{"id":1008,"date":"2013-09-30T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/?p=1008"},"modified":"2013-09-30T10:22:40","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T09:22:40","slug":"mars-war-logs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/30\/mars-war-logs\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars War Logs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mars-war-logs\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just finished \u201cMars: War Logs\u201d, and I wanted to share some impressions about the game\u2026<\/p>\n

At first glance, this is a gorgeous RPG, a bit in the vein of \u201cMass Effect\u201d (more action\/combat oriented)\u2026 The story takes place in a post-colonization Mars, where war is raging between guilds for control of the water.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also \u201cTechnomancers\u201d to give the extra \u201cmagic-feel\u201d to this sci-fi RPG\u2026<\/p>\n

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\u2026 It might get old after a bit (budgets stretch only that far), but it never became a deal breaker\u2026<\/p>\n

The dialogues are relatively well written, and the voice acting is pretty good\u2026 <\/p>\n

Combat is action-oriented, and it has some interesting ideas (dodging, for example)\u2026 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\u2019t be a problem by itself, if it wasn\u2019t the fact they did a very questionable design decision: every time you get hit, the ability you had underway gets cancelled\u2026 this means that you spent most of the end fights \u201cstun-locked\u201d, which is quite annoying (you\u2019re not playing, you\u2019re just waiting for a small opening so you can do something)\u2026 Making the ability take longer when under attack would have been preferable, in my opinion\u2026<\/p>\n

The other questionable part is the story and characters\u2026 The characters are exceptionally clich\u00e9 (which is kind of annoying considering the work in making the rest of the world feel less clich\u00e9)\u2026 This by itself wouldn\u2019t be that bad, if it wasn\u2019t the fact that they decided to follow the \u201cMass Effect\u201d route of \u201cromantically entanglements\u201d, but since the characters are so \u201cbland\u201d, it doesn\u2019t look probable and it kind of spoils my suspension of disbelief.<\/p>\n

Considering that this game doesn\u2019t have the budget of a \u201cMass Effect\u201d, it is an extraordinary achievement and it might lead itself to a good series, hopefully fixing what\u2019s wrong with it in the first place\u2026<\/p>\n

On another note, the game led me to think about sexism in games\u2026 the industry is abuzz with it, so when I was playing this game I was caught thinking about it\u2026 The female characters in this game are all extremely weak (we\u2019ve got two prostitutes, one \u201cfreedom-fighter\u201d with a heart of gold, and a weirdo sexy technomancer that thrives on open-sexuality), but it had the potential to be much better\u2026 the writing skills are there (most of the game writing seem quite natural, which is good), but the clich\u00e9 annoyed me a bit (even if I don\u2019t normally think about that very much, call me privileged)\u2026<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019d recommend this game if you like solid RPG that aren\u2019t mainstream opus that take forever to finish!<\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just finished \u201cMars: War Logs\u201d, and I wanted to share some impressions about the game\u2026 At first glance, this is a gorgeous RPG, a bit in the vein of \u201cMass Effect\u201d (more action\/combat oriented)\u2026 The story takes place in a post-colonization Mars, where war is raging between guilds for control of the water. There\u2019s also […]<\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[214,213,75,63,203],"class_list":["post-1008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","tag-logs","tag-mars","tag-review","tag-rpg","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1009,"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions\/1009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}