[Click here to start from the first progress log]

I suppose it’s telling that when handed several natural stopping points between story beats, I instead chose to continue playing. And playing. And playing. All the way to the end, in fact, and then a little more to experiment with wiping every other faction out (because I didn’t expect the game to suddenly end after defeating the cocky “order” faction). Having now finished the game, I can say that I’m incredibly impressed by the quality and addictiveness of the experience, though I’ve found one or two things to criticize since my fawning initial assessment. Still, this is an amazing game when taken as a whole, and a few minor niggles hardly diminish that.

There’s a betrayal in here somewhere

I ended up recording all 11 hours it took to finish the game on the recommended “normal” difficulty, but ultimately deleted the later videos to avoid giving away too much. That just leaves gameplay like this around the halfway point, which happens to be when I researched and developed monsters to bring into combat as ancillary units. It’s also possible to bring robotic drones into combat, but I found the monsters more useful (especially once you upgrade your ship to allow you to bring four).

At 15:52, the “mechanist” faction that I had been allied with basically declares war on my people. The reason their leader Redeye gives for this is that I willingly sacrificed characters—which is true; there was an earlier suicide mission that led to me throwing some people to the wolves for the greater good—reducing lives to currency in the process. That makes me wonder if it’s possible to stay in his good graces by simply ignoring the suicide mission (if that’s even possible) and playing along during another event in which I encouraged him to stand up to some supposed defectors.

Part of what makes me so curious about this is the ending. The first ending I got where a faction was left intact was very definitely a “bad” ending, but it’s entirely possible that this is because they’re an evil faction. The mechanists, on the other hand, were surprisingly friendly up until the betrayal. Then there’s the ending you get when all other factions are wiped out, which continues the game for another 30 minutes or so and is pretty clearly a kind of “good” ending. Part of me suspects that the mechanists have to be wiped out one way or another, but it’s hard to be sure.

The battle to finally topple the mechanists is at 22:32, and my strategy by this point was to have everyone rush the enemy and attack as quickly as possible while my monsters distracted them. You can see that this strategy barely eked out a win here, and that spike in difficulty lasted all the way to the ending. Winning battles eventually required lots of save/loading to experiment with different tactics and weaponry, and while that might not sound like a lot of fun, this might actually be the most fun I had with the game. Overcoming the odds with creative planning is very rewarding, and playing around with strategies is easy since there are few limits on saving and loading. You can’t save in battles, obviously, but you can quicksave immediately before them and then quickload the second things don’t pan out as expected. This encourages experimentation and makes overcoming brutal difficulty spikes fun.

Some minor issues I’ve found

It doesn’t show up so much in the video above, but the lightning strikes are frequent enough that the flashing can get to be a bit much during darker maps. I fully understand why this is (the storms factor heavily into the story), but there are still moments where it feels like overkill. The more obvious problem in the video above, however, is the bug that occurs 28 seconds in. Basically, the camera gets teleported (at least, I think that’s what’s happening), with only the more dramatic—but less practical—”cinematic” camera actually functioning. That’s not all, though, because the AI appears to completely stop working. I have a single party member left, and yet both they and the remaining enemies ignore each other. I also stumbled across a weird bug where a bunch of my party members’ perks refused to lock in. It took something like three attempts before they finally took. Minor, but bugs nevertheless.

Some of the body augmentations can look kind of silly in the way they alter character portraits. I mean, it’s great that a character whose eyes are removed has that reflected in their portrait, don’t get me wrong, but the art styles don’t really mesh. This isn’t always the case, though, with the stat-altering tattoos looking totally natural. It’s just the robotic/synthetic stuff that starts to look a little strange.

I’m not entirely comfortable calling this an “issue,” but it’s definitely kind of strange how there’s exactly one occasion in the entire game where you have to send off a three-person party to do some combat stuff on their own. Really, though, my problem is that the justification for the whole thing seems a little on the thin side given the freezer of possible characters apparently unaccounted for. Yeah, everyone but the chosen three are needed for an attack, but why can’t we unfreeze a few dudes and dudettes to make up the difference and let me use a normal-sized team?

Like I said, though, these problems don’t diminish how much fun the rest of the game is, and it’s really saying something when a game can get me deeply interested in real-time strategy without becoming overly frustrating or opaque in the process.

[Click here to go to Tempest Citadel log #2]

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