TymanTheLong said:Tuschi said:Oh man. Makes me want to finally start Mechanicus!
Mechanicus isn’t actually very good. They failed to balance their primary resource, Cognition (think action points), and by mid game you can sweep out whole rooms of their initial spawns and 1 or 2 round bosses. They compensated not by fixing it but by adding gates to later maps, the gates alternate being open, one gate open on even rounds, the next only on odd, the next only on even, so you’re basically moving through cattle stalls. Nothing lives when you get to it so there’s nothing to do but painstakingly move your army through pointless gates and you still one round the boss or enemies at the end…
You can have 5 tech priests but some builds are so powerful it feels like there’s no point in bringing a 5th, it’s just one more activation to move and 4 are already clearing everything.
The troopers are pretty worthless overall, by the end you just bring a couple of ranged dudes and a Castellan Robot (sp?), very occasionally they can contribute by mopping up something weak that spawns behind your front line. I’ll grant that the Castellan Robot looks pretty cool if you like that aesthetic design. You spend most of every engagement simply passing the turn for troopers, they’re too slow and too ineffective. The tech priest build for boosting their effectiveness is a laughably bad waste of a tech priest and you still end up with slow, pillow fisted troops.
The graphics are both good and bad, the design is good, the engine and textures are pretty rough and look even more pixelated than you’d expect on a zoom. Everything looks the way it should for both Mechanicus and Necrons.
The story is really the high point and if you opt to play Mechanicus it should be for this. With saves you can experience all the endings relatively easily while only replaying a few missions. I should note the game saddles you with a lot of decisions the result of which is so random and opaque that it’s frustrating. The wrong choice is never obvious and often results in a handicap, just realize that none if these handicaps are big enough to actually slow you down.
The game offers various difficulties, permadeath and ironman modes but frankly the basic mechanics of the game just don’t make those a worthwhile endeavor. Making a game harder when it’s still fundamentally broken doesn’t un-break anything.
Anyway, TLDR, only play Mechanicus for the story, everything else is so mediocre I’m surprised they’re doing a sequel. Oof. What a write-up. Appreciate the heads up. It being to easy is the last thing I expected. But I think my main interest actually is the story and I already own the thing so I might as well play it.