The Life Of Greather

The gameplay isn't too bad except for the framerate and the fact that the dagger is hands down the best weapon. It tries to sell itself as a grimdark realistic game, but some of the first enemies you encounter are bandits wearing skulls with golden battleaxes. Fetch quests are used to make the game last longer. They don't even make any sense in the context of what's happening. There's no music. There are almost no sounds at all. The voice acting isn't the worst but the recording software/hardware seems like it was bad. The ending was one of the worst endings I've ever seen. I can't recommend the game just because of the ending. I'd like to see what the dev could do with time and money though. Perhaps a story writer as well. For $2 it's not the worst game ever.

As a long-time PC gamer, I have to play a game before I judge it, regardless of the graphics or existing reviews. You assume control of a character named 'Greather', a farmer living in the town of Oxlea, waking up to a bartender's pleas for the character to leave his now-closed bar. The mission you have is set immediately, find your wife Ellyn. Unfortunately that's the only information you'll get for now, and all of Oxlea's 3 unique NPCs are unresponsive and no hints can be found in the immediate area. So, the game expects you to search, providing a map of the world. Now, I'm all up for exploration, but when the map doesn't even have a cursor indicating where you are, it's as useful as someone giving me a compass without a needle. NPCs telling me to go to Ferndale Market is fine, but when I can't even figure out where Ferndale is without having a deep knowledge of the world map already indicates a problem. So, in Oxlea, you find a knife (or dagger). From here you're free to kill all of the NPCs in the world, with no consequences. The only negative thing I've noticed is the Bounty meter which increases upon killing a friendly NPC, although from what I've played of the game it doesn't seem to actually do anything. Naturally, I murder everyone in Oxlea, and they ragdoll in one slash from the knife. The town somehow feels just as empty even with all the NPCs dead, and so far, the game feels emptier than Fallout 3 - or pretty much any apocalyptic game that's SUPPOSED to feel empty. Have more NPC interactions, better dialogue and bring some life and personality into the world. Heading out of Oxlea, I am greeted with two paths. One goes to Oxlea farm, where my character proudly exclaims that he's going to "plow these fields in the morning". There's one NPC who I quickly murder, and then there's nothing else... no loot, no quests, nothing. Time to head back and go to the other path. The other path leads to Riuena Camp, a place filled with bandits and axe-wielding.. bandits. Receiving a large axe from a bandit actually felt good, until I realised the knife from the beginning was actually just as strong if not stronger than this massive axe. And even so, there's no depth to the combat - you can just slash, move back a bit, slash, move back a bit and slash again and you are basically invincible. It's almost like Morrowind's combat system except it doesn't even feel as complete as THAT, and I'm not a fan of Morrowind's combat system. Moving on I find a town called Aldacain. Knights are attacking me here now, it doesn't explain why, they just are. I quickly dispatch the knights and the copy/pasted NPCs from Oxlea (literally the same NPCs) and a cutscene tell me I need to go to Ferndale Market. I have a slight sense of where I am from the map, since I know I'm in Aldacain, and I just have to follow the coastline along to Teiagre castle. Literally 3 minutes of walking and I reach the castle, where a guard tells me I need to recover the king's stolen valuables to enter. Seems strange that the guard isn't doing that and is instead trusting in some random farmer? Oh well. That's just a video game trope, I can't really consider that a fault of this game. Now what is a fault is that the game relies heavily on two of gamings biggest taboos - fetch quests and backtracking. Not only do you need to fetch 'the king's valuables', you need to heavily backtrack CONSTANTLY to get to where you need to go. This isn't fun, and it feels kind of like the developer is trying to artifically increase the game's length. Oh well, I guess I'll find this cart, I'm already this far in now. ..huh, water instantly kills you, even if you don't step into much of it? ....oh, the game doesn't have saving, so you have to start ALL the way from the beginning? Yeah. In this state, I wouldn't consider this even alpha, this is more of a proof of concept, and should not be released let alone sold for actual money. I definitely can see that a lot of work was put into this, but it need a lot more work to even be considered ready for retail. It looks like an early PS1 game, menu graphics are hard to read and just look unprofessional, the world feels dead and empty, and the voice acting sounds like it was done by family members in a bathroom. To begin with, it needs music (and not the same 20 second loop repeated), saving/loading, more NPC interactions and more variety to the world's landscapes. It could also do with more land in the actual world. I hope you listen to this review.