[h1] In A Nutshell [/h1]
Imperatum is a sci-fi Action RPG set in a distant future where humanity has spread through the galaxy, but has nearly been wiped out by a mysterious alien threat. You, as one of mankind's best agents, will need to find a scientist that has critical information about the threat.
As in any ARPG, the main activities you will perform in Imperatum are exploration, looting, quests, customizing your character choosing from different build possibilities, and of course fight tons of enemies. This game chooses a pretty classic approach, delivering the classic formula in most things. The exploration part is average, but also crippled by the game map not being reliable and displaying structures and paths that do not reflect the actual level layout most of the time, so it will be mostly useless. Looting is aswell average as in any other ARPG, but it has some quality of life problems, because you actually will soon have too much loot on your hands, and will constantly be using your Drone Companion to recycle unwanted stuff, because of your inventory filling at an alarming rate. Also, absence of loot filters, sorting or any form of auto-loot or auto-sell functions are issues in a game of this kind.
Class builds will feature only three branches: Psyker, Marksman and Brawler, respectively the archetypes of Mage, Ranger and Warrior. Each skill tree only has 16 skills, both active and passive ones, each with five levels, that will just scale the ability effects further each stage. This is below average for a modern ARPGs. Classes will also feature four attributes, Strenght, Intelligence, Dexterity and Stamina, that will passively increase health, or dodge, or psi power, but be of little use for anything else as there are no attribute requirements for any armor, skill or weapon (!).
Combat is barely sufficient and will consist in nothing more than mowing down copy-pasted enemies with no real differences between them, forget about having Elites, Special Enemies or Mini-Bosses with meaningful powers, unique skills, and advanced tactics like in any decent ARPG, even stronger enemies will just be a copy of normal ones with just a shinier name and a bit more health, or the occasional unique trait such as damage reflect or regeneration. This boils down combat to a repetitive slog, far more than what is allowed by this genre. Only exception are Bosses, with at least an hint of special moves, but nothing impressive or epic.
This game's worst flaw is not gameplay, which is bare-bones and barely sufficient, but the technical side, an absolute disaster, especially for a game recently graduating from Early Access. Ridiculous loading times of several minutes, random crashes, severe game-breaking bugs forcing reload, frame-drops to 10 or even 1 FPS for no reason at random times, inventory bugs, are only some of the many technical issues with Imperatum, and this is so severe it actually forced me to restart the whole game once because it crashed when it did not automatically save yet and made me lose 2 hours of gameplay. Yes, auto save only, on game exit only (!!!), so if it crashes while playing, your progress is lost. The game is borderline unplayable with these issues, and be prepared to data loss, progress loss, crashes and bugs of all kinds and severity if you wish to embark on this terrible journey.
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[h1] Gameplay Analysis [/h1]
[b] General Gameplay [/b]
Gameplay will mainly be divided between exploration, questing and combat. As said before, exploration is unreliable thanks to the map being inconsistent, while the environments are bleak, feel empty, and just look like a bunch of assets thrown there without much care, they do not give out the cohesion they should. Quests will consist of single-objective targets, given by basic NPCs with one or two lines of dialogue at most, without any form of side talk or other interactions. NPCs outside of quest givers will not even speak or do anything, just stand there. Combat is not very well balanced, boring, and very repetitive, also because the class builds do not give that sense of progression and customization most ARPGs give out, but skills will often be uninspired and mediocre, not contributing at all to making the combat exciting and stimulating for the player.
[b] Story [/b]
Story is just hinted at, with few dialogues, no additional lore or information, not very well written or engaging in any sense. Mediocre at best. This is however to be expected from an ARPG and is not a major issue.
[b] Combat System [/b]
Combat is classic ARPG style, but just the basics of it. Skills and character progression are not very exciting, tactical options are limited, skills are boring and mediocre, enemies are not well diversified and just feel like an endless copy paste. Not good.
[b] Content & Pricing [/b]
Priced at 20€, and with immense technical issues, mediocre gameplay, graphics and story, i do not recommend getting this game, even on sale. I recommend not getting this game at all. I cannot say about duration because the problems prevented me from actually playing it properly and finishing it.
[b] Balancing & Challenge [/b]
On Hard, the enemies are tough at the beginning, but then it becomes much easier with a few basic item combinations. For the balance i will just say this: my marksman build was a better tank than my previous brawler build, because high rate of fire plus health regen plus AoE on base attack made me basically invincible against huge groups of mobs and even bosses. Balance is not good at all.
[h1] Technical Analysis [/h1]
[b] Graphics [/b]
Blurry, dirty graphics with mediocre models, poor environments, clunky animations, and lacking effects. This game looks like from 10 years ago if not more.
[b] Sound [/b]
Soundtrack and effects are aswell mediocre, especially sounds of bullets and attacks make into a terrible cacophony that is just annoying most of the time.
[b] Performance & Stability [/b]
Severe FPS drops, crashes and slowdowns are very frequent. Stability is poor. This on an i7 4820K, GTX 1080 and 16GB RAM configuration.
[b] AI [/b]
Enemy AI uses a basic follow and attack pattern. Boss enemies sometimes use special attacks at regular intervals.
[b] Quality of Life [/b]
Inventory management and loot sorting could use vast improvement as they are not very good as they are now, and require a lot of fiddling all the time. The UI is decent enough and does the job.
[b] Bugs / Issues [/b]
Game breaking bugs that prevent you from picking up loot, make enemies stop performing death animations, duplicate weapons, wrong equipment swapping, and more are commonplace in Imperatum. On the side, targeting does not adjust for height so it is impossible to target enemies higher or lower than you, and this can be surprisingly crippling in some locations.
[h1] Conclusion & Rating [/h1]
A very poorly executed attempt in doing a good Sci-Fi ARPG, suffering from vast technical and gameplay issues, Imperatum is one game you certainly want to avoid, unless at least the technical issues are solved.
[h1] RATING: 3.5 / 10 [/h1]
