the claustrophobic gundeck of a galleon in Blackwake, scurrying around madly while never seeing more of the battle than the stray cannonball blasting its way through the hull and into my face. I love teamwork-heavy games that rely on actual cohesion between players in order to keep things working smoothly (or at all).

The Crew Sim tag has yet to be properly adopted by Steam's algorithms, but with a few more people suggesting it here and there it should catch on and help define the genre, and possibly give these games a bit more recognition (even if only to those who are already fans of similar games).

I figured I'd make a thread to mention the movement, and also to talk about games like this and share experiences and recommendations.

I poked around a bit and couldn't find any previous threads on this subject, so I figured that now was my chance to make MY VERY OWN THREAD about something!  Yay!


Anyways, Breach & Clear is a special forces simultaneous-turn based tactics game, a la Frozen Synapse or Laser Squad.  I wound up picking this up drunkenly last time it showed up in a Humble Bundle, and I just recently got around to trying it out.

After seeing a small sample of gameplay on YouTube and the game's official trailer, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the game itself.  It is quite a bit like Frozen Synapse, of course, but is simpler and more accessible (and also doesn't need nearly as long to calculate each round's movements and actions).  Another thing is the actually fairly wide range of customization you have access to when dealing with your squad(s).

Now, in regards to customization, the game has vague RPG elements in that you earn money ("silver") for completed missions, as well as XP for the soldiers who took part.  Silver is used to purchase new weapons, weapon mods, vests, helmets and other accessories.  The individual soldiers, meanwhile, gain levels and with them can allocate statpoints in one of the six stats (more on those later), as well as perks and abilities at 5-level intervals, capping off with the soldier's second activatable ability at level 30.  There are six different classes of soldier, each with their own unique stat to put points into, abilities and passive skills.

What makes this system interesting, however, is that it isn't balanced worth a shit.  Some things are just absolutely better than others, and I've been minmaxing and cheesing my way through the highest difficulty level for several levels now.  And I'll be happy to share with you some of my findings.


First, the classes.


That's a bit about the classes, now a look at the stats they all have.  Each stat ranges from 1 to 100, and will start off at 45 (except for special, which starts at 50) unless specified by the specific team type you selected (different special forces teams will start with 75 in one area, except for Spetsnaz who get 63 in both health and reactions).  Every time a soldier gains a level, they get 5 more stat points to be invested at your discretion:

Health: Does what you think, increases the amount of punishment a dude can take.  ...not by a whole lot, though.  The difference is somewhat negligible, particulary in higher difficulties, and the largest health bonuses you can get are from equipment anyways.  And, again, you're either not getting shot or you're dead.  Put points elsewhere.

Reactions: Determines how long it takes for a soldier to react to, target, and fire an attack at a seen enemy.  This is incredibly useful, and indeed necessary for getting off that critical first shot against someone.  I'd suggest increasing this to be on the safe side, but this only happens once at the very beginning of a firefight, and I don't know how big of a difference each point makes.  Still though, it's an offensive skill and as such should be invested in.

Accuracy: How accurate your shots are, and how often those shots are crits.  Critical hits do 5x damage, and with maxed accuracy you get a lot of them.  Also, you're actually hitting the people you shoot, which is, y'know, a plus...  Exceptionally important stat, but can be heavily augmented by weapon mods and the weapons themselves.  Invest at least some in this, or start off as a JTF2 squad and just buy the extra accuracy mods you need.

Evasion: Your ability to deny the existence of spoons.  It's basically just dodge chance.  Rather than soaking up hits, it lets you ignore hits entirely, and is thus better.  It also cannot be modified by equipment, so the soldier himself is the only indicator of how good he is at dodging bullets.  I highly recommend investing in this, even if it is just a slight gain.

Speed: How many tiles a soldier can move per turn, and how quickly he moves around.  This can be quite handy, primarily for quick response and for clearing out those larger levels in short enough time to get the max ranking.  Movespeed is slightly affected by certain equipment types.  By all means put some points into this, but not until you've gotten the other, more important stats at acceptable levels.

Special: This is one of the six class-specific skills listed above, and as such the importance of this stat varies wildly.  For the Medic, it is completely useless, but for the Fireteam Leader, it's his main thing.  Weapons Sergeants fall sort of in between, as extra damage is nice and of course useful, but the damage bonus is too small to prioritize over, say, accuracy.  Naturally, no equipment modifies this stat.



That covers most of the basics, but there's one extra thing I'd like to point out...  When looking at weapons and weapon mods, you'll notice the stat "ROF", and it does describe itself as Rate of Fire, saying it shows how many attacks you can make per second.  Only problem is, it's written backwards.  The lower the ROF value is, the more attacks you'll be able to make.  A value of 1.00 ROF means one attack per second, whereas 0.50 ROF means two attacks per second, as it's one second per attack.  A bit confusing if you don't know that right off, but you learn to see it as just "how many seconds it takes to make an attack".

Which brings me to my next point, the P90...  By completing levels in good time with no casualties, you earn a 4/4 star rating (other ratings exist for people who aren't completely anal about it like me).  The more stars you get, the more new levels and new weapons you unlock.  These include shotguns which are all worse than the shotgun that's available from the start of the game (protip: Don't use shotguns.  I'm sorry, but they're horrible in this game.  Yes, I'm as disappointed as you are).  Once you hit (I think) 250 stars, you unlock the P90, which costs 2500 silver (expensive, but not cripplingly so).  This is the gun to end all guns.  It has an accuracy penalty and absolutely piddling damage, plus a moderately short range at 25m, but it also has a 0.15 ROF.  That's pretty cool on its own, but you can then modify the P90 with a custom gas system that reduces ROf by 0.2, while increasing damage.  Since ROF can't handle negative or null values, it just goes down to 0.01.

0.01.  If it were firing one single bullet for each attack, that would be 6000 RPM, something achieved only by miniguns and other specialty devices.  But since an "attack" in this game means one shell from a shotgun or one burst from an automatic weapon, it's quite a bit more (not that this makes any difference other than what it looks and sounds like).  Even with the mediocre accuracy and the absolutely piss-poor damage, this makes the P90 by far the best gun in the game, as it will absolutely saw through enemies in record time, and with 0.01 ROF you can not only respond to new threats in no time, but each accuracy vs. evasion calculation, not to mention critical hit calculation, takes one one-hundredth of a second.  And it has infinite ammo, like all the guns in Breach & Clear.  There are still a few guns I haven't unlocked yet, but from the looks of it they're just "solid gold" versions of normal, crappy guns with infinitesimally better stats and astronomically higher price tags.  Really, once you get the P90 and can mod it, there's not much point using anything else.  I've yet to come across an engagement that happened at greater than 25m range, but the paltry 10-12m range of the shotgun has proven a big problem on all the occasions I've attempted to use them.


I hope this was enlightening for those who were considering picking up this title, and interesting/helpful for those who already have it.  There's still quite a bit more I need to learn about the depths of the game (clearly), but hopefully this has been a learning experience.  If you have any thoughts, comments or corrections, by all means open the floodgates!

So I recently stumbled upon this page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/137249839758228/?ref=ts&fref=ts

Depression happens to be a very close subject for me, having both experienced it in myself and in others that I care about, so I think this might actually be one of those cheesy attention-grabbing Facebook things that I'll actually participate in.

This thing's kinda flying around under the radar, so I figured I'd link it here to spread a bit of awareness and also hear what the folks around here thought.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's 2:18 in the morning and I'm starting to actually get tired enough to consider going to bed, so you'll have to excuse this from being a rather minimalist post.  Cheers.

So I just completed this recently.  Yes, I know, I'm a bit behind the times, but that's just me for ya.  I was in for something indie and mind-tickling, and a puzzle platformer with a focus on fluid physics seemed just the thing.

But, having just rounded out the thing, I have kind of mixed feelings.


On the one hand, the fluid dynamics really are a lot of fun, and some of the puzzles are delicious nuts to crack that in several cases can frustrate you for ages until you smack yourself in the forehead and realize the one blatant solution that was staring you in the face the whole time.  Or, even better, you can leave something alone and then eventually come back to it when you have some different resources available to you, thus finding an entirely different solution.  The variety of fluro seeds and fluid types allows for a wide range of combinations that can be used as tools for your schemes.

On the other hand, the fluid dynamics really are quite...  Uhh...  Tempermental.  Don't expect something to work the way you expected it to, or the way it did work before, or even to work at all.  And for a platformer, particularly one that relies on a fair deal of precision and timing in some parts (just a side note:  I would have preferred a heavier focus on complex puzzles than on timing, but that's just me), the controls seemed awfully sticky, unresponsive or just plain uncooperative (this may be due to how my machine processes the game though).

Additionally, the storyline was...  Odd.  Also very, very indie, for what that's supposed to mean.  It felt at times as though the plot and the actual game were at odds with one another.  You've got a very colorful, bright and fun/funny game wrapped up with a story that's at least attempting to be dark, mysterious, foreboding, and pensive.  And the ending really wasn't that great, if you ask me.  I saw the meat and bones of it a mile away, but the epilogue/credits sequence afterwards just left me with a definitive "Huh?" feeling.


A few pet peeves of mine include the fluros themselves, and their at times erratic behavior.  Like getting to the last leg of escorting a (spoiler alert) dark fluro around some puzzle, then creating a light source between us that would cause him to go into the dark spot I needed him to get to.  Instead, he turned around, ran right over the light source, and kamikaze'd himself on my stunned face, forcing me to start the whole damn thing from scratch.  Again.

Another would be the unstable and unprecise physics engine, and the heavy reliance on it being stable and precise.  Like walking past a difficult puzzle and leaving it for another time, only to see the puzzle spontaneously explode and solve itself without any interaction from me.

Furthermore, the later parts of the game seem a bit tacked-on, which I suppose is understandable.  But the entire last section annoyed me because the machinery I had to fix/restart/whatever was effectively impossible to interact with without causing it to smack me in the face a few times as thanks.  In addition, the final puzzle and the final-final puzzle were both a bit strange, with the fluros or other game mechanics suddenly changing for the sake of making things easier/simpler.  Add to this the bizarre ending, and the fact that many of the previous mechanics and options are forgotten and disused later on in the game, and everything feels just perhaps a little strained.


But by all means, do play this game.  It's a fun, alternative romp that can get your brain-gears whirring and your splishy-splashy sense tingling.  Just don't let it fool you into expecting more from the later parts of the game than it actually provides.


Also, in regards to the various upgrades you can get...  Pretty much the only thing I used consistently was the seed cannon.  Oh lordy, how much easier that makes things...