u/Aistar

Sector Unknown is a recent pure sci-fi CRPG created by a solo developer. It is surprisingly competent in its main loop, but marred by many flaws.

The story is that you're a prisoner (choosing your crime is a part of character creation) being transferred by a space ship to a remote prison planet owned by Star Frontier corporation. The planet is located in Null Sector, and beyond that, very little is known about it. During the flight, ship's AI offers you a chance to escape, as long as you take a copy of it along (because owners are going to overwrite it after this flight is finished). You escape, land on a nearby planet, and learn something interesting: Star Frontier pulled out of Null Sector, while leaving many of its personnel, from miners to scientists to soldiers, stranded. Not only that, but the corporation is planning on coming back - but not without wiping out all life in sector with some unspecified weapon. You and your AI friend decided to fight back, and for that, you need to earn trust and cooperation of all main inhabited planets and stations in Sector Null.

To be honest, the story don't make much sense to me. Both "we're pulling out because there is too much piracy and smuggling going on here" and "we're coming back, but killing everyone in the sector" make absolutely no sense. This is "I'm evil, because I'm evil" behaviour, and the little plot twist the game delivers in the final part doesn't fix anything. And frankly, the game doesn't give a good explanation about how the "kill everyone" is going to be carried out: sure, you can probably target planets and most of space stations, but what about individual ships? But even granting that... WHY? All this is a huge waste of resources and fixing symptoms instead of problems at a great cost.

Anyway, you're going to spend much of the game flying between various planets/stations and solving their problems. While the general narrative makes no sense, individual plots for each location are more-or-less OK, although I could never shake off the feeling that I don't understand the timeline: sometimes, it feels like Star Frontier pulled out just yesterday, while in other cases, situation degenerated so much it feels like years have passed already.

The best thing that I can say about this game is that its developer understands the RPG game loop (which is a nice contrast to e.g. Broken Roads). More than that, he managed to make it work. Take quests, kill bad guys, loot bad guys, resolve quests for XP, level up: simple, yet working. Despite all other flaws, I found myself doing just one more quest time and time again. This is a very good result!

I also can praise the role-playing system, somewhat. While not breaking any new ground, it offers enough choice to make levelling up interesting (and not overwhelming). The game offers many opportunities for skill checks (via thresholds) in dialogs, for many skills. With party size limited to 4, choosing what skills to level up each time is a challenge, which is good.

Now, for flaws... Unfortunately, this game has many of them.

First of are graphics. I don't usually criticize graphics in an isometric CRPG: this is not the genre where you REALLY need fancy high-poly models, complex shaders, modern animations. Baldur's Gate 3 non-withstanding, an indie CRPG can look like it was made in 1993 and still be great. But here, graphics are actively hurting your experience. Everything is just too damn noisy, especially on planets with weather and/or water. I nearly gave up on Sjo, because the constant rain made me squint just to be able to see characters.

Another problem which don't usually come up is camera controls. They are not exactly bad, but there is something off about them: sometimes, I found myself surprised by the way camera rotated after I pressed rotation keys. I'm not even sure what exactly was wrong, but somehow, something happened that I did not expect.

Combat system is not entirely a loss, but I'll be honest: combats are too easy, and there is absolutely no variations to them. No unique enemies, no bosses. There is no cover system, no AOE skills or grenades, so there is almost no need for movement. All you do is stand in place and fire at enemies (or run to enemy and use melee attacks, but really, there is zero advantage to building a melee character, since the game doesn't have zone-of-control or attacks of opportunity). You can choose to use abilities, but really, they're not THAT interesting or important (aside from the first few combats).

The key to success in combat is critical hits. They deliver MUCH more damage than usual hits, often one-shotting enemies, and you can level up crit probability pretty high. On lower levels, enemies can also one-shot crit your characters, but later in the game, that stops happening. It's an interesting design choice, but since you can't use tactics to increase/decrease critical chance, it doesn't make combat much better - only shorter.

Another problem of the game is the sheer amount of loot. Every enemy drops his weapons, and sometimes armor and accessories, so you'll be swimming in items. Most of them will be useless: common, uncommon and even rare-level guns and plates are replaced by epic and legendary versions some time around mid-game. And there is no button to sell or deconstruct all this trash into components :( Beside generic items, you will also sometimes find named items which have one of several bonus features. Most of them are useless (like "+X% damage when under effect of injector": the lack of difficulty in combat means you won't be using injectors at all), but some are pretty good.

You can also craft weapons at your base. This requires first building weapons crafting station, then buying blueprints for it using science points (a separate concept; you earn them for reading datapads and hacking into computers), then select which types of enchantments you want and pay the price in resources. These items are pretty good - I think they might be better than any named items, even, but the game doesn't really need this feature.

As for resources, you collect them on planets, and also in space. There are many types, but you shouldn't concern yourself with them - just grab everything you see. Beside crafting, you could (and should) use resources to improve planets you "own" (i.e. where you completed all quests to get local factions to join your rebellion). This doesn't do anything, but increases War Score: a parameter which only comes into play in endgame (and then, just barely). Still, it's a resource sink that makes crafting just that much less appealing...

So, bottom line, should you play this game? I'd say yes: it's only ~15 hours long, and the core mechanic loop is solid despite everything else. But it's not a game you will love, so leave it for a rainy day between more interesting releases, or a sale. Of course, if you're someone like me who plays anything isometric and turn-based, then, by any means, buy it and play it: you will find it at least compares favorably to likes of Broken Roads and Balrum and AntharioN. Which, unfortunately, isn't saying much.

Aether & Iron is a visual novel with skill checks and combat encounters, which puts it in the same sub-genre as, say, Banner Saga, even though everything else about these games is as different as possible.

In this game, you play as Gia Randazzo, a smuggler in alternate reality 1930's New York, which has taken to the sky with the help of substance called aether. Surprisingly, this did nothing to solve American city's problems, and now Heights rule all, Uppers live in relative comfort, and Lowers survive the best they can, being nearest to a gravitational anomaly called The Well, which may or may not be a consequence of Aether use. Gia has been down on her luck after a job that went wrong, and, to rebuild her career, takes an offer to shuttle a girl from Heights to Lowers. Is she a rich dame going slumming, or something more? Of course, nothing is ever simple.

The best thing about this game for me is graphics. I absolutely loved both characters (especially our heroine - and believe me, it's a rare compliment coming from me, as I usually have about zero feelings about looks of video game protagonists) and backgrounds. 3D models are less interesting, but serviceable.

Combat is also interesting. It's turn-based, but since we fight in cars, it has some unique features. For example, movement cost is direction based: gaining on other cars has one cost, changing lanes another, and moving backwards (braking) is free. Incoming obstacles also play a huge role. They make the battlefield dynamic, changing it every round. Lanes may appear or disappear, hazards may make lanes or separate cells more dangerous or harder to drive through. Combined with the ability to shove other cars, this makes things interesting.

While I applaud this effort to create a turn-based implementation of vehicular combat, I think the system isn't used to its full potential. Even though most (all?) encounters are hand-crafted, there is not enough variety, and, to be honest, they all feel pretty much the same. Even boss encounters mostly differ only in that boss cars have a lot of HP. There are barely any additional goals, and none trick encounters. Which is a pity, because I think this combat system can be used for more fun things.

The story mostly managed to keep me interested, although I think it's a bit too naive at times, especially for a purportedly noir game. The quality takes a bit of a hit in the third chapter (I really don't understand how you go from organizing a jazz concert to a full-scale rebellion), and the ending feels rushed - like the authors ran out of time and money.

Still, the game certainly worth a look, and if they ever get to release a sequel, I'm buying it. Unfortunately, this looks unlikely at present, because game's Steam forums are almost dead, so it seems it failed to attract a lot of attention from players, which is a pity. Go ahead, give it a try (there is a free demo even!).

The second game from authors of ATOM RPG, Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy retains many mechanics from its predecessor (and therefore, from early Fallout games), even if they're now dressed up in fantasy clothes instead of Soviet post-apocalypsis. World map, crafting, pick-pocketing, trading, most of character development - everything would be familiar to players who already tried ATOM.

Aside from setting, the biggest changes are in combat. First, it is switchable between RTwP and turn-based modes. I played the whole game in TB, only switching to RTwP due to mis-clicks, so I can't say much about this mode, but turn-based one works better than combat in ATOM RPG, in my opinion. The main addition is combat abilities, which modify attack cost, damage and additional status effects. Knockdown/Stun is the most useful of them, and mastering its use makes combat pretty easy, for the most part, especially after you get a full party: 3-4 knockdowns on the first turn render most encounters trivial.

Bosses are all immune to knockdowns (but not other effects, though I think Confusion - which makes the target move and attack randomly - maybe also doesn't work). Unfortunately, there is little else to distinguish them: they are all big piles of HP with attacks that deal high damage, but there are no "trick battles" or anything else to spice things up. Most players will not be greatly challenged until the very final combat which can be pretty hard, depending on your choices.

Combat abilities are tied to type of weapon (e.g. mace, maul and axe all have different abilities, even if they belong to the same weapon group). Unfortunately, this means you have to heavily specialize your characters in one particular type of weapon, and sell everything that doesn't fit you, even if stats are great: abilities are more useful than raw stats.

The same problem exists for non-combat skills, especially for crafting: if you want to be able to craft top-tier items, you need to get your crafting skill to 200, which means pretty much putting all points into it, making the crafting character relatively useless in combat (and of course, you won't be able to upgrade any other skills to any great level, too). I wish the game would be at least a bit more generous with skill points, so you could at least have two high-level skills per character!

Writing, especially English text, I think, improved compared to ATOM RPG, but I also feel that the setting (low-magic fantasy, with a little twist in the end) is too generic compared to USSR vibes of the first game, and dialogues often feel a bit bland, like a translated work that lost all the original colour (the lack of Russian language in the game might be to blame, as I'm pretty sure authors are still better at writing in Russian than in English, and may have been too constrained by the need to write in foreign language). For example, the same thing happened with The Thaumaturge, where the game was much more fun in Russian (and, presumably, in native Polish) than in English.

The plot isn't much to write about: there is apparently some kind of conspiracy, or maybe even more than one, and your party mostly blunders about while people conceal crucial information from you. The twist at the end comes about as somewhat a surprise (story seemed to be heading in a somewhat different direction, but this proved to be a red herring), but I don't think it saves the whole thing. Mind you, the plot isn't bad or anything, but I just didn't feel any special emotions about either the main quest, or side quests.

One of my biggest gripes with writing is the amount of false choices in dialogues: it is very often doesn't matter what line you choose. This is especially tiresome in the dialogue before the final battle, where you might refuse to listen to final boss' arguments, but he will tell you them anyway, at length, and force you to ask questions. Since I was forced to repeat that interaction quite a few times, I found myself longing for a simple "Attack!" option (admittedly, it is present in many other dialogues in the game).

The game offers a number of companions with fixed names and personalities. You get one out of several available at the start of the game (I think this is based on your chosen class), and then can find a few more during the game (but none of the starting ones). Companions voice their opinions at the crucial points in the game, which is maybe 3-4 times. Otherwise, they might as well be nameless henchmen. There is apparently a romance somewhere, but I missed it.

All in all, the game isn't bad, but isn't particularly great, either. It's a competent generic RPG, with good enough exploration, combat and side-quests that doesn't make its 40-hours length too tiring (but only if you use x2 time scale, because otherwise walking around huge locations takes too long). Get it on a sale, if you want to try it.