Long story short, Encased obviously had extremely passionate people behind it. The question is, what happened to them after the initial early access release?
The game feel like it's about half done. It's front loaded, with prologue and act 1 feeling amazing, while the rest of the game is more of a whimper. Not to mention the ending... Last 2(3) cells are a joke, and feel like they were cobbled together on the weekend before release.
Now, I mentioned that it feels like the devs had a lot of passion, and I stand by that. There are plenty of cool ideas, nice writing and attention to detail, at least initially. But none of these mechanics and ideas were finished, just left there, making you sad about the missed potential.
You have a vehicle system, obviously inspired by FO2, but it's just that, a movement speed buff on the map and a storage access. You can get an upgrade, but it kind of comes late and is less useful than you would initially think.
Inventory is a mess, it obviously wanted to be a Tetris system, but gave up half way through. So now it both looks bad and is annoying and is not very functional. About 10 hours in your inventory will be filled with keys and notes you cannot get rid of, so look forward to that.
Overall UI is not great. Some parts of it work, but generally you would expect better. I understand that unity has limitations and will leave a mark, but this is just shoddy work.
Story is ok. Some writing is very enjoyable, especially for some side characters and stories. Not the story itself, but characters. Random NPCs have more humanity and look like more real and believable humans than major characters in most AAA games. I've always had issues with FO games in regards to believability. Not that such events can happen or something, but that if they did, this is how people would act and behave. Encased does not suffer from this problem, most people have defined and realistic believes, wants and ambitions. Too bad most quests feel unfinished and just end abruptly, never having follow-up or real consequences.
And lastly combat. Oh boy. Imagine Divinity combat, but really bad. Like, if skills were made by someone who heard about what skills DOS2 has, and tried to recreate them from memory. While heavily drinking. Long story short, half the skills are just the same attack, but for different weapons. The other half are badly scripted basic abilities. There obviously was almost no testing, balancing or though that went in to combat. AP economy is a joke, damage scaling is out of whack, enemies are bullet sponges early on, and overall combat is the weakest part of the game.
I would mention stealth separately. Normally I'm not a fan of stealth, but I would recommend it here. Not that it's well made or fun, but it allows you to avoid turn-based combat, making the game much more enjoyable to play. Get a quiet weapon and stack some detection threshold (think of it as your "AP" outside of combat). I like syringers for their shroom laced dart, or cryo laser so you can root people in place. They can't detect you if they can't reach you. And then just go wild, killing all enemies one by one without starting the combat.
So overall, the game is not worth 30 euro. Get it on sale for a fiver, and have some fun. Don't expect a finished game, just a passion project that ran out of passion long time ago.
