Rev. Layle
A Smooth-Skin
(note I'm about one-third to one-half through the game: enough to have a definate representation of the whole production, IMNSHO)
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Metalheart: Replicants Rampage
Pros: Budget Price for new game; Fairly Solid (if not odd) Core Engine; Decent TB Combat; Interesting Premise; Implant System is Cool; Nice Graphics for 2D Isometric Game; Good Support; Music is well-done at least (not always suitable for the game, IMO)
Cons: Horrible Localization; Confusing Story (see Horrible Localization); Design Issues (i.e. WTF? Quests); Confusing Game Mechanics; CHERIS (omfg puke); VERY Tedious Movement; Less than stellar QA; Sound effects kinda cheap
Russian-based Numlock software has created an epic, "old-skool", turn-based, science-fiction RPG. The game basically revolves around two main characters, Lanthan and Cheris, who, apparently from the intro movie, start on a larger spaceship (military or civilian, is uncertain from the video) that gets pretty much pummeled by asteroids. They escape via a shuttle and promptly gets sucked in by a wormhole-like thingy. Eventually, the shuttle crash lands on the planet Procyon and the adventure of two people who just want to find a spaceport and go home begins.
Prepare to brace yourself for frustrating Fed-Ex and Kill-Ex tasks at the start of the game as you try to figure out exactly how this games works. The game, however, once you figure you the basics, it not overly horrible to manage and you will find your self letting Lanthan and Cheris fly all over the maps with relative ease. Over the course of the game, you will find NPC to join you in your adventures in the form of Cyborgs, Mutants, and Nomads (Replicants will help out too I believe, I haven’t got one yet, however). Some of these NPCs are worthless. Some are very useful in combat but may slow your overall movement quite a bit (Cyborgs anyone? They are great with weapons but they ARE slow-ass mutha-fu....). Unfortunately, 95% of the time, you simple have NPCs in your party to be pack mules and to fight for you; there is not even any inter-party interaction whatsoever once you get an NPC in the party, at least not that I can tell.
Once you actually can get your way through the tedious quests of the City of Fortune (the main starting place) and get out to the rest of the planet, the plot does develop and has interesting bits. Also, the quests become a little less tedious and more exploring happens; which is a great, as some of the art direction in game is pretty nifty with some nice alien-like landscapes popping up through out the game.
Now you have a bit of background on the game... time to go over the good and the bad (and the ugly):
- The Metalheart.exe proper is a VERY solid program. I have played it about 25-30 hours and have not had a SINGLE crash. The coders at Numlock are talented, or at least talented enough to make it work on my XP laptop with out a problem
- The core game engine is actually not that bad. With a few interface tweaks and more shorcut buttons, I think some really nice 2D RPG can be built with this easily. I like the simple experience system: 2500XP per level. Quest XP seems given out evenly throughout the game. XP from bad guys drop in value (I THINK, not 100%) as you are stronger and they are weaker.
- The TB Combat engine: *Almost* a DIRECT rip-off of Fallout 1 & 2 and, for the most part, runs pretty good.
The similarities:
* Characters have Actions Points
* Characters have two "active" item slots
* Right click to change modes on a weapon (Single or Burst, for example, no reload)
* Targeting cursor appears over targets with a hit percentage
* Can be exploited similar to fallout (i.e. attack, move out of combat sight, end combat mode, enter into combat sight, start combat mode, attack, repeat ad nauseum... doesn’t always work though, depends on who gets the first shot).
The differences, enhancements:
* The entire team takes their turn, then the enemy. You can switch between any of the characters at any time to do an action as long as they have AP left
* Throwing things (like grenades) is kind of cool. Right-click and a throwing cursor appears (you can throw a grenade between two enemies, for example). The down-side is the distance of the throw is dependent on the number of APs left (wtf??)
* Stances, like FOT - they change chances to be hit and can provide cover behind short obstacles.
* You can expend more APs in a called shot to have a better chance to hit (but to tell you the truth, I don't know if there is any advantage to making a called shot in the game - *shrug*)
* You can walk or run in combat. Run moves you farther, but expends endurance points.
- The Implant system is novel: Lots of implants that raise stats, give protection and give the characters special skills. A lot of the class 1 implants can be used at no cost to the player (no cost as in it requires no special "fuel", or Tactonium, to operate). More complex implants require a certain knowledge, dexterity and intelligence to install as well as require the use of Tactonium. Tactonium serum is used to prevent the body from trying to reject certain implants. Many implants will drain Tactonium from the player. Once the Tactonium for a particular character is depleted, the implant will start taking HPs away from that character. Luckily, you CAN activate and deactivate implants at any time, without removing them. It is common to install many advanced implants, and only turn them on right before or when a combat begins, for example.
- Graphics: not bad! In fact it looks pretty good for a 2D game. Better transparency handling when characters are behind walls or underneath roofs would be welcome, however. The font blows, though. Looks like some Windows system font (except in dialogues). What happened to nice smooth font I saw on the screenshots in development (in Russian OR English)? However, these are small complaints.
- Music: All well done. Most of it is not memorable (a few pieces DO stick in my head, esp. the more eerie ambient ones), but at least none of it is bad. I found some of the music inappropriate for the game. The combat music is a bit silly.
- Support, at first seemed non-existent, is now full on. Once Numlock started their own forum for MetalHeart (which IS moderated) they started responding to player questions, issues, comments, and bug-reports. In turn, two unofficial international patches have been released in the past week or so (in addition to the V1.1 patch already available from DreamCatcher's, as well as Numlock's, website). They seem to take criticism fairly constructively and, so far, behave in a professional manner. Of course, no real trolls have hit the forums yet; there is no telling what beasts may dwell inside a developer from Numlock...
The bad:
- Localization: Yep, you guessed it. This is a budget title, with a limited crew who worked on developing this title. I imagine the original Russian text probably make a LOT more sense than the translations. Read CAREFULLY, for the most part the plot does make sense; just all dialogue seems very disjointed and stilted. Some of the sentences uttered by the Cyborgs in Steelville make me cringe. I can't help but wonder if they are supposed to talk that way (because other locations aren't NEARLY as bad) or whoever was in charge of localizing Steelville should NEVER EVER translate to English again. Sometimes it's not so bad... other times, you wince.... repeatedly.
- Confusing Story Development: While the plot is striaght-forward, the development of all the element in play are confusing. I blame the localization for contributing for the story issues, but I have gotten a good fair share through the game and here is what I can tell: (SPOLIERS follow)
* We crash landed and want to go home
* Find out no one will let us leave, we are Imperial property now... somehow Lanthan pisses off the Imperials and now the attack us everywhere we go (see Design Issues)
* We do work for Fortune's Mayor (Kay Dee) so we can leave the city
* Find out other races/factions/whatever (like Cyborgs, Mutants, Replicants, Nomads, etc...) are trying to eke out a living on the planet.... most of them hate the Empire but feel useless against them
* The only star port on the planet is controlled by the Empire
* I guess we have to help all these people out before we can leave.... *sigh* why can’t we just KILL everyone?
- Design Issues: They wanted to make a an "open ended" (well, actually i am assuming here, i don't know if that was the INTENTION ultimately) RPG with a lot of quests. Well, it DOES have a lot of quests, but it is FAR, VERY FAR, from being open-ended. The plot-line is forced upon you, actions and attitudes against major characters and factions in the game are PRE-DETERMINED for you through Lanthan. There is no choice and consequences. In fact, I hit a game-stopping issue doing certain things out of order (luckily a patch fixed that problem, but how many more "oops! you did it in the wrong order - you can’t win - PWNED!!" issues are there in the game). The game environment is NOT very interactive: besides picking and dropping items anywhere... only a select few places on map, if at all, can be actually manipulated for solving tasks.
- Confusing Game Mechanics: I will admit I know more now than I did when I first started playing. The PDF manual that comes with the game DOES explain some things. However, when you raise a level and spend your "level up points" - I STILL don’t know if putting points into Will or Intelligence will make a difference right now. What EXACTY does sniper do? I know it helps to hit in combat, I think, pretty sure it helps with called shots, I think... I KNOW Health will give you more Hit Points!!! Luckily there is no speech skill... as no one would EVER put ANY points into it anyways.
- VERY Tedious movement. To leave an area, ALL characters must step on the exit square. For the main characters and even most mutants, this is not TOO bad as you can alternate between walk and run modes to get there in a decent amount of time. However, if you have a Cyborg in the party, expect to be VERY SLOWED down (Cyborgs can't run). In the larger maps, the disparate movement rates of the characters can get annoying as you want to move some large distance, and all of a sudden, most of your party is all over the place!
- QA: A lot of bugs were in the first release. Mostly they were scripting, balance, and continuity issues. Even now, I am worried I might do something the developers didn't think of and screw my game over. However, currently, my game is running OK now and progressing well (I’m convinced that the city of Fortune is just badly scripted... once I got out, my experience of the game improved).
- CHERIS!! Ok, the voice acting is not top-rate, but, MOST of the voices aren't really bad. Lanthan's voice is decent; Kay Dee is actually pretty cool, the NPCs are touch and go. Most of the crappiness comes from the bad localization (and the speech doesn't always match the written dialogue. The gist is the same, and, often, the speech simplifies some of the over-confused translations). While all of the dialogue is jilted in text and speech, I do have to say one thing: OMFG WHOEVER CASTED THE VOICE OF CHERIS NEEDS TO BE SHOT! REALLY! THIS IS THE WORST VOICE I HAVE HEARD IN A GAME IN A LONG LONG LONG LONG TIME. She sounds like some valley girl that is recovering from a hangover of beer, cheap vodka, and weed. She has no inflection in her voice. Her delivery is ALWAYS flat, she has this annoying "like oh my god" accent to her voice. There is an option to turn off speech in the game... most of the speech REALLY doesn't bother me... but I have been tempted to turn it off at times JUST TO AVOID LISTENING TO HER. Luckily Lanthan is the main liaison in all major dialogues (Cheris saying "You do the talking. Just tell everyone I'm your 'Dumb Niece'"… or something like that). Every time she says something I'm thinking: "How did SHE end up in space? Don't they discard those types of humans into some vat in the far future??"
Well. The game starts tedious, gets a little better, but still a little tedious. Quests don't always have logical solutions. Talk to everyone, sometimes talking to a particular, seemingly unimportant character will unlock a certain variable to get a task or quest moving along. Looking for something or someone in a quest? LOOK IN EVERY BUILDING if you have to (i.e. the sand bug quest in Fortune city ended up terrorizing the inside of the Job Agency - THE LAST FUCKING PLACE I WOULD LOOK - HEY THANKS FOR THE HINT)
Is it worth $20? Yeah, it’s OK for $20 but if you have problems spending a little cash and are VERY picky about games, definitely skip this. If you like to try anything, give it a shot, knowing the issues above. Make sure you visit Numlock's website for the latest patches and their forum. If you see it in a bargain bin for $10 and need a week or so to kill... sure, it's not that bad, it’s worth the $10. In fact it is a 6/10 not that bad. Honestly, I want to see the game engine cleaned up with a new story that fully fleshed out and scripted properly. MetalHeart seems like an engine tech demo with a bit of shoddy story scripting attached to it. I mean I am enjoying myself as a game time killer until I get some games I would probably enjoy more.
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Metalheart: Replicants Rampage
Pros: Budget Price for new game; Fairly Solid (if not odd) Core Engine; Decent TB Combat; Interesting Premise; Implant System is Cool; Nice Graphics for 2D Isometric Game; Good Support; Music is well-done at least (not always suitable for the game, IMO)
Cons: Horrible Localization; Confusing Story (see Horrible Localization); Design Issues (i.e. WTF? Quests); Confusing Game Mechanics; CHERIS (omfg puke); VERY Tedious Movement; Less than stellar QA; Sound effects kinda cheap
Russian-based Numlock software has created an epic, "old-skool", turn-based, science-fiction RPG. The game basically revolves around two main characters, Lanthan and Cheris, who, apparently from the intro movie, start on a larger spaceship (military or civilian, is uncertain from the video) that gets pretty much pummeled by asteroids. They escape via a shuttle and promptly gets sucked in by a wormhole-like thingy. Eventually, the shuttle crash lands on the planet Procyon and the adventure of two people who just want to find a spaceport and go home begins.
Prepare to brace yourself for frustrating Fed-Ex and Kill-Ex tasks at the start of the game as you try to figure out exactly how this games works. The game, however, once you figure you the basics, it not overly horrible to manage and you will find your self letting Lanthan and Cheris fly all over the maps with relative ease. Over the course of the game, you will find NPC to join you in your adventures in the form of Cyborgs, Mutants, and Nomads (Replicants will help out too I believe, I haven’t got one yet, however). Some of these NPCs are worthless. Some are very useful in combat but may slow your overall movement quite a bit (Cyborgs anyone? They are great with weapons but they ARE slow-ass mutha-fu....). Unfortunately, 95% of the time, you simple have NPCs in your party to be pack mules and to fight for you; there is not even any inter-party interaction whatsoever once you get an NPC in the party, at least not that I can tell.
Once you actually can get your way through the tedious quests of the City of Fortune (the main starting place) and get out to the rest of the planet, the plot does develop and has interesting bits. Also, the quests become a little less tedious and more exploring happens; which is a great, as some of the art direction in game is pretty nifty with some nice alien-like landscapes popping up through out the game.
Now you have a bit of background on the game... time to go over the good and the bad (and the ugly):
- The Metalheart.exe proper is a VERY solid program. I have played it about 25-30 hours and have not had a SINGLE crash. The coders at Numlock are talented, or at least talented enough to make it work on my XP laptop with out a problem
- The core game engine is actually not that bad. With a few interface tweaks and more shorcut buttons, I think some really nice 2D RPG can be built with this easily. I like the simple experience system: 2500XP per level. Quest XP seems given out evenly throughout the game. XP from bad guys drop in value (I THINK, not 100%) as you are stronger and they are weaker.
- The TB Combat engine: *Almost* a DIRECT rip-off of Fallout 1 & 2 and, for the most part, runs pretty good.
The similarities:
* Characters have Actions Points
* Characters have two "active" item slots
* Right click to change modes on a weapon (Single or Burst, for example, no reload)
* Targeting cursor appears over targets with a hit percentage
* Can be exploited similar to fallout (i.e. attack, move out of combat sight, end combat mode, enter into combat sight, start combat mode, attack, repeat ad nauseum... doesn’t always work though, depends on who gets the first shot).
The differences, enhancements:
* The entire team takes their turn, then the enemy. You can switch between any of the characters at any time to do an action as long as they have AP left
* Throwing things (like grenades) is kind of cool. Right-click and a throwing cursor appears (you can throw a grenade between two enemies, for example). The down-side is the distance of the throw is dependent on the number of APs left (wtf??)
* Stances, like FOT - they change chances to be hit and can provide cover behind short obstacles.
* You can expend more APs in a called shot to have a better chance to hit (but to tell you the truth, I don't know if there is any advantage to making a called shot in the game - *shrug*)
* You can walk or run in combat. Run moves you farther, but expends endurance points.
- The Implant system is novel: Lots of implants that raise stats, give protection and give the characters special skills. A lot of the class 1 implants can be used at no cost to the player (no cost as in it requires no special "fuel", or Tactonium, to operate). More complex implants require a certain knowledge, dexterity and intelligence to install as well as require the use of Tactonium. Tactonium serum is used to prevent the body from trying to reject certain implants. Many implants will drain Tactonium from the player. Once the Tactonium for a particular character is depleted, the implant will start taking HPs away from that character. Luckily, you CAN activate and deactivate implants at any time, without removing them. It is common to install many advanced implants, and only turn them on right before or when a combat begins, for example.
- Graphics: not bad! In fact it looks pretty good for a 2D game. Better transparency handling when characters are behind walls or underneath roofs would be welcome, however. The font blows, though. Looks like some Windows system font (except in dialogues). What happened to nice smooth font I saw on the screenshots in development (in Russian OR English)? However, these are small complaints.
- Music: All well done. Most of it is not memorable (a few pieces DO stick in my head, esp. the more eerie ambient ones), but at least none of it is bad. I found some of the music inappropriate for the game. The combat music is a bit silly.
- Support, at first seemed non-existent, is now full on. Once Numlock started their own forum for MetalHeart (which IS moderated) they started responding to player questions, issues, comments, and bug-reports. In turn, two unofficial international patches have been released in the past week or so (in addition to the V1.1 patch already available from DreamCatcher's, as well as Numlock's, website). They seem to take criticism fairly constructively and, so far, behave in a professional manner. Of course, no real trolls have hit the forums yet; there is no telling what beasts may dwell inside a developer from Numlock...
The bad:
- Localization: Yep, you guessed it. This is a budget title, with a limited crew who worked on developing this title. I imagine the original Russian text probably make a LOT more sense than the translations. Read CAREFULLY, for the most part the plot does make sense; just all dialogue seems very disjointed and stilted. Some of the sentences uttered by the Cyborgs in Steelville make me cringe. I can't help but wonder if they are supposed to talk that way (because other locations aren't NEARLY as bad) or whoever was in charge of localizing Steelville should NEVER EVER translate to English again. Sometimes it's not so bad... other times, you wince.... repeatedly.
- Confusing Story Development: While the plot is striaght-forward, the development of all the element in play are confusing. I blame the localization for contributing for the story issues, but I have gotten a good fair share through the game and here is what I can tell: (SPOLIERS follow)
* We crash landed and want to go home
* Find out no one will let us leave, we are Imperial property now... somehow Lanthan pisses off the Imperials and now the attack us everywhere we go (see Design Issues)
* We do work for Fortune's Mayor (Kay Dee) so we can leave the city
* Find out other races/factions/whatever (like Cyborgs, Mutants, Replicants, Nomads, etc...) are trying to eke out a living on the planet.... most of them hate the Empire but feel useless against them
* The only star port on the planet is controlled by the Empire
* I guess we have to help all these people out before we can leave.... *sigh* why can’t we just KILL everyone?
- Design Issues: They wanted to make a an "open ended" (well, actually i am assuming here, i don't know if that was the INTENTION ultimately) RPG with a lot of quests. Well, it DOES have a lot of quests, but it is FAR, VERY FAR, from being open-ended. The plot-line is forced upon you, actions and attitudes against major characters and factions in the game are PRE-DETERMINED for you through Lanthan. There is no choice and consequences. In fact, I hit a game-stopping issue doing certain things out of order (luckily a patch fixed that problem, but how many more "oops! you did it in the wrong order - you can’t win - PWNED!!" issues are there in the game). The game environment is NOT very interactive: besides picking and dropping items anywhere... only a select few places on map, if at all, can be actually manipulated for solving tasks.
- Confusing Game Mechanics: I will admit I know more now than I did when I first started playing. The PDF manual that comes with the game DOES explain some things. However, when you raise a level and spend your "level up points" - I STILL don’t know if putting points into Will or Intelligence will make a difference right now. What EXACTY does sniper do? I know it helps to hit in combat, I think, pretty sure it helps with called shots, I think... I KNOW Health will give you more Hit Points!!! Luckily there is no speech skill... as no one would EVER put ANY points into it anyways.
- VERY Tedious movement. To leave an area, ALL characters must step on the exit square. For the main characters and even most mutants, this is not TOO bad as you can alternate between walk and run modes to get there in a decent amount of time. However, if you have a Cyborg in the party, expect to be VERY SLOWED down (Cyborgs can't run). In the larger maps, the disparate movement rates of the characters can get annoying as you want to move some large distance, and all of a sudden, most of your party is all over the place!
- QA: A lot of bugs were in the first release. Mostly they were scripting, balance, and continuity issues. Even now, I am worried I might do something the developers didn't think of and screw my game over. However, currently, my game is running OK now and progressing well (I’m convinced that the city of Fortune is just badly scripted... once I got out, my experience of the game improved).
- CHERIS!! Ok, the voice acting is not top-rate, but, MOST of the voices aren't really bad. Lanthan's voice is decent; Kay Dee is actually pretty cool, the NPCs are touch and go. Most of the crappiness comes from the bad localization (and the speech doesn't always match the written dialogue. The gist is the same, and, often, the speech simplifies some of the over-confused translations). While all of the dialogue is jilted in text and speech, I do have to say one thing: OMFG WHOEVER CASTED THE VOICE OF CHERIS NEEDS TO BE SHOT! REALLY! THIS IS THE WORST VOICE I HAVE HEARD IN A GAME IN A LONG LONG LONG LONG TIME. She sounds like some valley girl that is recovering from a hangover of beer, cheap vodka, and weed. She has no inflection in her voice. Her delivery is ALWAYS flat, she has this annoying "like oh my god" accent to her voice. There is an option to turn off speech in the game... most of the speech REALLY doesn't bother me... but I have been tempted to turn it off at times JUST TO AVOID LISTENING TO HER. Luckily Lanthan is the main liaison in all major dialogues (Cheris saying "You do the talking. Just tell everyone I'm your 'Dumb Niece'"… or something like that). Every time she says something I'm thinking: "How did SHE end up in space? Don't they discard those types of humans into some vat in the far future??"
Well. The game starts tedious, gets a little better, but still a little tedious. Quests don't always have logical solutions. Talk to everyone, sometimes talking to a particular, seemingly unimportant character will unlock a certain variable to get a task or quest moving along. Looking for something or someone in a quest? LOOK IN EVERY BUILDING if you have to (i.e. the sand bug quest in Fortune city ended up terrorizing the inside of the Job Agency - THE LAST FUCKING PLACE I WOULD LOOK - HEY THANKS FOR THE HINT)
Is it worth $20? Yeah, it’s OK for $20 but if you have problems spending a little cash and are VERY picky about games, definitely skip this. If you like to try anything, give it a shot, knowing the issues above. Make sure you visit Numlock's website for the latest patches and their forum. If you see it in a bargain bin for $10 and need a week or so to kill... sure, it's not that bad, it’s worth the $10. In fact it is a 6/10 not that bad. Honestly, I want to see the game engine cleaned up with a new story that fully fleshed out and scripted properly. MetalHeart seems like an engine tech demo with a bit of shoddy story scripting attached to it. I mean I am enjoying myself as a game time killer until I get some games I would probably enjoy more.
- the second time is a random OASIS encounter that seems to serve NO purpose except to let Cheris disrobe and take a swim... while everyone sits around and holds their weapons like idiots)
. You're review doesn't seem so hot about it either, though nicely done.