Recent reviews by hEY

Fantastic short game. The first time I saw this game in motion, I was blown away by the creativity of the mechanic and the beautiful art. This game is not really a puzzle, even though it may seem like it. It's more of a dynamic point and click. So, come into the game wanting to experience it, not figure out its rules per se. I love the way the puzzles evolve over the course of the game, and I only really got stuck once (there were a few times I spent a few minutes on one thing, though).

Again, it's short, so your mileage may vary. I finished it in a little under 2 hours, but I think it is more than worth a look. The atmosphere is fantastic and it had a surprisingly compelling narrative (even though I'm not sure it's actually saying much). Glad I picked it up on the steam sale.

Ok, here's the deal. This game is fun, until it's very very much not. I can see how this game would be fun with friends, but I don't see how the game gets any easier with friends. And believe me, it's hard - hard in a way that makes it really difficult to get into and have fun with. The fact that the fire takes a turn every move makes this a constantly losing proposition. The game (because of it's board game nature) isn't a full tactics game, so you don't get to synergize mid-turn quite as well as you'd like. The kicker for me was that as you progress in the round, more and more fire spawns each turn. It feels like that forces me to play QUICKLY (which thematically makes sense), but just doesn't really work with the mechanics of the game, when you're just struggling to stay alive.

It's not even like XCOM where you feel like the RNG just isn't falling your way. It doesn't feel like the game is swinging back and forth, where I'm on the edge of my seat just praying for things to go right - and then being shocked (and delighted) at the crazy turn of events that just happened. Instead, this feels like the game is inherently unwinnable (I'm sure it's actually more than possible) unless you get a string of really lucky rolls. Losing is fine, difficulty is fine, even unfairness can be fine given the theme of the game. But this just feels bad. I haven't beaten the first round after several rounds, and I have no desire to keep trying.

Am I just bad at the game? Maybe. But the game doesn't entice me to get good at it. Experienced mode is more fun and seemingly easier than the family mode, but it introduces so many new features and concepts that there's really no middle ground. There's no ramp up at all. Besides a tutorial that is literally just the first map with a couple of tooltips, the game just throws you in. Now, I understand that this game is being faithful to the board game (which I had wanted to buy in the past, but never did. Yo, I'm not buying the board game for sure now.) But, this game in digital form is your opportunity to play with the rules of the game and make it accessible to a range of audiences. Provide more options to players who want to play this game differently. Let's say, a mode where you can change the behavior of the fire. 1 ember every round always. Or it ramps up, but it only goes every 2 turns. This would be significant, but maybe provide a full tactics mode, where you can control everyone independently and freely switch back and forth. Maybe a mode where you're just trying to put out the fire or a mode where all the POI are already on the board and it's just a race against time.

I DON'T KNOW. I'm not a game designer and I hate criticizing things I don't understand, but my gut feeling is that this game probably has a specific niche audience - and I am not it. I could be it, if the option to tweak a few things were implemented. That's all.

Also, that's not even mentioning all of the game issues. It hung on start several times. There are bugs like when you do a callout, it sometimes gets stuck on the last POI rather than returning focus to the firefighter. It runs very poorly (I'm on a Surface Pro 4 - laptop, but not terrible), and I had to drop everything to low and set the resolution way down just to get to like 20 FPS. Button prompts are weird and controls are unintuitive.

So, the core gameplay loop is solid and it's engaging to play with the systems. I saw a video of this online and I wanted to give it a try (I never buy things at launch or not on sale!) But, at the end of the day, I just didn't enjoy playing this game. The problems are solvable, for sure, and the polish will hopefully come. I want to support these guys coming from the board game world into video games, so I'm open to coming back to this another time in the future. Until then, though, I'm getting a refund and putting it behind me.

Having loved KOTOR, I was excited to give this a try. It's a really great game, that's horribly horribly buggy and all that. There's a lot of missing or unimplemented content and all that. But at the end of the day, it's still a fun game.

GET THE CONTENT RESTORED MOD. It's great. Fan-made; it adds back in a lot of the missing functionality, and it's really a must once you learn that it exists! Check it out.