Dustborn

Aight, buckle in. The discourse over this game was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid. If you unironically use the word 'woke' you can check out here because I ain't one of you. I finished this game and my thoughts are that this game is controversial for two reasons. First it is currently controversial for a game to be anything other than a 0 or a 10. Either it's the worst game ever or its the best game ever. But I remember the PS2 Era, the Xbox 360 era. An era of what we call 'Double A' games. Dustborn is... that. The second reason is that this game is very... corporate diverse. To the point it feels like a checklist was on hand. You know a certain very loud group of idiots hated this game the moment a black woman was the main character. But I don't care about either of those things so I gave it a fair shot. The combat is bad, it just is. This should've been like a telltale game or life is strange and just forgone the combat because I cannot stress how bad this combat feels to you. It never gets better. Beyond that the game is just downright broken in a few places. A hard lock after a boss fight that happened every single time I fought that boss. Another hard lock after doing dishes *after* that boss fight. Both bugs reported as early as november of last year and still unfixed. Luckily they seem to know the combat is bad, so every combat section has a 'skip combat' feature which if that's there... I must ask again why this isn't a telltale/life is strange sortof narrative thing? Why is this half baked combat here? If not for the skip combat feature I wouldn't have been able to complete the game from the above mentioned boss bug so thanks for that feature at least. The story is all over the place too. There are some genuinely cool ideas here but the story is so ADHD and won't focus on any one thing. The main villain comes out of no where with no explanation or build up, the ancillary villains just kinda... vanish because of vibes, and your crew feels bloated and filled with a bunch of characters who if they got cut from the game wouldn't change the plot. The crew that DO effect the plot are of mixed quality. So if we go back to my point about review scores. This is somewhere between a 5 or 6. It's not awful, it's just also not great either and it frustrates me to the degree that I can see potential in the ideas that aren't well written out. Also what the ♥♥♥♥ is that ending. The last hour or two of gameplay feels like they ran out of budget and were sprinting towards the ending which definitely didn't help with the feeling that some of these cast members were pointless. I would genuinely be fascinated to hear about the cut content of this game because what the ♥♥♥♥ must that look like given all the halfbaked ideas. It's very rough, going back to my talk on review scores i'd give it a five or six. If you can get it on a deep sale for less than like... ten bucks? Grab it. It's a weird trip.

This game is a joke, right? I went into this with an open mind, despite the negative buzz, in hopes, that it might not be as bad as some have painted it to be. And it's actually not...........it's far worse. I'll just get the positive out of the way - the comic book style visuals are actually kind of nice. Those are all the good things i can think of. The story follows Pax and her friends in this dystopian alternative version of America, She is an anomal, which, in this universe, I guess, basically means X-men, but with way lamer superpowers as is evidenced by her own, which is a power of a word, where she can, for example, block, trigger, or later even cancel to, essentially, influence or manipulate others. This feels like a parody of millenials made by a boomer. It doesn't stop there. The whole story aspect of this story driven game is incompetently made. The characters are insufferable and their dialogue sounds like it wasn't even written by a human being. They are supposed to be this gang of loveable outcasts fighting against opressive regime, but each time they interact with each other or anyone else, they come off as either obnoxious, or as toxic idiots. I have way more complaints - The plot is just unfocused. the world-building is bad. Plenty of moments don't make sense, or feel forced. The allegory, or symbolism is ham fisted. They later introduce other characters, some of which could have been cut out of the game completely. the pacing is terrible - it meanders until the final leg, which is rushed, almost like writers gave up. The gameplay isn't any better. In this type of borderline visual novel/walking sim game, it usually comes off as an afterthought, this being no exception. It includes way too simple adventure game puzzles, clunky Guitar Hero minigame and even clunkier combat. That last one is just painful - seriously, I recommend skipping every encounter. Oh, and there's music. The instrumental/ambient tracks are serviceable, i guess, but the vocal tracks? Forget the great songs from games such as Persona series, Silent hill series, or, from more recent examples, Hades and Claire Obscure: Expedition 33. The tracks we have here, sound like they were written and composed by a middle aged person, who tried to mimic style of hipster indie rock, that is at least a decade out of date and completely failed at it. I wanted to try this game mostly out of morbid curiosity, since the same dev made Dreamfall chapters (A pretty bad final entry in a franchise with a lot of wasted potential). Both of these are essentially poor man's Quantic Dreams games. At least QA titles have great presentation and can be enjoyed in "The Room" or "The Samurai Cop" type of way. Dustborn is just an unlikeable slog that drags for way too long.

I have, I have finally done it: I finished the most wokest game, or so they said 2 years ago. Divided America, 2030. Ever since Jackie got killed instead of Kennedy in Dallas on 11/22/63, the country was never the same again. Multiple states seceded, and there are now blue Rocketeer sturmtruppen casually roaming the street with their APCs and VTOLs in what remains of the former USA, with other weird actors like Mad Max biker gangs and knockoff Ollie's viltrumite tron warriors from California firmly in control of their respective states and zones. All the while this was brewing, there was this supposed huge event called Broadcast that turned certain random people into X-Men mutants with all sorts of voice abilities. That's the gist of the setting, and unfortunately the game doesn't elaborate on the lore and about the wild elements very well. This world doesn't resemble the real world that much. It involves superpowers and every faction possesses some game changing sci fi tech. Certainly more explanations are due, and apparently they did provide some through their discord server but to quote Elijah Wood: how could we have known? Just drop a 30 page lorebook in the main menu if you're that lazy. The game follows a group mostly formed of powered mutants("Anomals") who seek to escape the state. In contact with the underground railroad organization they've stolen a valuable mcguffin from the Californian viltrumites, in exchange for the resistance' aid. To circumvent the travel restrictions and fool the authorities, they all assume the cover of a band that's on the continentwide tour. Admittedly, the game does give a good road trip vibe, with each chapter having distinct vibes with different locations featuring unique assets, but that's pretty much the only thing they got right. The characters in the group have comically stereotypical personalities assigned to them and are annoying. Like legitimately annoying. If they were teenagers seeking refuge, then maybe I would've been able to offer more sympathies to them, but they're not. They're a bunch of 30 plus year olds acting immature. With half of the core cast's voice powers being deception and coercion, you can expect how this trip will be. I find only about a third of the total cast, including every character who later joins the ride, tolerable. Not likeable, tolerable. And the game forcing me to constantly console and counsel them did not improve my view of them any better. If anything they worked against it. The quality of the plot, the journey the band takes, is also subpar. To explain the voice oriented abilities it introduces a ton of vague elements and never goes full on to explain a single one of them. Villains are just as incompetent and uncharismatic, with none of them feeling particularly threatening when the crew is dispatching hordes and hordes of enemies with ease. The fact they spent years to build this shallow narrative is a surprise of its own, and they take their and our sweet time to tell this subpar tale at an excruciatingly stretched pace. If you're planning to play this, you're looking at a ~20 hourish playthrough through the span of 10 episodes. They could've easily halved this is what I feel. Gameplay. It can be separated into three categories: exploration, combat, and minigames. Exploration is what you expect from a game of this genre. You interact with the world and the characters, you can occasionally find resources to upgrade your weapon and there are quite a lot of unique discoverable collectibles/gifts you can give your party members. And they're for some reason well made. Very well made. Why did they care about this superficial feature this much when the characters themselves are poorly written caricatures and after giving up on worldbuilding halfway? Hell if I know. Your guess is as good as mine. The manner in which you talk to each character decides their ending, but honestly, I didn't care because they were so damn unlikable. For the most socially inept, the game also consistently spawns cringy emojis on top of their character models to convey their feelings directly to you, when the contextual clues and voice acting provide just enough. Combat. Absolutely terrible. I've seen better combat from asset flips, there's no saving this. Thankfully, every single combat can be skipped, which adds more to the pointlessness of these segments. Rhythm games, a brief pong and JRPG sections fall into the minigames part, and they are what they are. They should've implemented more variants of these to give the game a whiff of freshness every 3 or so chapters. And finally to directly address the elephant in the room... The politics. While the game did throw what I suspect to be a thinly veiled political analogy in many occurrences, because the storytelling of this game is so bad, I just ended up being confused in most cases. But there were some heavy handed offbeat moments you can't possibly miss. One of them is this extra activity of purging disinformation from people's minds using a gameboy clone. The idea is already stupid but the sheer dumbness is intensified more by the dialogues uttered after by the victims. The worst example I read was "I have a medical degree, there's no woke mind virus." ...Really? In the fifth chapter the band rescues a preschool kid from the oppressive regime, and she is mute, or at least appears to be mute because she is unwilling, or unable to communicate with people in any form both verbal and nonverbal. And later the crew starts to wonder what pronouns should they use to refer to her. Is this really the priority when the child's very safety is in question here? And the biggest offender to this game's infamy, the first track of the band, "We're The Dust Born." with its lyrics referencing the Replacement Theory. It doesn't make any sense lorewise, the whole band thing is supposed to be a cover to not attract suspicion. And the band's rest of the setlist is strangely tame. So why be this overly provocative? I assume they probably bought into that no publicity is bad publicity saying to generate buzz. And they got that buzz alright. So here's my final impression of the game Dustborn: It is bad. Not because I find it ""woke"" or I disagree with the game's politics it's trying to say, or at least what I think it's trying to say, I am pretty sure if I and a lead dev sit at a table and have a talk ourselves, we'll find out we're on the same side in most matters. I think it's bad because this game is just an incoherent confusing mess that is not enjoyable. It sucks both as a political statement and as an entertainment product, and that's that. Not recommended.

Soooo... It is a game, like a game made in like a studio umm... As a LGBTQA+ member those chaarcters were... Indeed chaarcters? Like they were there? they are... Yes. They are :3 I would prefer to eat rocks than play this game, it was unbearable, I felt like pushing through a swamp trying to feel the story That's what's wrong, it was just SO BORING, not engaging, none of the characters were memorable, me and my friend who are like, the gayest of gays didn't enjoy those gays :< It was 5/10 in the worst way, like the midest mid of mid

Нет, нет и еще раз нет, я пытался подойти к этой игре непредвзято, но она сама по себе предвзятая и единственный плюс данной игры, это комикс, а точнее стилистика и дизайн, все остальное в свою очередь это гигантская ошибка. Если и есть причина играть данную игру, то только на спор и 71% положительных отзывов, это явная ошибка, нужно поменять цифры местами.

This game is PHENOMONAL!! However, if you don't have basic empathy or communication skills you won't like it. You won't get it. You will fail. So, don't bother. There's a reason the incel MAGAts don't like it. If they had it their way we'd all be sitting around with out thumbs up our asses pretending like our own life choices are EVERYONE ELSE'S ISSUES. When can we stop listening to this overly loud ignorant crowd? Due to them I can't get any info on this game. In any case, I turned off fighting cuz I don't like to do it. I do enough IRL. It was very enjoyable. It was very heartfelt. It was, also, very heartstring pulling. I want more!!!

This was made for ****************** and *****************************

A generally annoying, boring and stupid experience. I bought this to play with some buddies after hearing it was bad and after what felt like 10+ hours, only an hour and a half had passed. it's just awful. Awful writing and terrible attempts at humour. The characters are incredibly annoying and unlikeable; it also has a wholly uninspired story that constantly seems to dodge around the topic at hand. Decisions you make feel unimportant/unimpactful as you mostly just whittle down all of the dialogue options. There's also simple combat that lacks any real purpose or adds anything. The graphics are boring, stale and not really interesting. Just like the characters. And the gameplay. Pretty much everything really. No thanks.

such a beautifully done game. i dont understand why people are so hateful towards this game. if you think its woke and all this other crap i think you may have issues. what game, movie, show doesn't have a ragtag group of outcasts fighting against some sort of government, mind u, in america. its a game and its really fun and well done.

A conspiracy between EU and Norway helped funding this game which was a drop filling the barrel to the brim same as the denied Peace Nobel. We must credit the peace loving stable genius for his superhuman restraint in not insta-nuking Norway at least for the time being. It didn't stop so-called critics who obviously haven't played the game from review bombing though. It's no masterpiece and a bit rushed near the end but I enjoyed my time with the game as I wasn't triggered by controversial content. A steal for the low price it's constantly on offer.