My two cents

[Nyaxx]

For what it worth, here is what i post on steam forum

Hi, this is my first review of any game here, not even sure here is the place to post it, in the first place. Please excuse my english, it is not my first language.

I decided to do this review because I find this game to have good potential, I love the setting and the background story and would like to see the finished version without the awful flaws I could spot in the first play through. Flamers and trolls...get a life I won't even answer. Game designer: you have possibly a gem but it is still pretty much encrust in dirt right now, would't even called this an alpha. That said, i will welcolm intelligent discussion on the topics i raised.


So here's my list of do and don't:

Graphics: one of the first thing to catch the eye, being a retro-gaming lover i don't mind cheesy graphic but if we compare to the forefather of all post-aps game, Fallout, there is a lot of ground to cover. Reminds me more of the later  Exile (spiderweb Software) series (blades of avernum).

Diversity: 2-3 pistols, subs and assault riffle that pretty much all feel the same...If we talk melee it's even worse! What, there is only knives or daggers or yet again you can use a pneumatic hammer... Where is the long blades, shock baton, guns with difference also, not only in the ammo but on the damage, strength recquired, range, stability...

Crafting: Love crafting but it is defficient here. Making item from scratch should be encouraged by making those said item better than the ones you can buy in the store. Also, if you need to put all of your SP in the crafting skills, they wont be usefull to you as you'll be to underskilled to used them. More balancing in this area is recquire. Also, recycling item should give you a chance to have some of the components back, not just scrap metal to make repair kit out of.

Cool downs: EEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRKKKKKKKKKKKK! HATE cool downs, hate it!  In the real world i'm pretty sure I can throw at least 2 if not 3 grenades in the 3-4 sec a "round" is usually in RPG. Why couldn't I throw another one for 5 round is completly unrealistic and frankly stupid. The use of cool downs *could* be explain with the use of magic, but is usually regulated by "mana" (or psi) points and action points. In the end I used as less as i could the grenades.

Action Points: Why would you separate action points from movement, I can't understand and I'm not sure it serves the game well. More so your visual system of the AP vs MP you have is pretty lame and very occult. Again, i would use the example of classic games like Fallout or Arcanum where you had simple dots and could easily and readily see what you could or couldn't do.

Story: earlier i compared the graphics to the Exile serie, of course underrail as (little) better graphic but what it lacks, compared to Exile, is the STORY. You should have like bazillions of side quests to do and more then a way to do it, wether you are a brawler, a gun crazy, a thief or a psionic.

The setting is great, the idea of an underground post-ap world is genious, the story so far is not great and the interractions with the PNJ is virtually non existent. This game feels more like a pre-alpha to me. I would have millions of quest and sub-quest idea for it, but right now the system is not up to it. Hope you will see to step it up, else I feel like I've been rob of my 10 bucks. AS of yet, would not recommend your game and would vote it a 4.5 at top.

[Kaerius]

It's an alpha. Way too early for a review. Several of your "issues" will be addressed as the game becomes more complete.

If you buy a game from steam where it clearly says "early access", expect it not to be finished. It'll save you a lot of headaches in the future, and you won't feel cheated out of your money. (Personally I think $10 is a steal for this game).

[Elhazzared]

In the first place Nyaxx, it is an alpha, you cannot rate a game when it is in alpha. Alpha means it's very much incomplete, popssibly bug ridden and whatnot. Also I don't feel your opinion on the content currently available being bad. Most alphas don't even have a 10th of the content this game currently has in it's alpha. More to the point, almost any game that comes out these days is designed to actually have somewhere between 3 and 20 hours of content. You can easly say that in your first run you'll have at very least 12 hours of content and this is very much incomplete. This isn't even a third of the game. There are 3 more major cities, lots of main and side quests, there are more parts of the underrail to explore. I'm not sure but I belive part of the surface will also be explorable (I may be wrong here). I can easly see this game having over 50 hours of gameplay once it's complete... If you feel that this is not enough for an alpha... Well, I think you haven't played many alphas before... For the price I paid for this alpha I already got more content out of it than many completed games including triple A titles.

While graphics could be better, you also have to think of this. It's one person doing this alone. There is no team developing it. For a one person thing, the graphics are quite nice. Trying to go further developing it alone would take forever.

Diversity will certainly be addressed. Again this is an alpha so you can assume half of the items are not there yet. In fact i'm sure if you play enough of it you might be lucky (like I have 2 times already) to actually find one thing called GEN in orange. It's a placeholder for an item still being made.

Crafting needs to be rethought too I belive. The main problem with crafting it's it's incredibly high requirements depending on material quallity. It has been debated and the one thing I agree mostly with is that items shouldn't have quallity. Quallity of the final product should depend on your skill instead. I also belive that items shouldn't require more than one crafting skill or it starts getting a bit problematic to cover crafting and other very important areas but that is a personal opinion.

Cooldowns are evil, everyone hates them and I'm not different. But even I can understand the reasoning which is called balance. Sometimes logic must take a backseat in order to archieve game balance. Still some cooldowns should be shorter, especially towards the use of health hypos.

Action points are yet another thing I very much agree with you. I prefer the dot system action point. Still with the current system in place I understand the reasoning for it not being there. Still it's not like this system is bad, it works pretty damn well, but we just prefer a more classic style of action points and to implement it the game had to take some radical changes which at this point is not an option I belive.

I'm not sure this game lacks in story, I've went through the available content and so far I've liked a lot of the lore. Again you have to bear in mind this is an alpha with tons of content still missing so what you get right now is not everything. Wait for the game to be finished and you'll have a lot more lore and story in it.

[Nyaxx]

Yeah ok so, I might (scratch that: i was) have been tough on the "review" thing.  I'm not really use to alpha, true. Maybe I tought it would be more complete, i dunno. Mea culpa. Tho I said, i would feel cheated if it'S stays like this but also said this is a gem, or diamond if you prefe, in the rough.
If there is 3 more cities to come and everything, Kaerius is rightby saying that 10$ is a steal for the game.
For cooldowns being necessary for balance, i don't believe that. I'm used  to RPG but more on the pen & paper style, i've played and mastered some for more then 20 years I always hated the spell per day system of D&D (which I always considered as a cooldown) and went around using mana points; for health you can easily come with a back effect if you use too much health potion (or whatever you choose to call it) and the same can apply to mana (or psi). Ammos and grenades could be more sparse, cost  more Elhazzared wrote. In fact I've played the game and written my review as a first impression thing, I must confess i didn'T read nothing of it yet. I agree with you Elha on the crafting, that the quality should depend mostly on your skill. Tho I understand that the creator wanted some components to be of more quality then the other, i think it could be resolved by using  a dual modificator (the item's and your skills) and that the exact quality of one item shouldn't be explicit, but suggestive (be it in the name with use  of adjective pristine, keen or used,rusted...) and i don't dislkie the fact of some item need knowledge of both mechanical and electronic, it's really more realistic. I can live with the AP system, but i just don'T find it practical.
As for the story, i love the setting but the lore could be more developed , maybe (most probably) it will.
Thanks for your comments Kaerius and Elhazzared.

[Elhazzared]

You could make stuff more expensive, like grenades and the materials to craft them but there is a limit to how much is enough. I don't like cooldowns too. The one which most bothers me is the time you have to wait by the gate for the double doors when heading out for the caves, it annoys the hell out of me but really, aside that I do belive there needs to be a way to limit what you can do in order to create game balance. I'm unsure whether you ever crafted grenades. If you havn't you've gone up to mk2 grenades at best and they are not really incredibly powerful. You can easly craft mk 3 which are awesome to deal with any humans even end game of what the alpha currently has, if it will not kill them, it will leave them close to death. I don't belive the resource cost for mk4 are acceptable but the mk4 are good. Then you have the mk5 grenades and let me tell you. so far only mutants surive one of those and on really low health. crafted grenades are insanely powerful hence why you can't toss them around like cookies. It's better to limit how many you use in a single combat, than make you sweat blood for one. Again I just don't agree on the health hypos cooldown.

I also understand the quallity of the item being something cool and realistic but as I did said before. game balance takes priority over realism. Making a mix of it as you sugest would make it even more wonky than it already is, it's either one or the other in my opinion and I'd rather have quallity based on your skill. It really balances everything out because if you got the resources you can always craft it, no matter what. But it will only be as good as you're good at making it which doesn't makes it overpowered for your level. On the having mixed crafting stuff just to make one. Yeah, again it makes sense but we fall into the whole game balance problem. The main problem lies in you not being able to really have a wide variety of skills, you have to specialise so damn hard that you either ignore crafting altogether or in order to craft you're really hurting over something you overly need somewhere.

Anyway this are just opinions, they are worth what they are worth but any feedback is good for Styg to see where the game is going on the minds of his players and adjust accordingly to what he wants out of the game.

[Elhazzared]

Yes, current version. One time I found it on GMS and another (in another playthrough) I found it somewhere in depot A. I cannot say for sure where it was but in both cases it inside something you open (not things you kill and loot) and one of those that have random item in each playthrough (some containers have specific stuff that never changes with each new game and some do change so it's one of those).

[Aria]

I found this orange GEN place holder item also little ways past where you first encounter the bandits/raiders when trying to deliver the package... keep going straight and you come to a open area with 2 locked rooms, across the road.

Office on right side with desk inside and 2 boxes outside, inside the desk I found the orange GEN item, I can try to screen shot the location if that helps? Also not sure it matter I just purchased the game a few days ago so this is a recent build.