melkathi

It doesn't get better. I chose to watch something else. Started Duck Tales yesterday. Season 1 Episode 1 from 1987.

As I am possibly reaching the halfway mark in Troubleshooter, it may be time for that long impression-review post, with the added bonus of giving people something else to read outside the Cyberpunk discussion. Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children The game is a tactical jRPG in the vain of Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics: Ogre, or more recently Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. It stands out from these in using Firaxis XCOM like combat. Furthermore it stands apart in the same way as XCOM: Chimera Squad did from other XCOM games (and UFO: Afterlight before that) in having only a set cast of characters. It has a few more influences from other game types. Setting: After a devastating world war, the world powers set up a neutral city named Valhalla. But as nobody was responsible for it, it descended into crime, reminiscent of Gotham on a bad day. The solution was obviously privatisation: Troubleshooter companies got licenses to fight crime and as an incentive got to request dispensations of items secured at the scene - bust a drug deal? Keep the drug money. Criminal gangs didn't like that and fought back, making it very unattractive for Troubleshooters to take them on. Meanwhile the police has their hands tied, as they have to defer to Troubleshooters so those don't lose their profit. Enter Albus (not Dumbledore), the main character who wants to become a Troubleshooter and start his own company. Albus is an orphan, raised by his mysterious aunt who he never seems to see in person and who sends him emails with money and a promise that a vague someday they may find time to meet in person. The Abandoned Children subtitle starts to explain itself. The writing is quite good. The story is not always told in order. The first tutorial plays 6 months after the start of the game for example. Various important characters will appear for a quick hello, then disappear for 30 hours of gaming, only to just pop up in a side story and disappear again. And sometimes you will control other characters to get glimpses of things that are going on at the same time. Gameplay Overview: After a series of tutorials (and I have a feeling they wrote two different tutorials but couldn't decide which one to use, so they added both), Albus will be able to rent a small office space in the back room of a bar, where he can set up a crime computer and IKEA furniture. This is your base. Here you can check what the state of the city districts is, what missions are available, and manage you character etc. As the game progresses, more options will become available - a couple of civilians you save during a mission will hang out at the bar, and will offer their services (shopkeeper). You will get access to a third room with a workbench, where you can craft equipment. And eventually you'll be told to take a stroll to Shooter Street market, the game's hub. Online/Offline: Why is there a hub? You can play the game online. It means that other player's Troubleshooter companies will exist in your game world. Practically it means that when you make a dialogue choice, you can opt to see how many people chose what options. In Shooter Street you would also see other players running about their business. I play offline. Missions: come with different objectives and two basic types: story and repeatable. Story missions will open up a new map and drive the story forward. Once you beat them, the map then will have a repeatable mission available. You are free to choose what missions you do, but the missions are the game's metric of time. Every 5 missions you get an activity report and paid by the city for your efforts. Depending on your lease and contracts signed with your team members, every few missions you will have to pay rent and salaries. On normal difficulty these expenses are insignificantly low. Combat: The tactical gameplay is at first glance very similar to XCOM. You have two actions. Using an attack ends the turn. There is light and full cover. If you run ahead blindly you may engage more enemies than you should have. The game has no player turn, but a fluid initiative ladder. Every actions costs time, and the order in which your team and the opponents act will constantly be adjusted. The higher your speed stat, the better. This part can also lead to some frustration. There are a few ways to knock an opponent down the initiative ladder. This can also happen to you. Draw the attention of too many enemies, that may result in you watching as ten gangster act three times in a row with you not getting any way to react. It doesn't happen too often, and usually is the result of you having played badly, but it does mean that some mistakes you pay for slowly. As the game has no set turn structure, mission timers are not based on number of turns. Instead they are tied to the action time. If a bomb will go off in 3000 whatever time units, then you can manage your actions accordingly. Using actions that will delay you for 80 units will give you less turns than using actions that delay you for 60 units. You can field up to 8 characters in a mission, so it takes a while until you have that many. At 57 hours I have 5 characters. Many missions will give you police backup though, so you may be controlling far more units during a mission. On some of the large maps, in missions that pertain to grand scale police operations, this means you may have half a dozen police under your control as backup. Character progression: Characters gain XP and level up, improving their stats and allowing them to use better equipment. They also gain XP in their chosen class, unlocking new abilities. A character can change class and will not forget the abilities learned from the previous classes. Classes affect the number of abilities you can use and the number of Masteries you can equip. Masteries are slotted on the Mastery Board. They include things like Lightning Reflexes to avoid reaction attacks or boosts to damage, crit chance, dodge chance etc. but also things like the ability to use Overwatch. Combining the correct masteries will also unlock set bonuses to further boost their effectiveness. These set bonuses you slowly discover through trial and error, with the game giving you hints as you get close to completing a set (or by looking them up on the wiki). Equipment has Diablo style rarity, and there even are equipment sets. You can craft a lot of really good equipment. Each character has their own crafting skill, so as you recruit more, more options will open up. you can buy materials, you can find some as loot, and you can break down loot into materials. Characters also improve their relationship with each other as they go on missions and can form bonds to fine tune party composition. So a character may get a free attack on an opponent targeted by another character or they may have increased defense if within line of sight of one another. Game Length: I know I can deploy a max of 8 characters in a mission. It took me 10 hours to get to 3 characters. At 57 hours I am still at 5. I know various characters unlock various crafting options. At 57 hours I can't yet craft jewelry (though I have a crafting schematic for a ring). I know there is a an animal sanctuary in Shooter Street where you store tamed creatures you aren't currently using with the pet class character. At 57 hours I do not think I have even encountered the character who can tame creatures - not even a glimpse on a load screen. I know there are drones you can control with a mechanic character. Maybe Kylie is the mechanic I will eventually be able to recruit? Maybe she isn't. As Mulan's love interest would say: We have a long way to go.

Well, the npcs in Troubleshooter every so often say I need to give them a day off. Then they go and get involved in some side mission that is worse than a day at work.

Troubleshooter wins best writing in any game for the simple fact that Irene calls the main character a muppet.

The writer for Troubleshooter must have had a great laugh writing Irene. They also must have had some very annoying experiences with RPGs that give you dialogue options that all lead to the same result anyway.

44 hours into the game, my Troubleshooter company now has its 4th employee, giving me a party of 5 people. Though the ladies are feeling a bit awkward around the new guy because of his fashion sense. Irene is not convinced that he isn't a villain.

Gah. Just had a really really tough fight in Troubleshooters. If this were XCOM with permadeath, I'd be searching for a new D-Squad with B and C having been wiped out by the overkill damage A squad suffered 😛

Which raises the question: why are you locked in a room if you had left the door unlocked? Who locked you in? Will this question be answered in this game or will we have to wait for game 4?

You have to pay the electricity bill in game 1 or else game 3 has no light?

I gave up on it. Found the whole stockpiling magic thing too tedious.

More in the ongoing series of actual dialogue choice: And Red Panda Fighting Style - Violent Panda Form

Interesting thing about Troubleshooter is that Overwatch does not just trigger on movement. Yesterday: VCPD Striker rushes into an alley and takes down a thug with an assault rifle. A VCPD Supressor covers the alley from the south. A thug with a hatchet rushes the Striker. Supressor triggers overwatch and shoots him, but the thug dodges. Attacks the Striker, who blocks and triggers counter attack taking down the hatchetman. The counter attack triggers the overwatch from another ganger on the other end of the alley. I lost a Striker that fight because he got charged by a boss enemy, counter attacked and the counter attack triggered the boss' counter attack. It makes you rethink "obvious" skill choices.

And he is in the list: https://www.justice.gov/opa/investigations-regarding-violence-capitol Which in general is a boring read and not much book throwing seems to be happening at anyone. Which mainly comes down to too little law enforcement to do meaningful arrests as things happened.

Using cubes to shoot people:

The Law & Pancakes Troubleshooting Firm is heading to the Hansando Loading Docks on a super secret mission. edit: I am at 17.8 hours and now have a party of 4. The person who said in his review he didn't get a third member 'till 30 hours in was definitely playing veeeeeeeeery slooooooow.

The Hero Irene would probably react this way: A man who disapproves of identifying a villain? 1) Also a villain. 2) Must be another villain. 3) So there are two villains? 4) Definitely a villain.

I had one crash at the end of the tutorial. Now (8 hours later) my game is stuck on the end mission screen and as the game only has one save, I am forced to abandon the completed 48 minute mission, as otherwise it loads me onto the stuck screen. (A patch was just uploaded which may be exactly for that: Dev comment in the patch note "We're sorry to have caused this to happen on Friday when you need to play comfortably." That said. It is a good game. Every story mission you do adds the map as a repeatable map so you can grind. It is a jrpg in this. There is a lot to grind. For example I bought something from the shopkeep and got told our relationship was improved by +2. I think I currently have a relationship of +23. Which means I only need another 2976 points to reach the 3000 needed to improve from Neutral to Friendly 😄 The story is very... Asian. When your character runs into a crime in progress he shouts his name "I am Troubleshooter Albus!" Though here people react to it a bit more realistic? As in, early on you get told off for doing so. And the only other person who does it is a certified lunatic (who may think you are a villain. Unless you are a villain or perhaps a villain. But probably you are a villain). The combat works well. It isn't as deadly as normal XCOM games. Especially in the story missions where you control some tougher characters. But it is more RPGy than XCOM games. You seem to have to check buffs on enemies for example lest you kill someone in melee next to a gas station who was affected by a Fire Veil which makes his corpse explode -> blowing up the gas station and setting half your team on fire. You start with only one character and get a second fairly early (in the first few hours). But you aren't alone in missions as you get police backup and thus have some generic assault rifle wielding grunts (edit: just went into an underground parking lot and police sent me strikers instead, armed with shock batons. Practical as we went and turned off the power to practically disable ranged combat). In a review someone mentioned they got their third character just before 30 hours. That may be quite strongly affected by how many repeatable missions they farmed though (edit: it took me 10.5 hours to get number 3, but don't know if the way I handled a specific mission sped that up). You do have a deployment max of 8 though apparently (at least the game tells me I am sending 2/8 units to the mission), so I guess we have a long way to go (and not in the bad way like the Mulan training montage). The English translation is not perfect. It does not make blatant mistakes though. Unit voice messages are in ... Korean? I am afraid I am not experienced enough to tell.

And the XCOM test. Is this a proper, true XCOM clone? Let's find out: I did not miss this attack. Test failed. Not a true XCOM clone.

Bought Troubleshooter. Played for three hours. Had dinner. Played for three hours. Brushing teeth now... Plan is to go to bed right after and not add a "Played for three hours" in between.

Dialogue choices that matter done right:

Got started on the XCOM-clone, JRPG, Harry Potter prequel Getting ready to head for Hogswart Waiting at station 9 3/4 Meeting Luna on the train (that's why I dislike prequels - characters so very often have quite different personalities to the original)

Trying to play Emperor: Battle for Dune. That game hasn't aged well.

Yeah, his term is over anyway. It's for later. But I doubt they'll get enough republican senators to go for it.

The SPD makes it easy for them though. They moved away from their roots to standing for nothing with candidates people have trouble remembering unless they managed to stumble about memorably enough. To say it in German: hätte, hätte, Fahrradkette. The most social democrat rhetoric we heard in the last years were satires by Böhmermann. Heck, I think I would vote for him if he did join the party.