Cyber Knights: Flashpoint
Explore the dystopian cyberpunk future of 2231 as you command a company of shadow mercenaries working for the highest bidder. Cyber Knights wraps a world full of consequential story choices and significant character development around a rich core of classic and new mechanics. The game combines tactical elements like stealth, hacking and tense combat with strategic features like base building, contact management and in-depth squad customization. Cyber Knights invites you to jack in and explore a unique cyberpunk world and the immersive, human stories of your merc team in the dark future of 2231.
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Turn-based Tactics: Deep and tactical gameplay using a turn-based, gridless third-person combat simulator. Cover! Overwatch! Recoil!
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Dynamic Cyberpunk Story: Unique interwoven narrative with depth, meaningful player choices and hundreds of hours of gameplay. Create your own story reminiscent of pen and paper cyberpunk RPGs
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Sophisticated Missions: Combine stealth, hacking and combat across multi-stage missions. Gain pre-mission advantages from Contacts
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Endless Builds: Experiment with endless combos of Jobs, cyberware, weapons and gadgets to build the perfect team
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Evolving Characters: Your team evolves as the story, your choices and battle leave lasting wounds, add Traits and threaten to strip their humanity
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Safehouse Base Building: Construct a custom safehouse and upgrade rooms such as weapon shop, hund kennel and medical bay.
Cyber Knights strikes a unique tone with a futuristic setting that has passed through the messy near-future to arrive at dystopian 2231. Man-made environmental disasters have ravaged our biosphere. Artificial consciousness has been created, subsequently murdered, and then strictly outlawed at a global level. Megacorporate colonies and research stations dot the solar system from Venus to Jupiter. Quantum computing has radically altered the digital landscape and the very meaning of privacy and digital security.
The game’s threaded stories originate from both inside and outside your team – weaving together threads from your hired mercenaries, criminal connections and history that just won’t die. These stories operate on three interconnected and at times overlapping levels – personal stories (your team), contact stories (your employers) and event stories (city-wide).
And every choice you make and mission you run will impact your character’s permanent Traits, changing them in both subtle and big ways. Their stories and your choices combine to create a unique narrative for every game, every Knight and every team.
The second game our studio created, Cyber Knights RPG, took hundreds of thousands of gamers on an gritty cyberpunk roller-coaster, trying to get rich or go down shooting. The classic Cyber Knights has always had a huge following within our community and we are xcited to come back to the world and stories we started creating there so many years ago with an all new game, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint.
We’re weaving together the genre’s classic themes with the unique setting and history of Cyber Knights to create some of the most cutting, gripping and human stories we’ve ever told. Betrayal, sacrifice, trading away humanity for an advantage, living fast and dying young, revenge and testing the bonds of friendship and trust – it’s all here under the New Boston dome.
Read More: Best Isometric Cyberpunk Games.
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
Read More: Best Isometric Cyberpunk Games.
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
Tales from The Dancing Moon
Tales from the Dancing Moon is a casual story-driven RPG that has elements of life-simulation, crafting, building and survival. All layered on top of a thread of mystery. Presented with a detailed isometric style, inspired by classic role-playing games.
You wake up to find yourself in a strange world. A local Innkeeper finds you and helps you make your way to the nearby village of Illisor – a ruined place that’s recovering from a recent attack of deadly shadow-beasts.
You spend your time at The Dancing Moon Inn where you assist the citizens in rebuilding their village. During your stay you discover that you weren’t the only stranger passing through this village recently. You begin to unravel the mystery that they left behind.
Will you discover your purpose here? And will you find a way back home?
Character Customisation
Customisation options allow you to become whoever you wish to be in this story.
Story
Discover the lore of Illisor by interacting with NPCs, completing quests, forging relationships and reading notes and books scattered around the town.
Crafting and base-building
Flexible and robust object placement tools allow you build the medieval town you’ve always wanted to build.
Hone your skills
Skills like farming, crafting, fishing, and swordsmanship will help you complete the various tasks given to you in Illisor.
Photo-mode
Show off your town and other stunning photography skills with a free-camera mode that has lens and filter options.
Read More: Best Isometric Exploration Games.
Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
It’s a good game. It’s not great because… because the ending part of the game had to be rushed (studio ran out of funds) and it’s felt. Where Barcelona and surrounding area is lush with story with great amount of choices and consequences, somewhere after the middle the game becomes very linear with no consequences of any action you perform – or already have, minor or major. You can still influence the ending but it all feels so… well, cut, be it Good or Evil. Healthy imagination allows rich foresight into what it could’ve been and, and… Ah, the bitterness of bliss. The game is so close to awesome.
– Real player with 64.2 hrs in game
This game is a bit of a mixed bag. The beginning in Barcelona is a lot of fun, visually appealing (despite aging poorly), decent voice acting and overall fun. There are issues in the start area, mainly talk your way out or fight it out. Many skills are totally irrelevant and the import/export mechanic allows for some rather interesting builds. After finishing France, the studio was running out of money and it shows, the voice acting almost totally disappears and the quests just become a slog through dungeons packed with monsters. It turns from a fun and reasonably light Diabloesqe RPG into a brutal slog that is a major pain in the A** to complete. If it was not for the easily abused import/export mechanic I would have never finished the game. BTW fix the texture bug on Windows 10 devices it’s frustrating to see, also so form of multiplayer servers would be greatly appreciated.
– Real player with 55.4 hrs in game
Archquest
Gather your party and venture forth to the city of Evertide, where invading monsters have risen from the ruins of the old city. Liberate the city block by block as you uncover the mysterious origins of the ancient city and what lies beneath.
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Create your character - based on tabletop RPG rules. Choose your class, feats, skills, and spells, and then customize your appearance by selecting your hair, beard, and skin.
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Explore the world in an immersive first-person view with grid-based movement. Each character in your party gets to choose an exploration activity, such as Search, Scout, Sneak, or maintain a Detect Magic spell.
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Engage in tactical turn-based combat. Execute reactions like Attack of Opportunity. Smash your enemies with Power Attack. Apply status effects with spells like Sleep, Grease, or Color Spray.
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Converse with your Diplomacy, Deception, or Intimidation skill against NPCs in a full-featured branching dialogue system.
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Manage your inventory and equip yourself with a paper-doll system. Craft magic items by grafting Potency Runes to weapons and armor.
Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition
What an experience! I recommend it to anyone who likes crpgs but hates combat.
– Real player with 149.9 hrs in game
Planescape Torment has a great story. The atmosphere of the game is really cool, and the soundtrack is really nice. The soundtrack for the city of Curst is my favorite. It is an old rpg, and a lot of the game is centered around dialogue options. I recommend it if you have the time to play a slower paced rpg. If you play it stat up Wisdom, Charisma, and Intelligence for expanded dialogue. It is not my favorite classic rpg in terms of combat and game play, but I’m glad I took the time to beat it and experience this classic. Great game that doesn’t just feed you the story, you have to pay attention and piece it together as you go or you might just miss the deeper meaning. What can change the nature of a man?
– Real player with 111.6 hrs in game
Serpent in the Staglands
A friendly reminder that taking on a pack of wolves with a kitchen knife, or single point in a first level spell is a bad idea.
Serpent in the Staglands is a modern ‘old-school’ style crpg in both look and feel. Gone are the arrows of patronization, the quest log, the terrible bland puzzles that a brain dead toddler could figure out, and in is a true return to form of open world crpgs bursting at the seams with love and attention to detail. For a game made by a team of two people, it is one of the gaming masterworks of this decade in my eyes.
– Real player with 39.6 hrs in game
Serpent in the Staglands starts of with you, the Moonlord, trapped in a mortal body.
With very little info you set out throughout the Staglands in order to put the pieces of what happened together.
From the get go the story pulled me in, I really liked the mystery and the continuous search for clues to figure out who trapped you and why.
Being in mortal form also strips you of your powers as a God and this is a very refreshing take on the genre: you’re not the typical hero which everyone asks for help, you’re just a peasant which most people ignore.
– Real player with 35.4 hrs in game
Avernum 5
Party with gremlins. Boat through rapids. Join a cult. Side with an ambitious general or the assassin he’s hunting. The low graphical requirements of this game allow for a vast frontier setting and a deep story. Difficulty is adjustable, allowing any playstyle from story-only coasting to ruthless min-maxing. Plus, Spiderweb Software is a true indie developer. This game is easily worth $10.
– Real player with 133.2 hrs in game
An incredibly mixed bag. Its very deep stat system and occasionally interesting challenge areas and boss fights are quite good, but ultimately these highlights are overcome by extreme linearity, way too many trash mobs, next to no plot, and one of the worst cases of hitpoint bloat I have ever seen in a game (late game there are some random enemies with 4,000 hitpoints. Given that the average character can do 50-100 points of damage per turn, you can work out the problem here). I really love spiderweb games, so I hate to bash this, but this is probably their worst.
– Real player with 128.3 hrs in game
Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness
Cant recommend this yet. I have no problems with the usual early access stuff; broken game mechanics, bugged quests, and balance issues. Those are all easy to fix. However, I do have some main concerns that the small dev team may or may not be able to fix for main release:
1. Performance issues. Long load times and poor frame rates on high end machines with SSDs. Not acceptable from a game that looks like 1998. Since you get a loading screen every time you enter/exit an area or building, long loading times severely impact the overall experience. Pretty much every streamer who streamed this said the same thing.
– Real player with 66.2 hrs in game
Party-based computer rpg similar to NWN, Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, et al. If you like those type this game should fit your needs. It is RTwP for those who only play one type of combat.
I think there is enough here to support for sure:
Pros:
Quite a large variety of stuff to find for the hoarder in all of us.
Melee combat is fairly robust and healing gets the job done.
The painted map backgrounds are mostly pretty.
Good variety in classes.
I will cover cons in detail since they need fixing:
– Real player with 23.3 hrs in game
Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition
Kingmaker is rough around some edges, with a few changes to the tabletop rules that aren’t clearly stated to the player. (If you’re unfamiliar with Pathfinder, it is a variant of Dungeons and Dragons.) A large number of frustrations I have often come from either the interface not being great at explaining when something is different, or not explaining anything at all until you’re in another menu. (A game like Pathfinder really demands a character creation/level up screen that lets you preview your whole build from levels 1-20 just to get an idea of what you’re doing.)
– Real player with 255.9 hrs in game
As a cRPG this is an excellent game - great characters, great companions, great stories - main plot and companions - and a combat system that works.
As a game, it’s a mish mash of systems, ideas and a rigidly enforced ruleset that sadly overwhelms that content a little. It is a massively long game with 6 distinct acts that do not flow one after another, but intersperse themselves with a poorly explained Kingdom building mechanic that ultimately just doesn’t work and really, really gets in the way of the rest of the game. Making numbers get bigger doesn’t really make for a compelling experience, but if you don’t do it you’ll get yourself in a right mess and the game will end. It has no respect for your time as a gamer at all, and will test the very limits of your patience.
– Real player with 209.4 hrs in game