Skyshine's BEDLAM

I haven't found Bedlam fun. Which is a pity because it had huge potential. The graphics are great and the animations are fluid. The random encounters are exactly what I expected from a Rogue-lite style game. Sometimes they're fair, sometimes they're not but that's just that way the dice rolls. My complaint is with the tactical combat mechanics. They're honestly stupid. Each side gets two turns. It doesn't matter if you've brought one unit or six. You can move the one unit twice or two of the six units once. Think about this for a moment. Most of the units will be unable to move in any given round. There is no numbers advantage; a small team tends to be superior as their members don't stand around like numbskulls whilst getting shot-up. No team composition will give you an advantage until you start getting high health and high damage veteran and elite members. That's not tactical play. There are four classes of combatant scaling from high health and low damage melee fighters to low health high damage snipers. A melee fighter can attack someone adjacent to them only - which makes sense. However their low damage means that attacking with a melee fighter is a waste of a precious turn. They're meat shields in the purest sense. Ranged units can attack only at a very specific distance. A sniper unit can attack someone seven paces away. If the enemy is six or eight paces away they cannot be shot at all. How does this make any sense? Why doesn't damage or to-hit probabilty scale with distance? A lot of the gameplay reduces to hoping an enemy will run into the narrow band of a ranged unit or trying to coax them into one with a sacrifice. Nothing in the description, video or screenshots indicates that this is the tactical style. That no real gameplay is shown is very telling and should have been a huge warning for me. Still complaining about the tactical game. Units are not placed at the start of battle they're dropped in randomly, a melee unit could start well behind a sniper unit who is too close to shoot the enemy. Why - when I am instigating the attack - would I possibly want my units deployed like that. Bedlam could have been a great FTL / XCom mix but as it stands it's a game of chess where your opponet randomly kicks over your pieces. It's not fun at all.

At this time I would advice most people to stay away from the game till it is balanced. The game starts out fun and enjoyable, but once you have a threat level higher than 50 you are looking at a mad rush to hope you dont get RNG'ed to insaninty. The game will throw you 7-8 AI to beat on an easy side mission area. Then you will have 3 AI on a main mission point. The game balance is bad you get 4 slots to use for your team and you get power ups and special weapons to use, OH and the AI get it also but they dont lose the ability to use their 2 action moves after using the power ups like you do. This is a huge downer for the game. There are missions that the only way to win is use all your resorces that are not easy to come by. The game really has no way of teaching you the smaller details on how to play or what the AI power ups do you get to find that out as you play and watch out some of the power ups are hard to see if they are active when there is a cluster of characters next to each other. The controls are slugges. I have found when you are wanting to switch from one of your characters to another you need to make sure that the right character is selected before you move. There is no hot keys to switch and no way to rotate the cam to see when things are in the way. This game could be good if the devs would be more active with the community and keep the game moving forward. The last update was 6 months ago, dont see any more coming any time soon. If you like games like this play FTL or Final Fantasy Tactics.

score: 8 out of 10. ADVICE FOR 90% OF PLAYERS: DO YOUR FIRST CAMPAIGN ON 'EASY MODE'. it is a bit too easy at first... but allows you to get a feel for mechanics and tactics. plus lets you enjoy most of the game. 'normal' mode is designed to kill you in less than 1hr. 'normal' mode is similar to 'insane' on most games. 'normal' mode is not fun.... unless you like frustration... or enjoy wasting your time and money... might also appeal to sado-masachist LOL that is NOT an exaggeration! check other reviews... lots of death maybe 1hr of campaign tme. the problem is difficulty ramps up FAST! soooo fast that you will be facing impossible odds in less than one hour. again... EASY MODE HIGHLY ADVISED TO ENJOY THE GAME!!

Another update 18/09 So after putting some more hours into it, I have a gripe that stems directly from the combat system. The longer you roam the wasteland, the more notoriety you have which is reflected by levels of threat (low -> guarded -> eleveted -> severe -> bedlam), akin in theory to the FTLs chase system, where it discouraged 'farming' or basically taking too much time. However, in practic, the threat level of bedlam does not coexist with its combat system, through which threat is represented. For each threshold you surpass, the battles are supposed to get tougher by simply putting more enemies on the battlefield. You face the same type of enemy units throughout the game, so they have the same health and damage throughout your whole journey. What is broken here, is that late in the game you encounter the same weak (as compared to your badass elite units) henchmen, but there are just way more of them, however, the numbers advantage they seemingly posses is mitigated by the two moves per turn system. Therefore, out of 15 enemies, only two, or even one move towards to attack you - easy pickings for your hardened lot. The rest is just grouped in the corner waiting their turn to enter the meat grinder. The only battle headache is the random placement system, which can really put in a tough predicament right from the start. Still, you always go first in battle so you can immediately activate shields, damage absorbers or flat-out nuke clustered enemies. In essence, you just drive around wasteland, hoping to unlock a new dozer (I didn't unlock anything yet), and scoring levels (= more damage output). And boy, you'll need your elites levelled if you are to have any chances with boss. What does it mean? If you manage to survive your first 20 minutes, you're rolling and the game gets grindy fast. Still, the potential is there, the game just needs tweaking. Update 17/09 So I kind of finished the game on normal. Let me say this. There are two difficulty bumps after which the game is a breeze (at least on normal). You hit the first bump right after the start - you only have rookies, who, for the most part, won't withstand more than one shot. Keeping them alive and leveling them is the tricky part. Some of them will die, but their sacrifice allows you to keep a force of capable veterans. Then, you gonna find the first elite recruitable. After the moderately hard battle, he/she joins. Elites are powerful units - they have more health, and their damage output raises each time they level. By the end of the game, one of my elites dished out 16 damage per shot (which means one-shotting regular and elite enemies, the only exception being the boss). I'd say that's pretty deadly. The second difficulty bumps comes right after you established a foothold with your now veteran troops. The resources. All of a sudden, your fuel and food are almost depleted. If you manage to gather some, you good. But that's random, as most of it comes from points of intrests that hide a random encounter. It could be your precious fuel, or a band of cyborgs. After that, you just steamroll. More elites join you, they level, you gather more powerful equipment for your dozer to use in battle (like a nuke, or a shield granting immunity to damage and regenerates your health each time someone hits you for one turn), etc. Most of the time I fielded my 3 elites and they mopped the floor with like 15 enemies without taking a scratch. As for the random encounters, I'd like to see more crew-specific, contextual interactions. There were only a handful during my 3 hour playthrough, and I'd would greatly enhance the feeling of accomplishment and connection to your crewmembers if they had more options to interact during encounters. As it stands now, half of the encounters don't even give you any option to pick - just a quick, flavor text and that's it. Hell, I don't mind losing my guys because of a choice I made in a random encounter! Everything written below still applies. Also, I cannot comprehend how you can compare this game to Xcom (the new one). ---- Original review ---- I cannot recommend Bedlam in its current, underdeveloped state, as it lacks certain, IMO, fundamental features. I do not share many reviewers' concerns about overall unbalance of the combat mechanics. I think two moves in a turn spent on whatever by whoever is an interesting concept. It just requires getting used to. However, I do have an issue with how uninteresting and not varied the characters are mechanically-wise. I.E. You start with 4 snipers, each of whom has the exact same stats. Like carbon copies. Same for your 4 gunslingers (each has 5 health, 3 damage, 3-4 range, 4 move). A wasted opportunity right from the start, a little mix up in the roster would greatly improve the decision-making process. Said gunslingers should all bee a wee bit different. Like imagine, one gunslinger with 4 health and 3 range, but 3-5 damage. Another one with 5 health, 2-4 damage, 2-4 range, and 3 move. You know, some tactical flavor. Once a character levels up (after scoring three kills), their combat usefullness increases dramatically, and their stats go up in a fixed manner, which means we do not get to allocate any skill points. A real shame - the way it was in Banner Saga kept things interesting - there you could specialize classes, having direct control of how and what function a given unit would perform on the battlefield. What a wasted opportunity! For instance, I would heavily invest in health for my sniper given the chance, granting him survivability, but at the cost of lower damage output. I would increase the range and quickness of my shotgun unit, making them glass cannons, etc. Choices is what we need, to further adjust the characters to our playstyle. Unfortunately, there are no active/passive skills either (sniper is the most 'exciting' class, as they have a passive chance for a headshot each shot), so there is no incetive to use your lesser units, as they are prone to dying extremely fast and cannot really dish out any proper damage. If the vanilla troops had a skill, like for instance your tank having a charge, or granade to use once per battle, that would justify using them in certain situations, even if they do not scale to the enemy stats-wise. Currently what happens is you end up using your two moves on your badassest guy, and reasonably so! A skill-tree, like choose one skill out of two per level - that's what Bedlam needs. Same goes for equipment. It's all bound to a character and is unchangable. Your frontliners will use a simple melee weapon, always dealing 2 damage. After the level up, the damage will increase, but it's always a fixed value. You cannot influence it in any way, your troops gonna deal the exact same amout of damage each time they attack. Instead of a boring 3 damage each shot, why not introduce a 2-4 mechanics? What about finding weapons as you travel along the wasteland? We don't need an abundance of them - just a few to spice it up. Apart from combat and character progression, the Dozer's upgrade system seems to be lacking. There are four areas of research - bio research (slower food consumption), armory (less power cells spent for using dozer's special equipment), barracks (faster soldier recovery), and engineering (less fuel used). By spending power cells, you can improve each, up to a level 5. Each level grants a % improvement in efficiency. And that's it. It could have been a small research tree for each research area, with at least a few passive bonuses to choose from, maybe an active bonus here and there. As it stands now, it just feels underdeveloped. Nevertheless, the art, the feel, the world, the atmosphere, it's all here, and it creates a fantastic coherent entity. In essence, the potential of Bedlam is huge, it may even surpass FTL, but as it stands, I cannot recommended it, even though I wish I could.

This is a great little game! Great atmosphere, music, style and very enjoyable. Many negative reviews are the early version of the game, which was unfairly hard. At the current state, it is NOT very challenging on normal difficulty, once you understand the mechanics, which are pretty simple. Here are few simple tips to get you going: 1. Upgrade your dozer asap 2. Don’t spend energy on equalizers, at least until/if you get some really good ones. In most cases it is better to use the default dozer weapon. Only use the weapon if there is no other option and you risk losing your lvled crew member (obviously, don't ever risk loosing your lvled chars) 3. Sniper is the strongest char by far. By mid game my main sniper delivers 20-25dmg, which is enough to end even a boss fight. 4. It is essential to level up your crew: give kills to the same crew member. Your main crew must be able to 1-shot your enemy to avoid taking damage: you will need 10dmg to kill any regular enemy. This is easiest with snipers, as they dish out 10dmg at lvl4. 5. Once your main team is leveled up to 10+dmg, start leveling up some backups. To allow injured crew time to heal 6. Position your team right on the edge your enemy’s firing range + their move range. This way the enemy can’t move and shoot at you in the same turn. Eventually they will decide to move into your firing range and you will reposition and 1-shot them 7. If enemy BLITZ is inevitable – use the dozer weapon to get them drunk. This is a great opportunity to level up your crew and/or get pickups. 8. Melee chars are also great, especially once you level them up to 10dmg. Since they have good health and range – you can easily get pickups and don’t worry too much about being hit. Also they are the best to avoid BLITZ (if you can’t use your dozer weapon) – because you can simply charge in and not die 9. If you still have trouble with difficulty – check out game wiki and youtube GLHF!

[H1]Skyshine, after a long time in the making, finally deliver upon the promise of Bedlam, two very distinct games in one most excellent package (and one elephant that sits in the corner).[/H1] It's been an awfully long journey. The initial rollout of BEDLAM was to lukewarm reviews and to muted user response, largely because of a very polarising core mechanic which encouraged some very specific and exploitative play (the long and the short was that it encouraged some very specific team configurations and relied too heavily on you getting an elite that you could power through the game with). That version of BEDLAM remains, for those that enjoy that style of game, however, there's a new mode, called "Campaign", and with that comes a completely new BEDLAM, one based very much on the XCOM:EU 2 AP per character approach. This completely flips the game on its' head, encouraging a balanced team of rotated characters where each individual link in the chain needs to be as strong as the next, lest you start leaking team members due to people getting smooshed by elites in the late game. [H1]This all sounds well and good, but what IS Bedlam to begin with?[/H1] Skyshines' BEDLAM is a blend of a few different games - FTL and The Banner Saga probably being the most prominent titles that would make the most sense to suggest, having a flat overworld map made up of nodes that you can explore, a lot of which have choice based text adventures, along with a smattering of isometric tile based combat encounters where you move your combat pawns around and fight against your opponents. In this game losses are permanent, so there's a touch of the rougelite about it as well, along with persistent meta-progression as you complete runs and unlock more dozers and more options to start your loadout with. The theme and lore of the world is absolutely excellent, seriously, it is. A bone dry wasteland that is filled with some memorable characters, a lot of backstory to each one, and a pulpy, comic book feel to the whole thing. The world building has been very well thought out, and is consistent enough that it could easily be built upon in other games, the lore is strong enough to serve as a platform for books and stories, if the game is able to keep going. The art style equally has this pulpy comic style that serves extremely well, and helps set the tone for the game in general, you really do get immersed in this somewhat askew look at the apocalypse. It's more Borderlands than Mad Max, and that's entirely to its' benefit. [H1]Getting around in yer Dozer[/H1] Mechanically, the game plays out somewhat similar regardless of Arcade or Campaign mode. You'll be moving from node to node on the overworld map, and then exploring minor nodes with your outrunner car as you see fit, sometimes this will result in a fight, sometimes this will result in an adventure encounter. Either way, there's a LOT of content to digest, it's easily on a part with FTL post it's advanced edition patch, if not moreso. You'll be working your way through the badlands of Bedlam fighting the various factions, each have their own little quirk which adds flavour to the combat, as well as figuring out the best build for your playstyle (since each of the classes have their own way of fighting, and mixing them gives you a very different approach depending on what setup you run with). With the advent of the Campaign mode, there's now two very viable choices for players. Arcade mode satisfies those who enjoyed BEDLAM at the point of release, complete with the BLITZ-o-meter and the original 2AP per side regardless of how those AP were spent over the turn. The Campaign mode satisfies the tactical thinkers who prefer the XCOM:EU style of approach with AP on a per character basis, and means that encounters are far more about teamwork and thinking ahead in a group sense, rather than an individual sense. These two very seperate modes actually work to the benefit of the game, opening it up to a much wider audience, and giving the game life where previously it would have been restricted only to very specific fans of the lore or the style of game. [H1]You mentioned an elephant?[/H1] I did. This game suffers from Kickstarter-itis. Almost as badly as Armello did. I therefore have to slap the warning that any retail purchaser of this game will be purchasing a game that no matter what will never be entirely content complete. Some elements of the game are going to be kickstarter walled off, there's a thunderdome style encounter that is not yet implemented that is going to be KS only, along with a Unique Faction Dozer (this is believed to be the Banner Saga Crossover one, or that might be another one on top) that is intended to be KS only. Whilst this may make up only a small-ish percentage in "absolute" terms, it nonetheless renders the product [b]content incomplete[/b] and therefore I will openly state that the game is such. If at some point in the future the developers open the option for people to buy (note, buy, I'm not asking they GIVE us this, but the option to pay for it) then I will change my review accordingly. [H1]Closing thoughts[/h1] It's been a long road. But Bedlam is now a game I can, with the above caveat concerning content, now fully recommend. It's good, it's actually solidly good, and therefore worth getting, though with the content issue I would still advise holding out for a sale of some sort because on principle you shouldn't pay full price if you're not getting access or the ability to get access to the full game. That's my personal stance, and you may choose to go for it regardless. Final Verdict : [b]Highly Recommended, caveat - CONTENT INCOMPLETE DUE TO KICKSTARTER LUNACY[/b]

Warning - This is not really a rougelike but it does possess some of that genre's elements. I would say its a tactical combat game with some light rpg and roguelike elements and.... UPDATE 3/31 - Version 3.450860234??? something like that...is out! The developers spent a ton of time rebooting the game and changing the mechanics from the two guys move per turn setup to the more standard XCOM style of move each of your guys then end turn. You can still play in the original mode via the options menu if you so choose. The update also brought in a number of tweaks and additional content as well as a slightly altered path to victory that makes the game seem a little less grindy. Overall all of the changes have been on the positive side and I stand by my original review with maybe a half point bump. If there is one thing left to complain about (there are several but I'm just picking one) I wish there were some unique mechanics or skills behind certain elites passed the basic units of each faction. For the most part the units within each class all do the same thing more or less and it gets pretty bland after awhile. I've finished the game twice now and I am not sure if I'll be revisiting the wasteland anytime soon but I've def got my money's worth out of this title. Kudos to the Dev for not jumping ship when the initial run of poor reviews came sliding in btw. OG REVIEW: Your ability to get enjoyment of this game will start and end with the combat. Since the combat style/mechanic is different than any other tactical style game I can think of you really need to spend a few minutes at least watching a "let's play" and go from there. Personally I enjoyed the combat style a great deal and it helped me to get over a number of blemishes I found along my journey through Bedlam. Pros - Solid Tactical Combat Puzzlesque Fights Unique (as far as I know anyway) mechanics Colorful artwork helps bring the bleakness of the game world to life Unlockable dozers for future runs Ac/Dc - Extreme Challenge at Times (more on this later) Violent VERY Grindy Cons - Repetitive Gameplay - There are some choices to be made that can affect your journey via text choices but 90 percent of this game is going to be on that combat map. To elaborate... -Units and their abilities are very much interchangable same stats for all units within a class (only 4 of those) regardless of whether you start the game with them or pick them up along the way there are Elite Units that contradict this with boosts in HP and damage but slower overall progression Lack of individual skills makes many of the fights nearly if not exactly the same. If you do not mind grinding a bit this might not be as much of an issue. -Replayability is Low -The method of unlocking the Dozers are completely random BALANCE - The begining of the game - Brutal After a few runs - You realize that your gonna lose some people early on for most of You can and should shrug these losses off. Middle - Long and gets pretty easy once you have the hang of it. End - Pretty tough again unless you spent about 8 hours or so grinding to get there. So I would give this game a 5/10 but would recommend it if your a fan of tactical turnbased games and want to try something different. The combat mechanic is pretty intersting and takes awhile to get use to. Once you do your going to see a surge in success rate. I hear there are still plans for substantial improvements to the games content and have some fixes in the works to restore balance. I would say this game probably should have be considered an Early Access Title until they come get through a couple more updates. There's potential for a much bigger game with more depth that could show up here in the next few months. In the meantime its not a bad tactical combat game....its just not really a rougelike.

This game is incredibly frustrating for me. The art, the world, the story, the premise all do a great job sucking me into the game. Then a combat encounter comes along and I feel like I'm smashing my face against a wall. Between An insane difficulty spike and controls that fight you every step of the way this combat oriented game makes a combat encounter about as enjoyable as pulling teeth with a pair of pliers. I'm half convinced this game was made by insane people. I get wanting challenging games, I cut my teeth on XCOM and xenonauts. But this is the first game I've ever played where you are ACTIVLEY punished for winning battles. I can't refund this game. The best I can do is spare you the same fate.

Game has been abandoned by devs for a long time. Difficulty/game mechanics are straight up garbage (coming from someone who enjoys legendary ironman on xcom!!), very questionable design decisions to artificially ramp up difficulty (forced max level for your troops to keep em weaker than enemies, you can only field half amount troops in comparison to the enemy, etc.). There are also sidequests/events on the map, but you have to ignore EVERY single one of them, otherwise your threat meter (and number of enemies/their power depends on that) will skyrocket and during 1/4th of your run it will max out and enemies will slaughter you. And yes, thats right, you basically skip 70%-80% of events cause great game design! Also later fights consist of super weapon abuse which take resources which you got via main events and saved up hopefully. that is literally the entire game. Avoid events, fight a bit isometric early on and spam super weapons later, great design choice, really. /s Since you are mainly fighting and they literally butchered that, id say stay away. It is a shame, because the graphics are nice, polish is somewhat there, even though there are a few annyoing bugs. But the design of the underlying systems is so flawed i iamgine a random street bum on acid could brainstorm better ones.