Inquisitor - Martyr, a tragic case of wasted potential

 [Introduction]

Inquisitor is advertised as an isometric action roleplaying game.
Put simply, it's a Diablo clone. It does pretty much everything Diablo does. The perspective, the controls, the skill trees, the loot, the item quality, the hordes of enemies... the only exceptions seem to be the absence of item durability, an open world and a compelling story.
Let's begin.

[First Impressions]

I expected Inquisitor - Martyr to be... okay. Not great, but okay. The devs had previously made The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, which was also okay. Unfortunately, my expectations of a "not great but okay" game kinda went down the drain pretty quick. The dialogue isn't very good, the gravitas of the situation falls flat as soon as you begin crushing enemy resistance like crunchy leaves and the story immediately raises more questions than it seems ready to answer.

[Development]

Developed by Neocore Games and announced in 2015, Inquisitor - Martyr was released in 2018.
I haven't been able to find much else pertaining to development, but it feels as though it was rushed. I don't know that it was, so take this with a grain of salt, but based on the final product, my assumption is that the development cycle was either cut short or something somehow went wrong somewhere.

However, it should be noted that it was much more of a buggy mess at release. Following the 2.0 total overhaul update in 2019, it became far more tolerable.

[Game Mechanics]

Before anything else, it should be said that Inquisitor - Martyr feels a little unpolished; there's a jank to it that makes it feel like an early access title in some regards.

Now, the game is ostensibly about an Inquisitor's investigation, but you'll be doing exactly 0 investigating, which strikes me as a tremendous waste. It makes me wonder: why even have us play as an Inquisitor? Considering that the gameplay is entirely focused on combat, you'd think it would make more sense to have us play as a space marine of the Adeptus Astartes or a Tempestus Scions stormtrooper.

Additionally, there's a distinct lack of a retinue. Ordinarily, an Inquisitor would have a number of companions with him on his investigation. Soldiers, psykers, bureaucrats, assassins, people who provide some service or another useful to the situation.

Instead, you're on your own. Not that it matters, because you're not really going to be needing a whole lot of help. Lorewise, there are Inquisitors who are combat monsters, but those tend to be the likes of Tyrus, who single-handedly banished a daemon prince, or Hector Rex, a literal giant who defeated the greatest of Khorne's Bloodthirsters by himself. Seeing how you're apparently not even important enough to warrant a retinue, it just feels out of place to be the deadliest person in the sector, despite the presence of space marines and greater daemons.

Naturally, seeing how you'll be killing thousands of enemies, you'll also be picking up an absurd amount of useless trash items. Fortunately your inventory is quite large and there's an option for auto-pickup, but you'll be selling or scrapping something like 95% of what you pick up.

This is in part because many of the items you acquire will have modifiers of questionable usefulness. They also appear to be entirely randomized by an automatic loot system, so you'll also come across items that have modifiers that appear to be more well-suited for an entirely different class to boot.

I'm also not sure why quality is even a tracked item stat. It never seems to be relevant And there are a whopping 8 item rarity levels. Ironically, uncommon and rare items are anything but, and you'll be acquiring a substantial amount of them, to the point that common items become rarer than both of them.

As for skills, there are a lot of passive skill trees (some of which must be unlocked?) and some of those passive skills feel like padding more than anything else. 5% extra move speed when wielding heavy weapons never seemed particularly relevant, especially when you can just swap to a lighter weapon at the press of a button. At least you gain experience at a high enough rate that you're unlikely to feel as though you can't fill out the skill trees you desire.

Glaringly, the world isn't open, which is a weird choice for a Diablo clone. Instead, you go back to the bridge of your ship between missions, where you can choose where to go next. I think the intention was to provide additional replay value or extend playthrough time by providing randomized missions from this hub, but there's little difference between randomized missions and story missions insofar as they play exactly the same.

There's a crafting system, but it's exceptionally grindy and the results are very RNG reliant. You get useless items out of it so frequently that you may as well not even try, thanks in large part due to the aforementioned randomized item generation and questionably useful modifiers.

Weapon variety is solid, but some seem redundant... sure, you can bring an autogun, but why bother when you can equip a bolter instead? Sure, the autogun is great for mowing down lightly armored groups of enemies, but... the bolter can fire frag rounds that blow up entire crowds at a time. Choosing between what amounts to a 21st century assault rifle and a .75 caliber automatic rocket launcher that fires exploding bricks made of zeal and spite, it's kind of a no-brainer.

The game also isn't very hard, and even special challenge missions aren't particularly challenging; the tarots that add mission difficulty modifiers in exchange for extra rewards don't do much in this regard either. Chances are, if you die, it's more likely to be due to some poorly telegraphed attack or post-death explosion than anything else.

The cover system has omnipresent notifications but is largely pointless, which ties into the aforementioned UI clutter. At least you can turn off half of the notification, but it will retain an indicator for some reason. Surely if I turn off the cover notification in the options menu, it's because I don't want to see a constant reminder of where I can take cover.

The cover system is completely useless to boot, although it should be noted that you can destroy enemy cover. As enemies frequently take cover (due to the player being a self-propelled instrument of destruction) it's pretty neat that some weapons will affect cover in various ways. Satisfyingly enough, bolters will actually visibly chew through cover. And other objects.

Most objects, really. Even the floor, although you can't fall through those holes. If nothing else, they certainly did the bolter justice. Sometimes it'll cause your brain to enter Ork territory and you end up just shooting stuff ineffectively because it looks and sounds cool. At that point, if you kill something, it's a happy accident. That, I can appreciate.

Some mechanics occasionally don't work as intended - for example, alarms will sometimes still activate, even though you destroyed them. Voice lines during gameplay also occasionally drop in quality and start stuttering, although I have no idea why.

There are attempts to spice things up with vehicle sections, but they feel like an afterthought and neither the game's engine nor controls seem particularly well-suited for their implementation.

Oh, and at least one mission failed to load and just froze the game. One of the Drukhari missions. I'll never know where it was going.

[Graphics]

Not bad at all; the scale of 40k is on point. The actual scaling of some characters and objects seems inconsistent, however, but that's a minor gripe. Similarly, some character design choices are weird, such as the tattoo eyebrows on one guy.

Generally speaking, it's a visually satisfying game. It might not be particularly realistic looking, but realism isn't what you really want in a Warhammer game. That said, the areas can be rather bland, so if you're expecting a wide variety, you might want to temper that expectation. Whether you're in a hive city or aboard a ship, there's gonna be a lot of muted colors and a lot of metal.

Also, for whatever reason, subtitles for other characters appear next to their Space Webcam feed in the top right. In contrast, subtitles for your own dialogue appear at the bottom of the screen, which just seems like a weird UI decision. It necessitates that you move between two separate locations to keep track of dialogue - three, if you also count the dialogue that appears above characters' heads.

Really, the UI is generally quite cluttered. It can be annoying to navigate.

[Story]

You play as an Inquisitor, although it's never specified which Ordo you belong to. You're on a mission to discover the truth regarding another Inquisitor, Uther Tiberius, and what occurred aboard the Martyr. Near as I can tell, it's some class of cruiser, perhaps Gothic, but it doesn't matter. According to the game, it's a Fortress Monastery.

Now, if you know Warhammer 40,000, then you probably know why this is a... questionable designation. If you don't, then let me explain: Fortress Monasteries do exist in the setting. The issue is that they have nothing to do with the Inquisition, but are the headquarters of Space Marine Chapters.

Anyway, you shuttle from your own ship to the Martyr to begin your investigation. I'm not sure why the developers insisted on using a valkyrie transport for this purpose, considering that the valkyrie is an atmospheric transport. The Imperium has dedicated transports designed for use in space, and they even have existing models that are very detailed.

But I digress. You make it to the Martyr, and the hangar defense turrets immediately open fire on you. Fortunately you survive both the plasma fire and the crash, but no one else aboard does, and so you're left alone. This is also questionable, because ordinarily an Inquisitor would have some kind of retinue, but not us.

The rest of the game is a sequence of "investigations" - by which I mean you fight your way through missions until you reach a bit of dialogue at the end, at which point the mission ends. In other words, there's no actual investigating going on.

The story is, frankly, a mess, and not a very interesting mess. It's ostensibly about an Inquisitor's investigation, but is actually just a string of weak dialogue whose only function is tying together sequences of effortlessly killing a staggering number of enemies.

The voice acting of that dialogue is, for the most part, subpar. Sometimes it doesn't even match what's presented to the player on screen. For example, there's a moment where the player character remarks on the presence of dead bodies, but... there are no dead bodies in sight, just a bit of blood on the ground.

There's also a very real chance that bits of dialogue will get skipped if you keep moving around while it plays out, because if you trigger new dialogue, it overwrites the old dialogue. So on top of the story already playing fast and loose with a lot of Warhammer lore and not being particularly good, you might also miss out on important parts of it.

Throughout the game, you also make a number of "Morality Choices" as part of your investigation, which could be an interesting element. The hard choices Inquisitors have to make are an integral part of their profession and a key reason so many people fear and hate them. That's why it's so unfortunate they really don't do much and are based on the barest explanation of a given situation.

There's no further investigation and all gravitas one might apply to the situation is effectively moot, because it doesn't matter. Even the characters involved in the decision barely react in any way beyond the simplest of responses.

I will also confess that by the end of it all, I'd forgotten most of the previous story elements leading up to that point.

[SPOILERS]

You find the Alpha Pariah and she destroys a Greater Daemon.

She doesn't banish it. It's not reforming in the Warp after being killed on the material plane. It is fucking GONE, permanently, which means a fragment of a Chaos God has been obliterated. This ups the stakes a lot; I cannot overstate how significant it is that a small part of Nurgle is now just gone forever.

So where do they go with this from there? No idea. That's where the main story ends, and I'm not paying 25 bucks for the standalone DLC. Supposedly the Alpha Pariah just ends up flying into a Warp rift and closing it while saying something about how the immaterium must be ruled.

[Pros]

- Mowing down enemies can be fun

- Bolters feel like bolters

[Cons]

- Mowing down enemies is pretty much all you'll be doing

- Tremendous wasted potential; this game could have been so much more, and so much better

- The story is fairly uninteresting

- Lore accuracy is wishy-washy most of the time

- Lootboxes

[Conclusion]

It's mediocre Diablo clone with good bolter portrayal at best. I really don't have much else to say.
Wasted potential is one of the saddest things in the world. Moral compass optional.

[Score]

4/10

/DUX

Sunless Skies, a Victorian amalgam of forbidden knowledge and cursed truths

 [Introduction]

Labelling itself as a "gothic horror roleplay game," Sunless Skies is a sequel to Sunless Sea, both in terms of release dates and the actual in-game setting. It also happens to be something of a rollercoaster ride, starting out fairly straightforward - at least as straightforward as captaining a flying locomotive in space can be - and alternating between insane revelations and rather mundane transit between ports.

[First Impressions]

I won't lie, when I first played it, I really wasn't into this game. It took a couple tries before it gripped me, and I think it's largely due to the starting area of the first region being fairly standard, despite the supposed fantastical nature of the game. There were a couple interesting tidbits, but I didn't return to it after ending what amounts to the tutorial for a long time.
Then, when I did return, I started exploring more, and what I found intrigued me enough to keep going.

[Development]

A year after its predecessor was released in 2015, Sunless Skies was announced at the EGX Expo. A year after that, a Kickstarter was launched. That's right, Sunless Skies qualifies as a Kickstarter game. Out of the initial goal of £100,000, a whopping £377,952 was raised from 11,739 backers, beating the development cost by almost £50,000. Not bad.

The game itself runs on Unity, which may explain some optimisation issues still present to this day, into which FailBetter have integrated their own proprietary narrative platform called StoryNexus. How exactly this works is a mystery I won't pretend to hold the answer to - suffice it to say that it works.

What didn't work so well was the initial release date. While the early access was successfully scheduled for 2017, the full 2018 release got pushed back to 2019, with the game finally releasing in January of that year. However, development didn't stop then; in fact, it never stopped. Despite periods of silence from the developers, patches were released through 2019, 2020 and 2021, albeit irregularly.

Most significantly, and happening to coincide with this review, FailBetter released a monster of an update in the form of the Sovereign Edition May 19th 2021. PC players who already owned Sunless Skies received this edition free of charge and a similar release is expected across all remaining platforms (meaning Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch).

While not quite a total overhaul, the Sovereign Edition does feature all previous content released for the game, as well as new narrative elements and general improvements to gameplay. Although this is expected to be the final update, it should be said that it's readily apparent that Sunless Skies has been a labor of love, which is much rarer than I care to think about much these days.

[Game Mechanics]

The player takes the role of a captain who inherits a flying locomotive (i.e. "Engine") from the previous captain following their untimely and apparently excruciating demise. At least I assume it was excruciating, given she was literally vomiting flames, but I digress.

With this engine, you'll be doing whatever you want. I don't mean that as in "this is a sandbox, do whatever" but rather "choose a goal and work towards it." You see, during character creation, you not only pick a past and a portrait, you also choose an ambition, which will determine your victory condition for the playthrough.

In that sense, Sunless Skies is open ended, because there's really no ending to the game itself, only your character's story. Everything around you will keep going, after all, we're talking about a world where the Queen of England has moved London into space, destroyed a sun and become the immortal Renewed Empress. One dude (or dudette) with a space train isn't gonna put much of a dent in that.

That's not to say you won't have any impact at all, however. The game is heavily story-driven and focuses primarily on story and exploration. There's combat, but frankly it's just kind of there. It can be satisfying, don't misunderstand, but it's probably not the main reason you're playing the game.

During your travels, you'll need to keep your engine and its crew going with fuel and supplies respectively. As you acquire new engines, equipment and crew, requirements will change, usually in the sense that you'll need more fuel to keep going and more supplies to feed the crew. Granted, you can survive for a while without supplies, and there will be opportunities for... improvising, let's say, but if your fuel runs out you only get a few chances to remedy that. And those chances might go horribly wrong.

Other than that, your main concern is terror and nightmares. The High Wilderness is a scary place, regardless of whether you're in the Reach or any of the other regions. During your commute to deliver trade goods to a port, you can encounter all sorts of horrors that want you dead, whether they be pirates or enormous sea urchin (space urchin?) that will do their damnedest to make sure you don't arrive in one piece.

Exploration, needless to say, is hazardous to your health, both physical and mental, but every discovery is well worth facing the menaces on the way and never feel recycled or underwhelming. Similarly, visiting a new port for the first time never stops being exciting. On top of that, it's all incredibly well-complemented by the game's soundscape.

Something so simple as the sound of rain will change depending on region and locale. It might sound insignificant, but across the board, I was impressed by the quality of the sound effects and music. It's not only enjoyable, it's also thoroughly immersive. In addition, the music is outstanding as well, and the transition between regional soundscapes is seamless.

Granted, it's not all fun and games. Everything costs you something, most frequently money, and to acquire most things, you'll have to work for them. Particularly money. This means you'll spend a great deal of your time in transit between ports, not necessarily exploring, because before you can explore, some groundwork must be laid.

That said, it's possible to tweak the difficulty to be more lenient in terms of fuel and supply consumption, so if you're less interested in dire circumstances and just want the exploration element, that's entirely possible, and a very welcome addition to the game's options menu.

Finally, as stated earlier, the game has some performance issues. They're not crippling or gamebreaking, but it can be frustrating to have the game freeze for several seconds for no apparent reason. I have also experienced extended loading times for port menus after running the game for extended periods, and while it never made me want to stop playing, it's something to keep in mind.

[Graphics]

This is a gorgeous game.
The art is hand-drawn and is the end product of a tremendous artistic endeavor to bring the setting to life. The otherworldly and fantastical nature of the setting can make certain elements hard to grasp entirely, and although the writing is descriptive, I very much appreciate the effort to provide visuals  that are as closely aligned to the writers' vision as possible.

[Story]

Welcome to the High Wilderness of Fallen London.
What we have here is a weird mix between outer space and the sky. Maybe. It's unclear. A lot of things are unclear, including what the hell happened to concepts such as "directions" and "time" and "workers' rights." I'm not kidding, either. Compasses are literally useless now, time exists as a physical resource that can be exploited and the aforementioned time can be used to dilate the flow of time, enabling the working class to accomplish a year's worth of work in only a month.

That's not to say they work faster. It's more like they're put in a bubble of accelerated time. They still feel a year go by. The outside just doesn't. It might even still age them by a year, even though the rest of the world only experienced a month passing. So time is fucky, and so is everything else.

Pretty much anything that used to be considered fantastical or supernatural is now mundane. For example, Hell is real and the devils who live there make an inordinate amount of money by selling cheap fuel and removing flaws from people's souls. Sometimes they straight up remove the souls from people if they're tired of having one. It's a seller's market.

The Fallen London setting is weird and freaky and I love it. Every time I learn more about it, I get more excited to find out what other weird shit is waiting for me. Incidentally, this is why I haven't attached any screenshots to this review. I don't want to spoil anything if I can help it. I only tentatively added any real details to the review in the first place because it would be barren otherwise, seeing how the story and the setting are the main draws for the game.

As for your character's own story, that's entirely up to you. Every lineage gets a unique version of the world. What I mean by this is that every starting character also comes with a "lineage," so if you die, you instead take over as someone who is somehow related to or acquainted with the late captain, similar to how your first character inherited the locomotive in the first place.

Everything your character experiences and does gets passed on. If you helped a port build anything, then that building is still there for whoever is next in line. I hesitate to call the game a roguelike, but this particular feature is definitely roguelike in nature. So roguelike-like, I guess.

[SPOILERS]

I won't go into too much detail here, but I will tell you about a realisation I had upon reaching Albion. You see, prior to leaving the Reach, I was pretty much clueless about why the Tacketies were fighting the Stovepipes. I just picked a side, mostly arbitrarily, and kept going. Later, I understood why some people want independence from London.

I thought New Manchester was supposed to be a busy port. It's not. Not compared to London. No, because London has become a weird multi-layer steampunk megacity floating in space above the husk of a dead sun, next to an artificial clockwork sun. It's like a hive city from Warhammer 40,000, except it took part of a Victorian space program in the early 1900s.

People here are literally worked to death by exploiting time being all fucky. Workers have no rights beyond their usefulness as cogs in a machine and no function beyond labor. The upper classes extend their lives almost endlessly while feuding amongst one another for the favor of the Renewed Empress.

And that clockwork sun I mentioned? Turns out the light from it is straight up poison. It literally turns people into glass, and if you approach it (yes, it's an actual location that can be visited), you'll see that there's something off about its light. It's a pale white, and it looks almost out of focus, like it's washed out.

Similarly, London's Great Bell,, popularly known as Big Ben, is still around. But its chimes are... wrong. They sound out of tune. It's a nice audible indication that, as implied and even confirmed throughout the game, time is out of whack.

No wonder people wanted to get away from London's influence. It's a horrid and dismal place.

I love it.

[Pros]

- The setting is bizarre, unique and highly enjoyable

- Exploration is very rewarding and consistently yields amazing experiences

- Combat is passable at worst and much better than Sunless Sea

- The soundscape is phenomenal

[Cons]

- Occasional stutters and freezes

- Transit can be quite mundane

- You'll spend a lot of time in transit

- Combat is the least interesting part of the game

[Conclusion]

Sunless Skies is not without its flaws, and it's not for everyone. Which is a shame, because I sincerely wish that everyone could experience this insane hodgepodge of gothic horror and excitement for exploration. I speak no hyperbole when I say that I've never quite experienced anything like Sunless Skies, and I don't think I ever will again.
May God be with us, for a thousand deaths wait in the sky. Moral compass optional.

[Score]

9/10

/DUX

Space Marine, Ultramarines; Ultraviolence

  [Introduction]

Here's an oddity: a third person shooter hack'n'slash Warhammer 40k game.
The oddity isn't so much the genre combination, but rather how good it is. Lord knows there have been some mediocre and downright terrible Warhammer 40k games in the past. I'm very happy that this isn't one of them. As the name implies, you get to play as a space marine, the stompy Captain Titus of the Ultramarines, along with all that this entails.
And it's pretty God-Emperor damn cathartic.

[First Impressions]

Space Marine starts as it means to go on. The menu screen is just Titus fighting orks.
Then the first thing you see your character do is jump out of a dropship with a fucking jetpack, because just letting gravity pull you towards the surface is not fast enough. You land on a ship in low orbit and immediately begin stabbing orks with a knife so big it may as well be a sword, and shooting them with a gun chambered for rocket-propelled grenades. Then you crash the ship.
Nice.

[Development]

Exactly when development began is unknown, although trailers were released as early as 2009. What is known is that a demo was made available in August of 2011, a mere month prior to release in September that same year. Whenever it started, development doesn't seem to have been terribly troubled. This may largely be due to the fact that Relic hired folks with experience developing for consoles.

Some of the new hires previously worked on titles like Gears of War and God of War, and while I initially figured they probably brought some elements from those titles along, upon retrospect I'm not so sure. The former is very cover-heavy while the latter has a big focus on combos and spectacle. Space Marine, meanwhile doesn't bother with cover at all and isn't so much a combo spectacle as it is a sequence of bloody firefights that happen to feature melee weapons.

Going back to the trailers, the pre-release footage offers a glimpse at what was going on. Models for both orks and space marines were quite different, and there may have been an intent to add a co-op campaign. Certain enemies, such as ork deff dreads, also appear in the trailers, but not in the released game. Curiously, many of the models in question seem similar or even identical to ones used in Dawn of War 2, released in 2009, the same year as the earliest trailer I'm aware of.

[Game Mechanics]

When I said that you get to play a space marine along with all that this entails, I meant it. Space Marine is absolutely brutal in its portrayal of combat in the 41st millennium. As an 8 foot genetically enhanced superhuman kitted out with power armor, a chainsword and a bolter, you're effectively the most dangerous thing on a battlefield that isn't a tank. Even that would be debatable.

Consequently, you're not gonna be using cover much, if at all. Anything out of arm's reach is gonna get peppered with .75 calibre rockets and anything that makes it past the hail of munitions will get a healthy helping of whatever melee weapon you're carrying around.

That's not to say that the terrain doesn't come into play, mind you. Despite being literally engineered for maximum killing prowess, you're still one guy squaring down with a planetary invasion force. Choke points are your friend, and so is the high ground. In the event you need to recover your shield, ducking behind anything bigger than yourself will suffice. You should also avoid backing yourself into a corner. Always leave space to reposition.

Also, those aforementioned .75 calibre rockets? Bolters won't be the only thing in your arsenal, although you are always going to have one handy, along with your sidearm. This starts out as a bolt pistol, but eventually gets upgraded to a plasma pistol. On top of these, you have 2 weapon slots that you have free reign over.

The other weapons at your disposal are as follows:
Plasma guns (which can be charged for a powerful shot exploding on impact);
Vengeance launchers (essentially sticky grenade launchers whose munitions can be detonated in flight);
Storm bolters (which are basically two bolters strapped together for maximum dakka);
Melta guns (think fusion-powered shotgun that instantly melts anything in a short cone in front of you);
Stalker bolters (a sniper bolter);
Lascannons (scoped laser cannon intended to defeat tank armor);
Plasma cannons (upscaled plasma gun, found as a mounted gun once);
Heavy bolters (upscaled bolters loaded with 1.00 calibre rockets instead, found as mounted guns);
Autocannons (basically a man-portable Bofors gun, found as a mounted gun once).

And those are just the ranged weapons. When the fighting turns melee, you've got:
Combat knives (knives so large they're basically swords);
Chainswords (chainsaws that are also swords);
Power axes (axes that disrupt the molecular binding of anything they hit);
Thunder hammers (hammers that disrupt the molecular binding of anything they hit, but explosively);

There are frequent opportunities to switch between weapons once they have been introduced, allowing for substantial leniency in establishing a rapport with each weapon and deciding whether or not it fits your playstyle. Plasma cannons, heavy bolters and autocannons are, unfortunately, very limited in availability and are discarded once ammunition runs out.

Space Marine strikes a solid balance between the usefulness of ranged weapons and relevancy of melee weapons, and neither ever become obsolete. Most fights can be approached as either a firefight or a melee battle, but ideally both weapon groups should be taken into account and brought to bear.

Certain weapons are also better used against some enemies rather than others - for example, it'd be a waste to fire a lascannon at a lowly ork boy when there's a nob nearby. Similarly, melta guns are best reserved for groups of enemies instead of lone ones. Nothing prevents you from doing it anyway, there's no denying it's very satisfying, and your sidearm will never run out of ammo so you'll always have a ranged option. But even so, it pays to be economical in your use of munitions.

All melee weapons have a simple combo, which is pretty much just mashing the attack button. The most advanced melee fighting gets is interrupting a combo to use a stun attack instead, which can either provide a stronger stun (for tougher enemies) or an area-of-effect stun (for crowd control).

Finally, if you run low on health, never fear: those stuns come in handy, because stunned enemies can be executed for a health boost. Just remember: you can still take damage while executing enemies, and you don't get healed until the execution is completed. If you're down to an inch of your health bar, you might want to recharge your shield before you attempt an execution.

And that's pretty much it.
The game isn't terribly long, so your arsenal never really gets old.

Oh, and my one gripe: the final boss is a quick time event. It kinda sucks, because every other boss in the game is at least engaging and requires application of what the game has taught you so far. I won't say that it's bad, it's just... kinda lame compared to everything else. It's set up to be a dramatic final fight, and it sure as hell is dramatic in terms of circumstance, but when it's a backdrop to a QTE sequence, it falls a little flat.

[Graphics]

Space Marine looks okay.
I know there's folks out there who might tell me that it looks old, that it doesn't hold up anymore or that its age is showing or something to that effect. I'm not saying those folks are wrong, I'm just saying that it's really not that bad. You'll occasionally run into somewhat low res textures, particularly during close-ups, but nothing struck me as particularly terrible.

This is still a cool looking game, and more importantly it absolutely captures the aesthetic and scale of the setting. Warhammer 40k's Imperium of Man is steeped in superstition to the point that pulling a lever is accompanied with chanting, bell tolling and incense. We're talking about people who have weaponised cathedrals and have perfected genetic engineering, but are terrified of what a Windows 98 computer might do if its raw computing power is left unchecked.

And this is not limited to lever pulling. Consequently, every area you visit may as well double as a shrine, and in fact probably does. Nothing is labelled either, which makes it pretty weird when you approach a radio station and it's just a bunch of levers with a console attached. No one knows how this shit works except the guys who turned ancient instruction manuals into hymns.

That feeling is perfectly captured by Space Marine's aesthetic, and I love it.

However, it should be noted that much of the game is quite limited in its color palate.
I hope you like brown.

[Story]

As an introduction to the Warhammer 40k setting in general, Space Marine isn't great. Very little gets established early on, and we're not really told why anything is happening, only that it is. In terms of establishing motivations, very little is done in the early game.

Later on, some things do get explained, such as the innate drive orks have to loot things and the nature of ork leadership, but nothing advanced. Space Marine isn't an advanced game, so if you're expecting something to the effect of Helsreach by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, you might want to temper your expectations a bit. There's no deep character development, or really any to speak of, despite the opportunity for such being present.

Titus and his squad get the barest of characterisations, which is a shame, because there's a lot to work with. You have Sidonus, the experienced veteran. You have Leandros, the new guy. And you have Titus, a seasoned captain. There's material for something interesting here, particularly considering Titus' pragmatism and Leandros' reliance on the Codex Astartes.

Instead, we get pretty much nothing, and even though I quite like Titus, I'm left wishing there had been more focus on the squad interacting. Something like Republic Commando, maybe. Give us some chatter here and there, beyond just talking a bit about the mission. I understand that these are space marines and they're largely focused on very little other than the mission, but surely Sidonus and Titus have formed some kind of bond in the past 200 years or so. Hell, Titus even addresses Sidonus as "old friend," and this happens more than once.

We do get some more personality from Grimskull, the ork in charge of the invading greenskins. In no time at all, he's established as a credible threat, because he actually appears to make plans. Granted, his plans are largely made with the end goal of "I want the titans" or really anything else that strikes his fancy, but where most orks would dismantle the local orbital defense gun or install it on a gargant or some crazy nonsense like that, Grimskull just uses it the way it was intended, turning it into a distraction while he goes for the titans.

And besides, he's just fucking cool looking. Where a sensible person might wear armor, Grimskull doesn't. Instead, he's strapped a god damn V8 engine to his back, which powers his arms. It's completely absurd, and I love it.

Something else that's rather well-characterised is the Imperium itself. In part by the environment, but also by the occasional public announcement. It's mostly stuff like "workers of class 9 and below do not qualify for medical attention" and reminding people that planetary invasion is no excuse to skip work. The orks might be repurposing the assembly line, but your absence will be noted.

[SPOILERS]

Obviously the ork invasion is thwarted. Kind of. As much as you can thwart orks, anyway. You can never be 100% rid of them due to how they release spores when they die, and even burning them might not get all the spores, but I digress.

The problem is that the initial solution to the ork problem is firing the Psychic Scourge, some kind of warp-powered device that was intended to kill aliens. Unfortunately, the Psychic Scourge is powered by the warp, which of course means it's not gonna do anything good.

So daemons get summoned, providing a new enemy to fight. That's all well and good, but crucially, it becomes ever more apparent that Titus has some kind of inherent resistance to the warp and its energies. Why is that? How can he do it? We have no idea. It's never explained, it probably never will be. There were supposed to be 2 additional games, exploring Titus going rogue and Titus becoming Chapter Master of a new Chapter respectively.

That aside, it is neat how you get some red flags along the way, such as Drogan becoming progressively more erratic. His own facility doesn't recognise him, he has only incomplete knowledge of how to navigate it, things like that. It's later revealed that "Drogan" was just a corpse being possessed by a daemon, and the aforementioned red flags hint at something being wrong right from your first meeting.

Also, in closing, it should be mentioned that Leandros is a moron and a hypocrite. He never shuts up about the Codex Astartes, but in the end decides to call the motherfucking INQUISITION because he has concerns regarding Titus' ability to resist the warp. You might be wondering why this matters.

It matters because the Codex would require him to report the situation to a Chaplain or Librarian. Titus wasn't wrong when he said that Leandros had failed.

Honestly, fuck Leandros.

[Pros]

- Tremendously satisfying combat

- Story is decent for what it is and stays true to the setting

- One of the best Warhammer 40k games out there

- BOSS MOTHERFUCKING GRIMSKULL

[Cons]

- Cliffhanger with no sequel

- Characters could have been expanded much more

- Multiplayer is P2P and almost entirely dead

- Final boss fight is a god damn QTE, come on

[Conclusion]

In summary, Space Marine is a cathartic game about shooting and curbstomping a bunch of green soccer hooligans who won't get off your lawn. Its graphics may not have aged as well as I would have liked, and it might not be the most challenging game, but it's a lot of fun. I will forever lament the fact that we didn't get the sequels the game so rightly deserves, but at least we got something.
Shut the fuck up, Leandros. Moral compass optional.

[Score]

7/10

/DUX

Stellaris, a space game about space set in space

 [Introduction]

LET'S BE XENOPHOBIC; IT'S REALLY IN THIS YEAR!
Stellaris is a 4X Grand Strategy game, so right off the bat you should expect to do some exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating. It's also gone through so many patches, updates, hotfixes and miscellaneous changes that Stellaris in 2021 is vastly different from Stellaris in 2016. There have been mixed responses to those changes, but it's really not as bad as some people will make it sound.

[First Impressions]

Around the time the game was released, I didn't see the point of it. A bunch of my friends were playing it, but I was happy with Sins of a Solar Empire. I figured it was basically the same thing.
I was wrong. I also struggled to get into the game at first, because my only prior experience with Grand Strategy was Crusader Kings 2, which I struggled to get into even more. But, unlike CK2, I kept trying with Stellaris, and eventually I got over the comparatively small initial learning curve and made my way up the rest of the learning curve.
In short: don't be deterred, Stellaris is sufficiently easy to learn that it can serve as a gateway into the Grand Strategy genre of games.

[Development]

Revealed in 2015 and released in 2016, Stellaris has had a long development cycle.
Now, we don't know when work on the game began, so naturally I'm not saying this because development from conception to release took a long time. Rather, I'm saying it because Stellaris is, practically speaking, still being developed.

To the dismay of some, there have been many total overhauls between 2016 and 2021 that fundamentally changed how the game plays. The original release barely resembles the current build, and certainly played nothing like it save for some very broad strokes.

General notions of population growth, infrastructure development, colonizing new planets, expanding borders and so on and so forth never changed. What did change is how exactly players go about interacting with these elements.

In total, there have been 62 patches (by my count), 17 of them major. 8 of those major patches were substantial enough that they can be considered literal gamechangers. Fortunately, perhaps in reaction to the aforementioned dismay from parts of the player base, Paradox have opted to make it possible for players to roll back to earlier versions of the game through the Steam client.

To be clear: Paradox really didn't have to do this, but they did it anyway. It warrants mentioning that they went the extra mile to accommodate people who weren't fond of the overhauls, and while those older versions are obviously no longer in development, the fact that they're available at all is a sign of commitment to the fans.

Finally, it should go without saying that Stellaris still has its share of problems, despite the developers perpetually working to fix bugs and improve the game. The biggest issue, which may(!) have been fixed with the most recent major patch, has always been late game performance due to the sheer amount of pops that have to be tracked by the game. There are work-arounds, such as simply playing in a smaller galaxy with less habitable planets and fewer factions, but that's no solution for folks who want bigger game worlds.

[Game Mechanics]

What with this being a 4X game, most of your time will be spent exploring the galaxy, expanding your territory, exploiting resources under your control and exterminating any opposition. Kind of. Two of those are optional. You don't really need to expand much if you'd rather play a tall build (small highly optimised territory) than wide (grab as much land as you can and then some). You don't have to exterminate anyone either, because you can have a pacifist government.

Speaking of government, that's one of the first things you'll probably want to do: create your own custom empire. Sure, there are some default ones with decent flavor and variety to them, but half the fun is designing your own faction. Species, traits, government type, home world and origin are all customisable elements, in addition to city/ship aesthetic, name lists and flag design.

Regardless of your empire and the settings chosen for your galaxy, you'll most likely want to get exploring and exploiting pretty quickly. Send out science ships to survey systems and have construction ships build mining and research stations. It can be a slow start, particularly if you have traits that reduce population growth.

As your population grows, you'll want to provide housing and employment, for both their benefit and yours. Unemployed pops will reduce stability and increase crime unless you provide adequately high living standards, and homeless pops will definitely be unhappy. More jobs generally means more resources, which means more improvements to the infrastructure.

Even if you don't expand much, it's vital that you maintain growth across all resources, or at least maintain a substantial supply until you can create growth. This is particularly important when it comes to industries that consume resources to produce other resources, such as fabricators that turn minerals into either alloys or consumer goods.

This of course means that you have to balance the infrastructure of individual planets as well as your empire at large. It's fine if a planet has a deficit in, for example, food production, so long as other planets pick up the slack. It's also important to take the three strata into account: rulers, specialists and workers.

Generally speaking, if a specialist job opens up, then a worker pop will move to fill it, so bursts of sudden development can be detrimental, because that worker pop might have been providing food or energy in their previous position, which is now empty. When this happens, you'll have to wait for population growth to fill the position. That, or resettle some folks from another planet, but doing so isn't free.

Inevitably, you'll run into alien empires. Depending on your cultural inclinations, this might either be a joyous event or a disaster. The same is true for the aliens. However, before any kind of diplomatic action can be taken, you'll have to establish first contact. How this is achieved may positively or negatively affect your relationship with other empires once communications are finally established.

Afterwards, your interactions can range from hostile to friendly to completely uninterested. Naturally, hostile interactions largely involve insults, territorial claims and outright war, while friendly interactions are centered around trade, embassies and various pacts and agreements. Provided you have the associated DLC, diplomacy will eventually expand to the point that a galactic community is created. Think of it as a sort of UN in space, with all that this entails.

War, of course, largely revolves around territorial expansion and planetary invasion. Or just planetary bombardment. Or, if you have the appropriate DLC, outright planetary destruction. Combat is a fairly straight-forward affair. You design ships, then you build ships, then you send ships at the enemy. It plays out automatically in real time and involves precisely zero tactical interaction on the player's part; you only make strategic decisions, i.e. when and where to move the fleet(s), who leads them in battle, what ships they're made of and how those ships are equipped.

Once enough time has passed, an end-game crisis will appear. There are several of these, ranging from interdimensional invasion to galactic AI uprising, but all of them present an immediate threat to the galaxy in one way or another. Although dealing with the crisis can take anywhere between an afternoon and several decades depending on the circumstances under which it emerges, you are effectively in the final stretch of the game at this point.

Once the crisis is defeated, whichever empire has the highest "victory score" will win the game. You don't really have to care much about this, because winning or losing the game doesn't mean you can't keep playing after the fact. The galaxy is still around, and so is everyone in it.
Well, unless you blow it up, which is possible with the Nemesis DLC.

You might have noticed by now that I've mentioned a number of DLCs. That's because Stellaris is a Paradox game, and consequently has 14 of them of varying quality, usefulness and impact. The base game is perfectly serviceable in and of itself, but certain DLCs do add quite a bit to the game. In my opinion, these are: Federations, Nemesis, Megacorp, Utopia, Apocalypse and Synthetic Dawn. The rest, frankly, are hit or miss. In any event, I caution you to research the individual DLCs and what they contribute to your experience before purchasing.

Additionally, Stellaris has excellent mod support, which is embraced wholesale by the developers.

[Graphics]

It's a space game.
You'll be looking at space a lot.
In fact, more often than not, you'll probably be looking at a galactic map and borders between empires.

Stellaris is, in its own way, a beautiful game. Many systems have various backdrops and astral phenomena in them. Planets, especially inhabited planets, are fairly detailed for what they are. It's not necessarily jaw-dropping, but what's there is solid and fits the general aesthetic of being in space.

Colors are generally dark or muted. You'll never really come across anything that might be described as blinding, and the reason for this is simple: you're gonna be looking at this for extended periods, so anything that's hard on your eyes is gonna make it an unpleasant experience to play Stellaris. With long sessions in mind, it's very welcome that the game doesn't stab your retinas with bright flashes.

As for the UI itself, it's fairly straight-forward and easy to navigate once you get into the swing of things, although you may occasionally encounter some doomscrolling. This mostly occurs when you end up colonising many planets or building 12 science ships or somesuch.

The graphics are fine. There's really not much else to say. There used to be some visual glitches, but as far as I'm aware, they've all been fixed by now.

[Story]

Here's where your imagination shines. Or doesn't.
Because on the one hand, there's literally nothing stopping you from creating an expansive universe with a homebrew setting and alien races and empires who all have complex cultures and unique motivations on the galactic scene.

I know, because some people even make Youtube videos about this stuff.

But beyond what you cook up yourself, there's very little in the way of story. Certain events are always the same, and the background for each crisis is also always the same, but the real story is how the story of your particular galaxy unfolds. This is doubly true for multiplayer.

[Pros]

- Base game is perfectly serviceable by itself

- Empire creator offers substantial variety in potential custom empires

- Great replayability

- Exceptional mod support

[Cons]

- Base game is missing some of the cooler features in the game

- Paradox's DLC policy (all expansions combined cost around $170)

- Can be hard to get into

[Conclusion]

I've played a lot of Stellaris. 906.6 hours according to Steam, as of writing. Suffice it to say that I'm probably a little bit biased, because I've been returning to it every now and then for years. It's not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a game with dedicated developers, fans and modders.
In fact, as it happens, much of my playtime has been with mods installed, and while ensuring compatibility can be a pain when you have a hundred of the things active, it's a lot of fun. Stellaris mods allow you to do some crazy shit, and to showcase that, every screenshot in this review has been from a modded game.
The folks that ought to know have told us how it's got to be. Moral compass optional.

[Score]

8/10

/DUX