Made by Spiders Studios. I guess they made Of Orcs and Men. It’s a sci-fi action-RPG.
$20 on Steam and Xbox Live Arcade. $16 currently on Greenman with GMG20-GGN5D-FC3NA at checkout.
Any impressions?
Supposedly, it’s kind of Witchery in terms of combat.
This sounds like a total recall rpg that is party based. Going to be hard for me to resist this one, especially with party based rpgs becoming rarer.
Hmm… I’ll probably wait for impressions, especially of the combat, but I’m intrigued.
Other than having the same engine, I’ve no idea how similar this will be to Of Orcs and Men. I mean, I haven’t even played that yet.
Well, for 16 bucks I pulled the trigger. Downloading now. Will report back when I can actually play the thing.
I salute you, Charlatan!
Really curious about this. I rewatched Arnie’s Total Recall two days ago after some 10 years, and RPG set on Mars could be exactly what I want right now. Hopefully it is good.
Shameful the lack of reviews though. Did they not give any review copies out or what?
I don’t think they did, but I think that’s more a result of it being so low budget. The scuttlebutt is that after Orcs and Men, this is last opportunity for Spiders Studios to prove themselves as a viable indie studio.
Well, I like the Black Sabbath song so this is probably pretty good.
Are you thinking of the as-yet-unannounced sequel - Mars: War Pigs?
That doesn’t even make sense. War Pigs? Psshh.
I’m enjoying it so far. I’m about 2 hours in. It’s got some annoyances though.
Combat is action rpg with party members but not button mashy. There’s a basic attack, a block breaker attack, and a block with parry system. The camera is zoomed out enough so that you can see what’s going on unlike monster hunter but I don’t think there’s a lock on mechanic. The writing is cringe worthy at times and I’m too early to get any sense of the plot. Loot spots are glowy and there’s a confirmation after looting. Quests so far are hand holding with indicators on the map. It’s too early to tell if some dialog choices actually make a difference.
I bought this.
I’m a huge rpg fan, i love total recall (which this sounds like a lot) and i like party based rpgs (which the steam store page made this sound like).
It also helped that it was like $16 on GMG and i had enough credit to mostly pay for it.
Will have to try later. From ibdoomed comments, i might end up being disappointed in it, but it isn’t that big a hit so i doubt i will regret the purchase. Hopefully.
I got sidetracked, but I’ve played 3 hours or so and I also like it. The writing is pretty weak, to be sure, but the plot seems moderately interesting. It feels “Euope-y” in that I get a strong Gothic feel from it, in addition to the Total Recall vibe. You can modify weapons and armor by “crafting” mods to insert in them. Character development is by spending points in combat, steath, or “magic” (though the last path hasn’t opened up to me yet). In addition you have another type of points to spend which can open up more choices for you (for instance, I spent 2 points to open up more crafting choices for me).
There is a lock-on (it’s mousewheel click) but the couple of times I used it I was sorry (locked onto a far away creature and then some nearby guys popped up and I got hosed).
Doesn’t seem terribly difficult (I’ve dialed the combat difficulty down), but that’s ok with me.
So far I’m happy I got it. Hoping I can play through most of it this weekend.
Came home from work, bought this, proceeded to play for the next 5 hours.
I like it, but it clearly low budget. The voice acting is mostly decent to terrible. Thankfully more decent than terrible but one female character early on…
The game seems pretty hard. I’m playing on medium and you can EASILY die. Enemies have some sort of anti stun lock mechanic where if you hit them enough, fast enough, they start to dodge all of your attacks for a little bit. This is pretty lame and what is more lame is you don’t have the same thing and get hit locked from enemy attacks very easily. Some attacks are also almost impossible to dodge it seems. Early on you’re facing these (basically) monsters that jump attack you in an enclosed area and in large numbers. Only liberal use of consumable items like grenades, traps and health kits got me through some of these sections.
The game is heavily melee based. My character is more of a mage, but you still melee most of the time. Things like guns or force lightning only supplement your melee.
I haven’t really found a good way to deal with groups of enemies yet. Well, grenades help a lot, but they are expensive. My magic doesn’t seem to help much although the (basically) force lightning does nice damage against two enemies. The force wave sounds like it should affect groups but it doesn’t seem useful with a couple points in it so i started working on other abilities.
The crafting system is very cool. Most armor/weapons have addon slots that you can craft addons on to to customize them. This also changes the appearance which is something even big budget games tend to laze out on.
The story is ok, but it is no Baldur’s gate. Early on you’re in a prison/POW camp and i think the game does a poor job at staying constant in atmosphere. Half the time i’m wanting to escape from this prison and half the time i’m wondering why my character wants to escape because life in the prison seems really good with few exceptions.
The party system is pretty disappointing but present. You can give your ai companion very basic commands, but it is more accurate to say you can’t affect them at all. Can’t change their equipment, skills or really effectively order them to do stuff. Ai companions are decent distractions and do decent damage though. You certainly feel they are present and you certainly try to keep them alive in a fight (they revive after a battle is over if they “die,” like in mass effect), mostly due to needing them to take heat off you.
They describe it as being a “short story,” so I wonder how long it is. Thanks for the comments, everyone.
You’re calling “Mars: War Logs” a short story, what does that mean? Is that a comment on the length of the game or that it’s part of a much larger story?
When creating an RPG you can start with the idea of making a trilogy, or like the baldur’s Gate series, a 100 hour game. We knew we didn’t had the funds and means to do so, and we’re not found of DLC adding some story part after part… So we tried to create a complete story, but a shorter one. The main quest is about 15 hours of gameplay, there are a lot of side quests and a big part of the game can be played again as the choice you’ll have to make at the end of chapter 2 will completely modify the story. That’s why we call it a short story, designed for downloadable platforms.
I really hate melee in science fiction games. Soldiers today rarely use bayonets, and the idea that in the future they’ll be more useful than today doesn’t make much sense to me. Give me ray guns any time.