Recent reviews by myhv

Long story short, Encased obviously had extremely passionate people behind it. The question is, what happened to them after the initial early access release?

The game feel like it's about half done. It's front loaded, with prologue and act 1 feeling amazing, while the rest of the game is more of a whimper. Not to mention the ending... Last 2(3) cells are a joke, and feel like they were cobbled together on the weekend before release.

Now, I mentioned that it feels like the devs had a lot of passion, and I stand by that. There are plenty of cool ideas, nice writing and attention to detail, at least initially. But none of these mechanics and ideas were finished, just left there, making you sad about the missed potential.

You have a vehicle system, obviously inspired by FO2, but it's just that, a movement speed buff on the map and a storage access. You can get an upgrade, but it kind of comes late and is less useful than you would initially think.

Inventory is a mess, it obviously wanted to be a Tetris system, but gave up half way through. So now it both looks bad and is annoying and is not very functional. About 10 hours in your inventory will be filled with keys and notes you cannot get rid of, so look forward to that.

Overall UI is not great. Some parts of it work, but generally you would expect better. I understand that unity has limitations and will leave a mark, but this is just shoddy work.

Story is ok. Some writing is very enjoyable, especially for some side characters and stories. Not the story itself, but characters. Random NPCs have more humanity and look like more real and believable humans than major characters in most AAA games. I've always had issues with FO games in regards to believability. Not that such events can happen or something, but that if they did, this is how people would act and behave. Encased does not suffer from this problem, most people have defined and realistic believes, wants and ambitions. Too bad most quests feel unfinished and just end abruptly, never having follow-up or real consequences.

And lastly combat. Oh boy. Imagine Divinity combat, but really bad. Like, if skills were made by someone who heard about what skills DOS2 has, and tried to recreate them from memory. While heavily drinking. Long story short, half the skills are just the same attack, but for different weapons. The other half are badly scripted basic abilities. There obviously was almost no testing, balancing or though that went in to combat. AP economy is a joke, damage scaling is out of whack, enemies are bullet sponges early on, and overall combat is the weakest part of the game.

I would mention stealth separately. Normally I'm not a fan of stealth, but I would recommend it here. Not that it's well made or fun, but it allows you to avoid turn-based combat, making the game much more enjoyable to play. Get a quiet weapon and stack some detection threshold (think of it as your "AP" outside of combat). I like syringers for their shroom laced dart, or cryo laser so you can root people in place. They can't detect you if they can't reach you. And then just go wild, killing all enemies one by one without starting the combat.

So overall, the game is not worth 30 euro. Get it on sale for a fiver, and have some fun. Don't expect a finished game, just a passion project that ran out of passion long time ago.

I would not call it a bad game, but it ain't a good one either. Just feels like most gameplay elements went nowhere or never got finished. Story is pretty good, but drags on too much, especially compared to the amount of non story content.

The game barely changed from 2 years ago, just the ending chapter got added. And it needed more bugfixing.

Gaia wants to do a lot of things, but isn't very good at any of them. It has lots of ships, shields and weapons, making buying one a frustrating endeavor, but very little reason to use most of them. And yet passive slots, engine boosters and active devices have like 4-5 options each, with most being insignificant upgrades or just overall meh. There's a talent tree with perks and skills, but all of them are boring and low impact. Map is not that big, for a space game, and yet most of it has nothing for you to do, outside of a few generic kill or fetch quests.

Main story feels on rails, you have no real agency or reason to be on the other side of the screen. You get to do some fighting and then sit down and listen to grownups talk, until it's time to do more combat. Or taxi stuff around. It also struggles with pacing and context, jumping around randomly. 4 years after supposed release date, and it's still just two mostly disconnected from each other stories, no ending, and a promise for more later.

Will update later.

Very interesting experience. Helped me find the words to describe the practices and tricks that I've always knew existed, but could not pin down. I'd say it's a must to experience, if you ever found yourself deeply invested in an massively multiplayer game.

That said, game could really benefit from some polish. Maybe more context, especially in latter parts. And please, have a native English speaker go through the game text. It's not that there are many grammatical errors (apart from insisting on using gears as a plural of gear), but it's often difficult to read and comprehend.

It's not NFS of old, but this is best we got in arcade racing.

Do note that the devs don't think it's appalling to deliberately change game economy months after release via a stealth patch, artificially starving the playerbase of rewards and progression, in what is, essentially, a single player game. All just to badger you in to buying macrotransactions.

Does all the monkey brain stuff a f2p game would, but without it becoming too grindy or annoying. Try it out.

It's better than it looks on screenshots.

Great game, would recommend to anyone looking for a solid single player experience. It is heavily story focused, and I do not think it has much replay value.


My complaints are mostly minor:

Camera needs work.
Platforming is not enjoyable, especially when camera decides to move, or certain ledges allow you to just walk off them.
Combat has too many pause animations mid combo, hurts the flow.
The combo system does not work well with arkham style combat. The formal actively works against the flow. It's also hard to keep track of when first combo ended and the new began.
Upgrades are boring.

It's ok for a few evenings...


But seriously, where do I even start? Probably with the best advice I can give: play this in multiplayer! There are discords dedicated to finding and hosting groups, no need to hope for a reply on the steam forums or join random groups in the browser. It's so much more enjoyable, but frustrating at the same time. Learn to love fort joy, as you'll be restarting many times. It took me good ~30 groups to find someone to finish the game with. Thankfully (and sadly) first act is the best made one, and there's a lot to do there.

Main reason why I would recommend this game is not it's story, or some innovative features and approaches, but it's replayability. Even 300+ hours in I found combat enjoyable, each fight a challenge, with a chance to ♥♥♥♥ up. There are some rather clever mechanics to learn and abuse, unique skills to master, builds to optimize and routes to find.

The game is well worth your money and time, despite it's shortcomings.

Speaking of which... Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things wrong with the game. From expected (but not liked) bugs and glitches - on my last playthrough we had at least 3 bugged quests, a bunch of issues with stuck characters and desyncs - to more serious problems.

Story is passable at best. It will not keep you awake or amaze you in the end. Sidequests are often more engaging than the main plot line.

Armor system is very restricting for the most of the game, especially on the higher difficulties. It pretty much forces you in to using only physical or magical (typically physical) damage, as you need to strip the armor before controls can be used, and controls are mandatory for the most of the game. Yes, sure eventually you can get one spell room clearing mages, but that's late game, and that's not what you will be doing most of the time. Arguably mages are gimped up to level 12, which is a good half of the game. Once again, this is highest difficulty level, but this is where it gets fun.

There is also serious lack of skills, or variety, to be precise. It's fine for first game, but later you start to notice it more. And so many skills are very situational, or subpar, so you generally use ~5 constantly and a few for utility. It's specially notable between melee classes, as a rogue, knight(2h weapons), warrior(sword and board) and metamorph will use the same warfare skills, as they are core to being a melee, and not their "subclass" variations. There are also crafted skills, combining 2 schools, but combinations are between magical and physical schools, meaning you will rarely even see them.

There is very little to do outside of combat, except preparing for combat or picking up quests before you go fight stuff for the quests. A bit lacking from a cRPG.

Several of the systems feel unfinished, lacking purpose. Crafting seems like a huge part of the game initially, but you only really craft runes and lockpicks. Potions, scrolls, food and grenades quickly become useless, even healing potions are disappointing in the endgame. Scrolls hold up the longest, but not the offensive one, only the ones that can remove status effects. NPC attitude value is a glorified discount program.

AI "cheats" a lot. No one will suspect you as an undead (or having the zombie trait) outside of combat, but once initiated, get ready to receive all the healing spells. And they will forget it immediately after. Enemies will know where exactly to move, to avoid a minefield of line of sigh obstacles and smoke blockers, just to get that single possible shot on their turn.

But all of that said, I still enjoyed the hell out of my time with the game. Sure, maybe the abysmal state of PC gaming this year and lack of good RPG games in general is partially to blame, but I think there's more to it.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone looking for a game they can immerse themselves in.

End of 2019 edit: Still an amazing game, better than anything that came out this year on steam.