Didn’t find a thread on this in the search box, so here goes. For some reason I can’t seem to get a Steam link to work here (but I bought it on Epic anyhow for the 25% off coupon I had).
Same folks (Bearded Ladies) who did Mutant Year Zero. This one is another post-apocalyptic tactical RPG-ish thing, with mutant frogs as bad guys and actual humans as protagonists this time. Similar vibe though, and the combat is also similar but a bit more refined. Pretty interesting story, dialog runs from pretty good to sort of not so good, and combat is fun and reasonably challenging.
With the Epic coupon it’s a decent buy. Not whether I’d go for it at full price, though it certainly does seem to deliver what it promises.
I have this on my wish list. I am curious to see how it turns out. It does look good.
Mutant Year zero did not click with me though. I am not sure why. I hope this does not have the same problem with me.
I recall trying MYZ because it was free and stopping immediately. Something about the camera made me nauseous I think. Did it have more of a third person perspective? Anyway, I’m really enjoying Christopher Odd’s play through of this.
MYZ was balanced in such a way that the only viable “tactic” was to abuse the view limits of AI characters to pick them off one by one. It got old fast. It’s a shame, too, because the source material was fun.
Anyway, color me skeptical, especially since this appears to be the same genre. At first glance of the title I thought it was going to be a sequel to Miasmata.
I found combat in MYZ to be frustrating, and bailed eventually due to the game-y ness of the battles. As noted upthread, abusing the AI’s view angles and other cheese was essential, and made the core of the game sort of unpalatable. Kinda liked the duck though.
Miasma Chronicles’ combat feels a bit better, and you have some more tools as well. Only a bit of the way into it but it feels like they learned a lot from MYZ til now.
Yeah, everybody says that stuff about MYZ, which has kept me from playing it even though I got it for free. I have no interest at all in my tactical battles being reliant on metal gear sneaking. I guess this is just that but without the interesting setting. Bleh.
I wonder how much that applies to a lot of these tactical combat games. For instance, I’m thinking of Massive Chalice, which I’ve been meaning to replay. But wasn’t that game largely skirting around and then carefully breaching the AI detection limits? Wasn’t that, basically, the essence of its battles?
I wonder what – if anything – would make Massive Chalice’s approach work any better or worse than Mutant Year Zero’s approach, which is presumably the same in Miasma Chronicles? I guess your use of the word “abuse” is carrying a lot of weight here, but without having played Mutant Year Zero, I’m not sure where the line between “abuse” and “gameplay” falls. :)
It fails for me when the core game design is a golden path sort of puzzle design, which is what I think of MYZ. You must in the end keep playing them over and over getting your guys through because they’re all you have.
Whereas MC might have detection games as a part of it’s tactical battles, but ultimately the core design mitigates that concern because it’s centered around the knowledge everyone dies.
The setting is interesting enough, at least, I find it fairly interesting. Coal mining town in Kentucky long after an apocalypse apparently brought on by, well, not sure yet. The Miasma itself has a very (new) Prey vibe. The characters skew pretty young and shallow for my taste, but I’m not that far into it.
One of the games it feels I am just playing them wrong. Mutant Year Zero felt similar at the beginning; I can’t remember what I learned to overcome that feeling. Here after three hours on normal: a disappointing slog. I need a ‘How to play’-guide to get grasp. Shoot, shoot, medpod, shoot, shoot, one dies, see if I can make it, shoot shoot, medpod, another one dies, shoot, shoot, … oh lucky me. That’s for the fights where you can’t ‘thin the herd’ because there’s a cutscene or something (I am in a dungeon now where there was no sneaking prior to the fight). But the whole games feels like this for now. Maybe it’s the positioning I don’t get…
Getting to the crunchy turn-based bits, I’d say they’re fine.
Yeah? I don’t know. Feels pretty hardcore/special to me. The reviewer on the other hand has run into similar problems like me…
My main issue is that it’s a deeply ungenerous game. Consumables are limited in quantity, with even glass bottles (apparently the only object distracting enough to lure guards in the post-apocalypse) being few and far between. Ability cooldowns are excessively long, with even a bread-and-butter skill like overwatch having a three turn wait between uses. Protagonist Elvis’ armour-stripping ability? Six turn cooldown, so don’t expect to be using it more than once per combat. What’s worse is that cooldowns persist across skirmishes, so if you use an ability at the end of a fight, there’s a good chance it won’t be available at all for the next one.
The 1 star though is due to the reviewer’s interpretation of one of the main charcaters. What is described feels odd to me as well but I don’t know yet where that odd feeling goes. I have not seen enough of the game/narration/character to agree with the given interpretation.
I have to say I probably misjudged this one, though I should have known from my experience with MYZ. It grabbed me at first, but the parsimonious doling out of consumables and rewards, the punishingly unforgiving combat, and the arbitrary linearity of a lot of the game started to wear on me. Sadly, well after the return window had closed, so I will probably finish this at some point.
I like the character in question, but I’m an overprivileged white guy, so what do I know (for the record, I don’t think Diggs is dumb at all)? Been really enjoying the playthru I’ve been watching. I do agree that Elvis lacks personality. None of the characters are especially compelling, though Diggs is my favorite. I think the combat is really good. It’s true that abilities have long cooldowns but you start to get a decent number of them and it makes you think of how/when you use them best. Some of them are VERY strong and need long cooldowns.
My experience with Massive Chalice was that on Normal difficulty, the skootch-and-shoot tactic was both boring and brutally effective. You could ignore 2/3’s of the character classes, and just use the long-range archers to plink away and easily win every battle (give or take one battle).
But!
If you move the difficulty slider up a notch, now the enemies have the armor and HP to survive your archer’s fire long enough to start landing hits of their own. All of a sudden you are losing characters and battles to increasingly beefy mutant monsters. Now you have to use the full character roster, since the melee and alchemist classes are more survivable and have slide/stun abilities that you will need to deal with groups of strong monsters. E.g. maybe you can’t kill a deadly enemy on this turn, but you can slide him over so that he bumps into another monster, stunning them both and buying you another turn. This version of Massive Chalice is much more interesting, as every turn of combat you are dealing with Into-the-Breach style tactical puzzles of how you can use X moves to kill/disable/discombobulate 3X monsters.
Anyway, that was my experience. Do consider skipping normal difficulty if you are giving the game a replay.
