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lobotomy42

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I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing this.  It has that "one-more-turn" addictive quality, but my feeling is that the game is wildly unbalanced - it seems possible to build a good number of stats with just a handful of early-level events, making the rest of the possible events somewhat pointless.  I'm also not clear on the win condition, since I made it to Captain's Assistant (or whatever) and yet am still on the station.

 

Also, this will ruin Facebook for you.

 

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I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing this.  It has that "one-more-turn" addictive quality, but my feeling is that the game is wildly unbalanced - it seems possible to build a good number of stats with just a handful of early-level events, making the rest of the possible events somewhat pointless.  I'm also not clear on the win condition, since I made it to Captain's Assistant (or whatever) and yet am still on the station.

 

Also, this will ruin Facebook for you.

 

I'm really, really mixed on this game. Some of the emergent narratives are really great, but the win conditions are unclear, plus it's so easy to make one wrong click and go into a happiness/health death-spiral while in search of said win conditions. Every time I play, I max out charisma in a couple weeks and then spend months grinding miserable jobs to advance. It all just feels like it's missing... something. I welcome any theories as to what that something is.

 

Also, I get way too attached to my first girlfriend every game, spending all my time making them happy and hence crippling my social advancement, except for one time where I made a point of dating hiring managers for the jobs I wanted. That was cool, but ended in failure, because I got trapped in a job way beyond my skills and got stuck in (you guessed it) a happiness death-spiral.

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I feel like it's really easy in the current rougey-ish alike for many games to write off generally poor balance as part of their core mechanics. Sometimes it makes for hilarious stories emerging from the game play but most of the time it juts feels unfair. I think a big problem that kind of outlook is that it REALLY encourages save scumming or just generally abandoning play throughs that don't start with advantages. 

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I feel like it's really easy in the current rougey-ish alike for many games to write off generally poor balance as part of their core mechanics. Sometimes it makes for hilarious stories emerging from the game play but most of the time it juts feels unfair. I think a big problem that kind of outlook is that it REALLY encourages save scumming or just generally abandoning play throughs that don't start with advantages. 

I can see this being true for the majority of players who feel the need to optimize. But for people like myself, I don't want to always have experiences and stories which are about slowly gaining capability at just pace. I can appreciate a smooth difficulty slope, but I think there are life-experiences which games can relate well that either have difficulty spikes or no difficulty.

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