Reviews - themediocritic

A 2020 Review - The Age of Decadence (PC, 2015)

Score: 4/10

Mediocrity Score: Mediocre at Best.

The Age of Decadence is a strangely unbalanced turn-based CRPG. It rather uniquely takes combat out from being the main focus and pits the player into a scenario where you can take different approaches. Touted for being a game where "choices matter", the game somehow feels so linear - locking the player into a path chosen early on. Choices in the game will keep you on your toes, that is until you realize the pattern of don't trust anyone, ever. My advice before buying is - play the demo first.

Tags: The few words that come to mind are: mediocre, unbalanced, dialogue-heavy, cheap.

Play the demo first. If there is anything you should do before buying, it is to play the demo. This game is both very difficult and very easy. Rather unique in its approach, within The Age of Decadence you can 100% avoid all combat in the game by taking a more charismatic-stacked approach in your character build. What they don't mention is how incredibly simple the game becomes when you go for this non-combat route. It turns into a dialogue-heavy, point-and-click game where if you make the wrong choice you likely will be thrown into a combat situation where you will surely, and cheaply, die. Go with the combat route, and you are faced with a stacked-against-you RNG-based combat which is difficult to the point of coming off as both brutal and cheap. The one thing both routes have in common is the smoke-and-mirrors masking the cheap game-ending situations it constantly throws your way. In complete fairness reading reviews, watching let's plays, playing the demo, or even the reading developer's own disclaimers - potential players have been warned that "there is a good chance that you won’t like it, precisely because we took too many liberties with the established design". I can't help but feel like this is akin to being told "Here's the really over-cooked steak you ordered. There is a good chance you won't like it, but since this is all intentional - we've taken an extra heavy-handed approach with its blackened design." Yet here I am, disappointed that I paid for a really over-cooked steak that has an impressive char-broiled aesthetic.

Pros:
- Has an honest demo.
- Multiple routes may be taken to beat the game.
- Incredibly funny and useful skill/ability descriptions. More games should take inspiration from this.
- Some hilarious ways to find yourself dying, made out as a fool, or being separated from your money.
- Budget-friendly in cost and in required/recommended system specs. 
- NPCs are hilariously evil, greedy, untrustworthy, and always out to get you. 

Cons:
- A lot of cheap situations made to make you fail while masquerading as being a "choices matter" feature.
- RNG in combat is grossly stacked against the player, and always in favor of the NPC combatants. 
- The non-combat path becomes a trivial point-and-click game that leads to instadeath anytime you find yourself having clicked the wrong dialogue choice and end-up in combat.
- Boring story with a boring end-conclusion. Dialogue becomes a chore.
- The most important choice you will pick are your attribute points at the start of the game. Once you set yourself on that path, there is no deviating from it. You are locked in and cannot improve your stats in the game. 
- Lacking equipment options to suit your character with. I felt it was far too shallow.

$15 USD is a good, reasonable asking price for the game. If a sale put's it at 50-75% off, then all the better. Great budget recommended system specs and even better minimum. If you've got an older, or perhaps simply not as high-performance of a computer, this game would be a great fit and all the more worth the price. That being said, I don't know that I can put much more than maybe 10 hours into the game. Sure - there's some replay value but the same NPC conversations and quests get dull rather quickly. It's simply not something I'd generally recommend. Only with asterisks. Which brings me to my rating and recommendations:

For me, a 4/10. Strangely unbalanced. It does some things really right, and some things really wrong. I preferred the non-combat, more dialogue-driven paths - but that required a lot of reading of a rather...mediocre story. I did like how dishonest and untrustworthy almost the entire NPC base is. Kept me on my toes... until I realized the pattern of don't trust anyone.

I'd recommend the game to people who:
-Loved the demo.
-Love hardcore combat.
-Love point-and-click games and are willing to stick to non-combat builds.
-Have a budget or low-performance system, but are itching for a different RPG.
-Getting it with a significant discount

Everyone else, probably don't bother. There are much better RPG titles out there more worthy of your time and money.

A 2020 Review - 7 Days to Die, Alpha v18 (PC, 2015)

Score: 8/10
Mediocrity Score: Definitely Not Mediocre.
If it weren't for its unpolished nature - this game could easily be a 9/10 or dare I say - a 10/10. Survival thriller meets RPG-esque builds and progressions. Rough edges or not, this game is an absolute blast and I expect to see more and more content to be added over the foreseeable future. So incredibly close to being a top-tier game. I'd nickname this "The Rust Killer".

Tags: The few words that come to mind are: fun, potential, exploration, and engrossing.

My original review within the first 10 hours was scathing. I gave it an initial score of 4/10 because of how unpolished it is and because of that, I quickly wrote it off as a dismal attempt at a game in a very saturated genre. I was wrong. I found myself frequently recalling how much fun I had reviewing the game. Which led to me reinstalling and relaunching my little, hellish world appropriately called "EatMyShorts". Since writing that negative review, I've managed to play 72 additional hours within those two weeks. For me, that has NEVER happened. 7 Days to Die isn't a very pretty game. It has no plot or setting in a larger world. At a quick glance seems like a very average survival game. I personally made the mistake of jumping the gun and judging too harshly. But why should you play what still sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill game? Because it is fun. Spectacularly fun. That is the #1 reason why I've decided to grade it an 8/10.

Pros:
- Incredibly fun. An end-of-your-chair thriller. You'll shirk your real-life responsibilities to play more.
- Every building is like its own dungeon or instance. Incredibly varied - full of secret rooms, traps, and sweet-sweet loot. Also Zombies.
- Strong RPG qualities - leveling, unexpectedly large skill tree, character builds/classes, and a large variety of quests.
- Challenging AI. Even at a high level, the game finds ways to bring about more difficulty and more scares. 
- Finally, a post-apocalyptic survival game that could entirely be played and thoroughly enjoyed in a singleplayer mode. 
- Robust crafting system providing an abundance of items, resources, and materials to create a vast amount of objects.
- Super customizable server/world options. Admin/singleplayer cheats are really, really fleshed out.
- Can dismember and decapitate zombies. 

Cons:
- Graphics and physics are quite unpolished. The world is missing a lot of the "filler" objects that make a world look less bare and cookie-cutter. Appearances often look vague, blocky, and sometimes out of place.
- Vehicle physics are laughably bad.
- Difficulty scales with leveling, but rewards do not appropriately scale.
- Only non-enemy NPCs are basic traders/merchants.
- Many of the non-combat paths seem like an after-thought. Very shallow.
- Base building is tedious and boring. It's more useful to re-purpose and fortify existing in-game structures. This is often blocked/forbidden on online servers.
- Leveling becomes SUPER slow to progress.
- Quests often feel like either a waste of time or overly difficult & resource expensive to complete.
- Online servers are a dime a dozen. Most public servers are empty/low-population or entirely looted. PVP is awkward and very unbalanced.