Archeo: Shinar

The game would not start, not even after 80 minutes of having it open.

TL;DR - Poorly made, feels incomplete/unpolished - Poor artistic, UI and tutorial choices - Min-maxing is encouraged, but not fulfilling - Generally disappointing I hadn't even started the game and I had a lot to say. Music The menu theme when you start the game is amusingly short at about 25 seconds and, annoyingly, it doesn't loop well. Think triumphant exploration music that concludes abruptly before starting back up again. It was grating. I will grant that once I started a game, the main menu theme changed to something that looped a lot better. Disregarding that, the music is really delightful in general. There's an in-game record player where you can select background music. The vibes range from up-beat and exploratory to really chill and lovely. Personally, I really like both the Postcards songs. Sad to see non of the music is on Spodify. Voice Acting There is voice acting in this game. An interesting choice, as I feel a game like this wouldn't need voice acting, save for maybe the "letter from my father" intro sequence. Which, by the way, isn't volume mixed correctly. The other voice actors are about on the same volume level while the intro sequence is way too loud. I listened to a total of 3 voice actors in my admittedly short playtime of this game and I wanna say they suffer from poor mic quality issues (I don't know enough about audio to really say) and one voice actor was just... let's say not great. This lead me to the bewildering discovery that, in a game that has voice acting, there is not a voice volume bar in the settings menu. Not even a toggle. You have to turn down Global volume for the voices, which turns down everything. The Tutorial I admit, I did not spend long in the tutorial (there are 5 parts) because it was the most annoying thing I had to endure from a game in a while. In tutorial fashion, you cannot click anything other than what the tutorial tells you to click. We enter character creation (which in hindsight, why is there character creation in the tutorial?) and every button is there to see. Male/Female toggle, hair arrows, face arrows, name text box, super damn simple. "Cuppy", the tutorial cup that is voiced, has a paragraph to say for every action you take. She tells you to choose the gender, you click She greets you, you click her dialogue box She asks you to name yourself, you name yourself She goes on for no reason about your family name for about a paragraph and tells you to pick your appearance, but you have to click her dialogue box first, not the arrows She takes another paragraph to tell you where the arrows are thAT YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE She takes another paragraph to talk about your appearance, even though you only took one action, and asks you to pick a stamp, you pick a stamp She tells you to click done Literally none of that was necessary. It's character creation. Why the ♥♥♥♥ do I need a play by play in character creation. This isn't Baldur's Gate with a million sliders for every detail, there's not much to explain. Note: there are portions of the tutorial where you can't access the options menu to exit, so you have to sit through it. She talks in paragraphs for no reason in most of the tutorial, which I didn't finish as most of it you can intuit yourself. Art style and animation This game has a very charming art style, though there are a couple of style inconsistencies here and there. I have also noticed that many of the assets suffer from resizing, as some of them are crisp and clear while others are bloated and fussy or pixelated. The animation is boiled down to throwing around and resizing PNGs, ala work-place-training-video, and there are many instances where animated assets go out of UI bounds. It's a choice, and in my opinion as an artist myself, it isn't a very good one. It makes everything feel really unpolished. There are ways to get around a huge animation work load and this choice brought me out of any emersion I had (But maybe that's just me, as I would notice details like that). It may have benefited them more to not have animation at all. UI It seems as though some of the UI isn't sized correctly. I'd changed my resolution properly, but the options button seems a bit small. This goes for back buttons and font sizes as well. On that note, there isn't a settings button in the options menu. You have to exit your game and go to the main menu if you want to change any volume settings. Also, half the buttons are styled and rounded while others are just dark boxes with text. (I also ran into a bug where I couldn't click on the character portraits during an expedition. I could only click on the character names.) The Gameplay You start with a party of people who you can send on expeditions. Each character has 7 skills that you can increase, which scratches my min-maxing itch. Once you're on an expedition, there will be pop ups for you to assign a person in the group. These pop ups are timed and shows a skill needed to complete the task. However, you don't have a way to see each persons skills. You have to remember the skills they have from before you started the expedition. This mechanic would be cool and fine if I didn't have 7 skills and 5 characters to keep track of, with the implication that you would get even more characters as you play. And of course, even if you pick the best person, there's still a chance you can fail. It deflates the satisfaction of min-maxing character skills in certain areas. Outside of expeditions, there's a real estate mechanic, a black market, a place to buy and sell items for your people, and a place to grow your influence. Conclusion Ultimately, I got annoyed with this game. Put simply, it's poorly made. Which is disappointing, because in concept, the gameplay loop could be really fun. However, it seems like it's designed to have a long-ish playtime (I wouldn't know, I only played a couple hours) but I'm not sure the replayability would survive that. Really looking at it, this game consists of a handful of menus and chance. It's worth $8, maybe even $5, but definitely not $13. This review is posted long after the updates have stopped, so there doesn't seem to be any hope of improvement. I got this game on a 90% sale, which is about $2. Obviously, experiences are different between people and frankly, there's nothing *wrong* with this game. But I could definitely have a better time playing something else, and I think you would too, so I can't recommend it.

Love the idea of this game, but the gameplay loop is very minimalist and dull.

[url=https://jannekeparrish.com/reviews/archeo-shinar] Full review [/url] [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44626948-Loons/] My curator page [/url] Archeo: Shinar is a turn-based strategy and management game. You manage a team of explorers, ostensibly on a quest to find the Tower of Babel, but more likely on a quest to find fortune and glory. Your team can be trained to improve their particular exploration skills, as well as boosted through items and the liberal application of attitude adjusments. They then go out on expeditions, hopefully returning successfully, but at least having a merry jape along the way. Beyond the expeditions and team management, Archeo: Shinar also includes an array of options for what to do with the various artefacts the explorers return with, and how to improve your own reputation. The player can interact with the press to improve their standing and get favours, buy and invest in land, and sell artefacts. The game also includes random events that can help or hurt, but at least add a nice bit of flavour to the game. However much promise there is in the game’s concept, though, it’s the actual execution of these concepts that matters. The game can be effectively split into two aspects - the preparation and time between expeditions, and the expeditions themselves. The expeditions, for all the romp they are, are minimally interactive, with the main interaction being the party preparation beforehand, and choosing an explorer for a particular challenge when it arises. However, with each challenge being timed and no real information given about what the challenge is, beyond the needed skills, there is less the sense that you are submitting an explorer to a challenge, and more the sense that you are subjecting them to the mercy of a random number generator whose logic you are incapable of understanding. There is no transparency for the odds of success, neither during the expedition, nor during the preparation, leading to expeditions the player is woefully unprepared for, but which they had no real way of knowing they were unprepared for until it was too late. The management element of the game is similarly baffling. While there is a broad array of things to do, the reasons why I would do these things are not evident, nor are the actual victory conditions. Some, like the market, are straightforward, while others - like property and press - are confusing either in how to engage with them, or in why I would want to. It wasn’t until about a third of the way through the playthrough that I realised there was more I could do in the press room than just plying reporters with gin, but I am still unclear as to what the benefits actually are. Equally, while the property management seems like an interesting mechanic, beyond the basic elements of giving more money or resources, it’s unclear why I should engage with this element as heavily as the game seems to think I ought to be. Perhaps most bafflingly of all, I don’t really understand how to win this game. In my first mission, I was given a rival and thirty rounds, but no real indication of what victory against this rival looked like. Was it having more reputation at the end? Investing in property? I know I did lose at the end, but I’m not sure what I could have done differently. Archeo: Shinar is a game that tries to be a lot, and in doing so, loses track of what it actually ought to be. There is the core of a fun game here, in expeditions and in preparing adventurers for an expedition. That game would have fit nicely in the zeitgeist of reevaluating British exploration and exploitation, and would likely have been a fun addition to that canon. Instead, Archeo: Shinar chooses to take on a much broader array of elements instead of focusing on the mechanic that its players came for. In adding property management or reputation instead of making the expeditions more compelling, it succeeds only in watering down the one thing that made the game interesting to begin with. This game disappointed me. I love explorer games. The art looked fun, and what I saw of the writing looked like it echoed a style of humour I enjoy. Its needlessly complex mechanics, arcane win conditions, and reliance on random chance, though, left me feeling powerless and lost in a way I didn’t like and definitely didn’t sign up for. I guess it is the quintessential explorer experience then, isn’t it?

Archeo: Shinar is a turn-based and real-time strategy set in the world of archeology. It's a simulation of managing the expeditions and finding the best team for that. The game is pretty hard because with just a few bad decisions you can lose couple of hours of progress.

Excel the game

fun not bad --> 7/10

It's amazing how these people are still functioning with the amount of phobias they have contracted. Sadly, that's very relatable.

This game is a pile of junk! The main activitiy that you do in this game, sending your explorers on missions are just random chance calculators, devoid of any flavor, explanations and narration. I played on normal and even though i set my mustache explorers to work most efficient (at the cost of getting negative traits) and upgraded their skills every turn it only made a difference some of the time. What is really dumb is, that if on a turn you cant pay your explorers, you have to pay the complete sum on top of their next wage on the following turn. You cant pay off a part now, noo... you have to pay basicaly double on next turn, which makes it really hard to come back when you are behind on money. And at the third time you fail to pay you are out. Your c unt explorers sometimes cant do ♥♥♥♥. if you tryed to play on the highest difficulty, the game tells you that you need to use every trick in the book to be able to survive. Except for the fact that there are no damn tricks to use. They do not exist coz there is bugger all to do in this game. You buy a few things to buff your exploerers during a expedition and that is it.

난이도: 다른 운영게임이랑 비슷한 수준 볼륨: 이정도면 무난하다고 생각함 특이사항: 신경쓸 거리가 상당히 많다. 땅도 사고, 집도 짓고, 언론사 로비, 훈련, 랜덤이벤트, 암시장 등등 [hr][/hr] 고고학자가 되어 연구팀을 데리고 유적 탐험을 가는 게임. 탐험에 성공하면 큰 돈과 명성을 얻을 수 있다. 그런데 플레이어가 보통 고고학자가 아니라서 하는 일이 좀 많다. 연구원 고용이나 훈련은 물론, 경매에 올라온 땅도 사고 십여 가지 건물도 올려야 한다. 탐험 중에 유물을 찾으면 암시장에 팔아치우는(!) 짓도 하는데, 리스크와 이익도 따지면서 한다. 사실상 주도면밀한 도굴꾼이 아닌가 싶다. 게임성으로 따지면 재미는 있는데 아무래도 반복작업이 심해서 질리기 쉬운 편. 다른 운영게임은 진행하다 보면 점점 기능이 해금되면서 할 수 있는게 늘어나는데 이게임은 처음부터 대부분의 작업이 가능해서 그런 게 아닌가 싶다. 명성이 올라갈수록 할 수 있는 작업이 늘어났다면 좋았을듯.