by Snorb » Fri Mar 28, '08, 5:09 am
IronSeed- Really, this is a great game. I want to enjoy the nicely-written plot about travelling a strange new galaxy and "awakening the iron space between thoughts." Honest to God, I do. But... oh, God, where do I begin with IronSeed?
* You and your crew have no flesh. Instead, your brain patterns were magnetically scanned and stored in a chemical bath called EgoSynth before your ship left Mars.
* You were supposed to be in space for a thousand days while a computer virus killed a few people you and your crew didn't like. Someone put a zero in the wrong place, though, and a thousand days became a thousand years.
* The ship's internal chronometer failed sometime after launch. When you recalibrated it, it reset to your launch date: 2/1/3784 AD.
* Somebody (read: The Scavengers, a psychotic Borg-like race of information assimilators) shot the living crap out of your ship. Practically everything's damaged in the beginning of the game.
* Your three engineering teams are usually efficient in getting stuff repaired/built/disassembled. However, one particular team has a reputation for being overdue with most of their tasks (I'm looking at YOU, Team 2!)
* Oh, your ship had a weapon. Unfortunately, it's the worst weapon in the game: the Dirk. (All the weapons in the game are named after medieval weapons. Laser cannons are the Dirk, Scimitar, Broadsword, and Claymore, missiles are the Shortbow and Longbow, and rail drivers are the Blackjack and Whip. There are other weapons, but I have yet to see them in action.)
* Said Dirk starts the game not installed on a gun node, but sitting in your cargo hold! Granted, you weren't expecting the trip to be this long, but we should have been prepared for something!
* Your so-called "best of the best, hand-picked" crew can't build much in the beginning. You can disassemble your Dirk, but don't expect to put it back together again until you do a lot of research.
* Why does my Medical Officer have to have a certain character level before I can build Ochre Embryons? (Oh, yeah. Those do psionic damage, and she'd know about how to injure humanoid brains.)
* Your ship has next to no fuel in the beginning. You know how to build more, but you don't have the materials on board the ship. Don't expect to without a lot of mining and luck.
* While we're on this subject, the Oban system, where you start, has one local neighbor: The Edaum system, which is forty years away. There's no light speed drive, no FTL, no hyperspace. The current year section of the chronometer has a ten thousands digit for a reason.
* Combat is hard. The manual recommends practicing combat with no less than two Dirks. You know, the shoddy sub-par laser cannon that you can't build any of until your crew smartens up? Those Dirks?
* Oh, and I forgot to mention: Your crew can go insane. If they do, hope you saved backups of their personalities in the EgoSynth. Unless you want your Engineer to destroy everything in your cargo hold, of course...
On the plus side, the overall presentation of the game is great, and the plot's cool. Not to mention the famous "Get 12 million kilometers away from the enemy ships so they auto-self-destruct and I can salvage them" bug. But... God, IronSeed is Nintendo hard in the beginning.
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