Code of the Savage
“Sails on the horizon… Why they came, we did not know… Destruction, chains…"
Code of the Savage is a tale of vengeance and survival. After escaping a slave ship, you have found yourself in chains and washed ashore on the island Kingdom of Daneth. You must find your way in a brutal and unforgiving world where nothing is black and white.
Code of the Savage is a no-holds-barred classic western style RPG. Inspired by the greats from the 80-90’s with a modern flair. There is a strong emphasis on player freedom through social and moral interactions… Will you choose to firebomb the brothel, the church… Or both? Will you do it for money, glory or just because?
In Code of the Savage, you and the main character are totally new to Daneth. Explore the land and discover its rich history and lore.
I wanted to create a role playing game that brought me back to my gamer days as a child on the C64 and MS-DOS PC. There is just something lacking in today’s RPGs that I miss. Tired of micro-transactions, and randomly generated worlds; I am creating a world that is handcrafted with purpose. Essentially, I am creating the game that I want to play.
Code of the Savage includes a great emphasis on NPC interaction. Each NPC in Code of The Savage has their own story, their own character portrait, and a daily schedule. They will, go about their daily lives, going to work, eating and sleeping.
Level up your character and adventure forth to discover the treasures, history, and people of Daneth.
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Open world - A large open, seamless, non-linear, hand-crafted world for you to explore. Including day and night cycles, and weather.
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Exploration - Discover towns, cities, hidden caves and dungeons. Unravel the rich lore of Daneth.
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NPCs with depth - Meet a rich cast of NPCs with a dynamic branching conversation system. NPCs remember your name and react differently depending on the situation.
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Dark themes - Code of The Savage doesn’t hold back on what some may consider offensive content. If you’re easily offended, Code of The Savage is probably not for you… This is not a “slay the dragon” and “save the princess” RPG.
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Player freedom - There are various ways to progress through the game, with no right or wrong answers. Morality in Code of The Savage is not black and white. You decide what’s right, and you decide what’s wrong.
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Adventure - Battle giants, undead and other creatures, hunt to gather resources, or go on a murderous rampage, the choice is yours.
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Combat - Fast-paced dynamic combat system which is real time with pause. Combat encounters happen in real time, without loading to a separate combat screen.
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Inventory - An intuitive and easy to use inventory system. Any equipment and armour the player is wearing shows on their avatar.
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Controls - Smooth grid-based movement. Easy and intuitive mouse and keyboard controls.
Read More: Best CRPG Adventure Games.
Astrobase Command
Salvage the remnants of your civilization by starting anew in uncharted space, with a small crew and the beginnings of an Astrobase. Grow your base by constructing modules on all three axes, put out fires both literal and metaphorical, and send characters with real personalities and emotions on non-linear text-based adventures across a procedural galaxy.
The only mode is ironman and every section, module, deck and crew member added to your Astrobase comes with implicit risks and reward, so choices matter. How long can you keep from succumbing to the dangers of space?
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Grow - Expand your Astrobase in all three directions.
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Nurture - Build a home for your crew and their daily lives
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Design - Layout the Astrobase to counter crises such conduit leaks, compartment failures, explosions, fires, personnel issues, and more
The Astrobase can be constructed along three axes. Your crew can expand the base by building modules or contract it by salvaging them. They can add or remove functionality by building up or tearing down sections in the modules. They can even build ships that lets you explore the galaxy.
You choose what to build and when to build it. The crew needs to rest and they need to breathe, do you rush the construction of the Enlisted Quarters or the Air Pump first? What’s the optimal placement of the new module? Is it better to have the Plasma Reactor closer to storage or to the crew’s quarters? Keep the station well maintained and stocked with supplies or disastrous consequences may result.
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Characters - Your crew make their own decisions as they interact with each other and the world around them.
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Full AI lifecycle - They work, eat, sleep, use the bathroom, relax, and socialize all as part of their daily lives.
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Morale - Your crew can get exhausted, or suffer from low morale which affects the quality of their lives and how they perform tasks.
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Relationships - Your crew form personal, professional, and romantic relationships. The relationships can be either positive or negative based on how their personalities and actions align.
Your crew live their own lives on the Astrobase. They have things to do and people to meet. Exactly how well they perform depends on how good they fit into their job, what adventures they’ve had, and what horrors they have survived; even how well matched they are with their peers matters, some will become romantic partners while others become bitter work rivals.
You will run into stumbling blocks, maybe your crew is exhausted because you’ve pushed them too hard, or low morale makes slacking off more enticing, or maybe Jenkins and Rodriguez spend too much time arguing while the Fission Reactor goes critical. Figure out your problems and fix them!
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Explore - Build and dispatch ships across the galaxy to explore planets, fight killbots, extract resources, and interact with other civilizations.
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Delegate - The ranking officer of each ship will make decisions based on their personality, and take recommendations from their team.
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Overrule - Change the decisions in the logs they send back, or let them make their own mistakes.
The procedural adventures of the crew assigned to your ships can be read and interacted with in the logs they send back. Carefully handpick the crew for each ship you send out. Monitor their progress or leave them to their own fate. Whatever you choose to do, the outcomes of their adventures will be felt in what resources they get, what injuries they suffer, and in how it changes their emotional state.
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Assign - Choose the best person for each job based on their stats, personalities, and over 50 different skills.
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Manage - Prioritize tasks, clear task blockers, optimize the routes that the crew take during their day.
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Observe - Calculate resource depletion and stay on top of tasks to prevent the reactors from exploding, the conduits leaking, and compartments failing,
The desk is where you design the Astrobase into a functioning home for your crew, promote leaders, manage tasks, monitor resource consumption, read reports from your ships and give them your input.
Running the station means manning your desk. Be efficient, and use your time wisely or take a break and play some Asteroid Shooter.
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Individuality - Characters maintain emotional memory, and experience psychological growth over time depending on how results align with expectations.
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Expression - Each character’s personality is expressed in their conversations, thoughts, and ship log entries
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Story - Over 100 personality traits and 42 intertwined emotions combine to author narratives that reflect how the crew are actually thinking and feeling.
The Astrobase’s crew will have conversations with each other, or insights about their lives. Crew members join the Astrobase with revealed personality traits that drive the emotions that effect their job suitability, choices and actions. More traits become unlocked as they experience emotional growth.
Ensure that your crew’s psychological needs are met and they have the ability to grow as people. When you’re processing recruit applications you’ll want to keep an eye out for personalities that might clash with your existing crew, or will be compatible and create lasting friendships.
Read More: Best CRPG Choices Matter Games.
Mirage Online Classic
The game has one of highest toxic community I have ever seen, those people publicly admitted to using bugs to take advantage of the game instead of reporting them, the content is very short right now and there is a balance issue as well as it needs a lot of quality of life improvement.
The game in overall is based on action combat even thought there is a tab targetting that allows to use special class ability.
The leveling has absolutly no reward, only equipments matter, killing rats will give you more exp than doing dungeons.
– Real player with 1542.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best CRPG Action RPG Games.
The game is pretty fun, still lots of content being worked on at the moment that’s yet to come in the game and there isn’t much benefit in playing hours and hours per day to the point it starts feeling like a chore so you can take your time with the game and be patient, go at your own pace. The community and people in discord are friendly and helpful as well, don’t hesitate to ask for advice.
Some people have been writing reviews about Zeus saying he’s toxic, but after playing for over 300 hours and frequently with all of the other active players, this hasn’t been the case at all and he even changed my name for free with the exception I was new, which wasn’t an offered service. Both the devs are nice people and they have a discord you can join to talk with the community and make suggestions for the game which they are very open to.
– Real player with 314.3 hrs in game
Tortured Hearts - Or How I Saved The Universe. Again.
I’m not much of a review writer, so I’m not going to do an in-depth analysis, but 150+ hours in I’ve become completely addicted to this game. As advertised, it’s old school in the larger sense of its design and flow, but it has elements and specifics that are entirely unique. It is difficult at first to figure out how some things work, so you do what pretty much all old school RPG’rs did: play for a while, figure out how things work, then start a new game for real. There’s a huge demo that can serve that purpose for you. This is not one of those games with 40 hours of cut scenes and an onscreen arrow pointing you to what you need to do next, where flashy graphics (that sometimes even work) substitute for game play. You will get quests that you will not be able to solve until well into the game, and you’ll have to stop and think about where you need to go and who you need to talk to. If you want a game that holds your hand and points you to every answer, this is not for you. If you want to solve things on your own, can handle some frustration and you value the game over flash, I think this is a great game for you.
– Real player with 990.4 hrs in game
Game has some great potential but just far too frustrating. I fully get the concept of trying not to “hand hold” to make the game more difficult, but so much of this game is just running all over the map just hoping you find the right person to talk to and trigger the correct speech line. The entire game is mostly just based on brut force.
Then there is the combat system. You have no control at all over what your team does in combat. To make it worse, the AI is horrible. You will find your team wasting mana casting a cc spell on an already cc’d enemy or casting the same spell over and over that the enemy is immune to. A strong monster will be one hit away from death and your mage will cast three straight buffs instead of killing the monster.
– Real player with 541.1 hrs in game
Nuke Land
Nuke Land is a huge open world with dozens of cities and settlements. As you travel you will meet many enemies, both human and mutated insects. Weapons in Nuke Land are the main argument, but there are not many of them left. However, you can find a weapons craftsman. He will help you restore and upgrade weapons. You have a variety of activities: trade, work as a mercenary, racketeering and other monkey business. Choose what you want to be: a mercenary or a merchant; the mayor of a forlorn village or decide to conquer all the towns and proclaim a new state.
Super Army of Tentacles 3: The Search for Army of Tentacles 2
This game plays a lot like a choose your own adventure visual novel. It has a lot of various places to explore and a multitude of quests to play through besides the main quest line. The combat in the game is either wordplay based or trivia based (much of it being US history).
I really enjoyed my playthrough of the game and will likely replay. Even though I’ve played thru it once, there still were many side quests I could go back in another playthrough to do and various options to drive the story other ways. The humour in the game was a plus for me too.
– Real player with 17.1 hrs in game
It’s 2017 and the Apocalypse is years ahead of schedule and the gods have disappeared. You, a Deep One, have awoken from the Dreamland and must find the Necronomicon before Nyarlathotep, The Crawling Chaos and his 7 gods does and restore things to how they were or bring in a new age.
Alright, so SAT3: TST2 is the third VN in the series and it’s not nearly as cool as I made it sound in the paragraph above. This VN is, at its core, pure insanity and chaos. It’s a Lovecraftian adventure where you fight monsters by answering trivia questions (Brush up on your Shakespeare.) and fly around on a floating ship/city while “fighting” Microsoft paint horror monsters and creatures. One moment you’re in Antarctica making friends with a… yeti girl with pointy teeth (?) and the next you’re challenging Alexander Hamilton to a rap battle and signing the declaration of Independence. (Reminder: It’s 2017.)
– Real player with 13.0 hrs in game
Amborettio
Amborettio is an interesting game with a unique story behind it. I was impressed with the details in the backstory and I enjoyed collecting materials to build the required tools for the game. For the price, I would recommend this game to everybody who is interested. The solo developer has completed impressive work with this game at a fair price. I look forward to seeing the future games that this developer publishes.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
Gamedec
Pretty well done. Definitely along the lines of Disco Elysium in a cyberpunk setting, but without the roll of the dice involved in your dialogue checks - options are mostly determined by how you branch your professions (the level-up system) and by your past actions and interactions with other characters, things or situations. On top of that, you have to use the information you gather to draw conclusions and make deductions (you play as a sort of cyber detective), and most choices you make will either block certain paths of information or open them, which ends up changing the nature of a lot of the dialogue and the way the story’s told and, inevitably, how you’ll get to end the game.
– Real player with 65.6 hrs in game
IN A WORD: COMPELLING
IN A NUTSHELL:
WHAT TO EXPECT: Detective adventure game. Isometric presentation. Cyberpunk Setting. Wide range of well-crafted locations. Good variety of crafted NPC individuals. Scripted, linear but self-deterministic story with arcs. Point & click style interaction system with some depth. Minimal character creation. Unrestrictive clue and deduction system. Occupational skill system for additional interaction options. Forgiving design generates some replayability. Made with no soft-caps. Text heavy, requires lots of reading. Extensive Codex feature full of important game data. No combat system. Single-player.
– Real player with 31.6 hrs in game
Fire and Dungeon
Hint to developers:
You know that idea you have about the player character being blind or it being to dark to see anything so you have a black screen with maybe the occasional flash of light or little circle of light flitting past randomly? Yeah, the one that saves all the money on special effects in movies? It NEVER WORKS in computer games. No it did not even work there. It certainly did not work here.
I do not recommend buying this. It starts out iffy but quickly decays into black screen without even a bump sound to tell you you found a wall. Brilliant for a game, yes?
– Real player with 0.1 hrs in game
The Age of Decadence
–-{Graphics}—
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
The game portrays an aesthetic I have a massive soft spot for - Post-apocalyptic colonial Roman Empire. The environment art is well polished and beautiful, and the art style is self-consistent and immersive. I really feel like I’m somewhere in Carthage. The cities feel appropriate for their size – Maadoran feels like a dirty, bustling metropolis down on its luck. The design of the armours and weapons are all era-appropriate, with proper, real-life names (e.g. Lorica Segmentata).
– Real player with 391.5 hrs in game
In brief: AoD ditches many of the genre long established staples to focus on the roleplaying, and this it does amazingly well; there really is nothing quite like it out there. The EA version is very much playable (there are less bugs than in many releases). The combat, which has been much the focus of attention due to its difficulty, is not awesome, but it gets the job done and it is optional.
***Since for some reason Steam has decided to implement a character limit to user reviews (what’s up with that Gabe?), you can read my whole review here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/230070/discussions/0/666827315713399977/ , but below is a very long extract:
– Real player with 214.3 hrs in game