Just finished “Mars: War Logs”, and I wanted to share some impressions about the game…
At first glance, this is a gorgeous RPG, a bit in the vein of “Mass Effect” (more action/combat oriented)… The story takes place in a post-colonization Mars, where war is raging between guilds for control of the water.
There’s also “Technomancers” to give the extra “magic-feel” to this sci-fi RPG…
The atmosphere is very good, everything being gritty (instead of the usual clean look of space operas), and some of the visuals are very pretty… It might get old after a bit (budgets stretch only that far), but it never became a deal breaker…
The dialogues are relatively well written, and the voice acting is pretty good…
Combat is action-oriented, and it has some interesting ideas (dodging, for example)… but here the game starts showing its issues. I think the balancing is really off, because the usual solution to any fight to make it harder is to add enemies to it (instead of smarter/more powerful ones). This wouldn’t be a problem by itself, if it wasn’t the fact they did a very questionable design decision: every time you get hit, the ability you had underway gets cancelled… this means that you spent most of the end fights “stun-locked”, which is quite annoying (you’re not playing, you’re just waiting for a small opening so you can do something)… Making the ability take longer when under attack would have been preferable, in my opinion…
The other questionable part is the story and characters… The characters are exceptionally cliché (which is kind of annoying considering the work in making the rest of the world feel less cliché)… This by itself wouldn’t be that bad, if it wasn’t the fact that they decided to follow the “Mass Effect” route of “romantically entanglements”, but since the characters are so “bland”, it doesn’t look probable and it kind of spoils my suspension of disbelief.
Considering that this game doesn’t have the budget of a “Mass Effect”, it is an extraordinary achievement and it might lead itself to a good series, hopefully fixing what’s wrong with it in the first place…
On another note, the game led me to think about sexism in games… the industry is abuzz with it, so when I was playing this game I was caught thinking about it… The female characters in this game are all extremely weak (we’ve got two prostitutes, one “freedom-fighter” with a heart of gold, and a weirdo sexy technomancer that thrives on open-sexuality), but it had the potential to be much better… the writing skills are there (most of the game writing seem quite natural, which is good), but the cliché annoyed me a bit (even if I don’t normally think about that very much, call me privileged)…
Anyway, I’d recommend this game if you like solid RPG that aren’t mainstream opus that take forever to finish!