The Fall - Last Days of Gaia

[Morgoth]

Today I received my copy of TF I've acquired at Ebay for a relatively cheap price, so I thought I should share some of my impressions with you, but be warned: I only played ~45 min because I couldn't stand it any longer, which already concludes that the game must suck, and that, Ladys and Gents, is indeed the case. If that suffices, good, otherwise go ahead for the longer version of my rant.

 

Let's begin with tech stuff a'la Graphics/Sound:

 

Graphics: When I first started the game, I experienced the unpleasant Choppy-Shock-Effect I only remember back from Ultima 9. After some sacrifices (turn off the shadows completely!) the game ran better, but still with choppy framerates. Anyway, I'm not impressed. Although the houses and other geometry are highly detailed and the textures mostly hi-res, everything is static. The characters look like and move like wood puppets (and your PC moves like he pissed into the pants), there're no facial expressions, just ugly painted textures on a rough head. And with the silly looking portraits and the general bad art direction, this game does not do a good job in immersing you into the game world. I think Silver Style have done an overall bad job in that regard.

 

Voice Overs: The German Version has fully Voice overed dialogs, but most of them sound out of place and boring. I guess they just hired bums instead of professional voice actors. They're also recorded in LQ and have a subtle tin like reverberation....maybe it's the air? (but then they should sound like Mickey Mouse! (w00t) )

Also, I don't like the fact that all of those wood puppets are babbling with Berliner dialect when the setting is supposed to take place somewhere in the Southern-West USA. But the good thing is you can turn the speech off!

Sound: Solid, but nothing special. I wished they could have used more sound sources, but otherwise you hear that what you'd expect from a PA setting: Howling wind, thunders from the far, some crickets...

Music: Not bad, but again, nothing special. Fallout music was better, it added a certain hazardous note to the already hazardous atmosphere, whereas TF uses a more Tribal kind direction.

 

 

If that didn't already discourage you, then read along and get a taste of the worse things a'la Controls/Combat:

 

Controls: Similar to NWN. Your PC is centered in the middle, and with the mouse wheel you can zoom, and moving you cursor to the side of the screen let you rotate the cam, and moving the mouse on the top/bottom alters the cam angle. Still, NWN's control scheme feels more polished, whereas in TF I always spend too much time to get the angle into a right position. Not a good thing, but I guess when you play longer you should get used to it.

Interface: Well, a right mouse click onto your ugly portrait opens the inventory, which is pretty standard. There're the slots where you can carry everything from ammo, weapons, food, armor... you get the idea. When you click onto a weapon in the inventory, it's activated. No drag & drop a'la NWN. The interaction with the environment is pretty simple too, just hold down RM, and you get some options like collecting items, unlock doors etc.

Combat: Well, I only fought one battle with some wolfs. Hitting Space pauses the game, select your enemy and then shoot stuff. That is all I can tell you so far... Oh, and it didn't make any fun at all!

I miss SPECIAL and the splatter effects from Fallout.

 

 

So, what's about Story/Role Playing?

 

 

Character Creation: Well, you choose a portrait, Intro plays, game starts....wait, what's about character creation? That is something you do after ~5 min of gameplay. After you walk into the village with the hanging down minibus which indicates "New Government", you walk down the street to a crowd and experience first hand how a guy gets beheaded with a good old style scaffold. After that, the so called President makes a speech through a loudspeaker, namely how necessary it is to deal with the trouble makers and so on... the crowd thinks the new government is great and everybody is satiesfied and goes back to do their usual business. Aha.

Well, so after talking to the President (who looks like a clown), you can assign to work for him as a mercenary and fill out a document where you now can give yourself a name, nationality, a special characteristic (a'la tall, or ugly) and of course putting your points into 6 available attributes and 14 skills (almost all the same as in Fallout). There's also a special signing box a'la "Herewith you agree that your body may be used as food after you die". Nice, but probably useless.

Story/Quests/Roleplaying: Uh oh, now that's the more difficult part to describe, what could I tell you when I only played around 45 min? Let's start with the Intro:

It's a very nice done CG movie, that takes place somewhere in a biosphere. You see a white haired woman (probably scientist) having a conversation with a white haired girl (drawing some ugly pictures). After some standard blabla, the girl asks what the word "Courage" means. And that is where you come into place. Seems like you're searching for your father and sister who got captured by a gang of villains, and after the camera moves into the girls freaky eyes, you see your PC standing in front of the before mentioned "New Government". Nice. But after that, I only had the chance to do "Get to guy A and talk to him, then guy A tells you to go to guy B and so forth" things. Also, the tutorial in the camp was very boring. It might be possible that the story gets unleashed to a later point, but right now, I didn't feel to continue the game, because there was just no point in doing that.

NPC's/Role-Playing: Pretty bad. As mentioned before, the NPC's do not only look like wood puppets, I think they are wood puppets. The dialogs aren't really interesting written (choices are pretty limited too, sometimes it's just an endless to and fro clickfest until you get another dialog choice, which just means that you can end the dialog). But hey, maybe that changes when you delve deeper into the game (which I won't). Your party members are...well, don't expect anything deep, in fact, I think they're just robots. No, that would be an insult. Even that silly Czerka Droid in Kotor2 had more personality than all NPC's together I met in the game.

 

Conclusion: Although it's not really fair to give a judgement in a so early gameplay process, TF does at least a good job in telling you "I'm boring!!! Don't play me!". Yes, that's it. I just couldn't stand it anymore, so I quit and uninstalled it. Maybe I'll re-install it again when the free update to the "Extended version" gets released, but I think that won't change the "heart" of the game at all. All other RPGs I played managed it at least to introduce the player to the world and give him/her some reasons to delve further into it, but TF feels more like a Beta software (technically) and has A) a very slow and uninspired start and poor Morgoth didn't give it a real chance or B) just sucks throughout in almost every aspect.

Take your pick, I suggest you stay away from it, unless you have no taste and think boring games rock!

[Diogo Ribeiro]

But... Wasn't this supposed to be God's gift to CRPG players? Eh?... Oh. Gosh darn it.

[Morgoth]

God's gift??? Haahhhaaaa.... The God of Boredom perhaps, yes.

[GhostofAnakin]

Maybe I skimmed too fast, but even your negative review didn't sound so bad. I'd still like to give this game a shot. Is it ever coming to North America?

[Kaftan Barlast]

The jerries have made yet another stinker, huh?

 

 

 

 

The english release is "second quarter 2005".

[Tanuvein]

Wow, all the official reviews I've seen rate it very highly. But seeing as you played only 45 minutes, I won't even consider this opinion yet. I find it odd you managed to get bored with a game that fast, especially an RPG. Heck, I thought the first hour of Torment was fairly boring - it was only hte premise that got me to play and see the gem that it is.

[Morgoth]

Maybe I skimmed too fast, but even your negative review didn't sound so bad.  I'd still like to give this game a shot.  Is it ever coming to North America?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes it will. Silver Style is still working on getting the "Extended Version" out of the doors (supposedly end of April). The Extended Version (which equals with v 1. will have two new areas (and quests), new speech in HQ, new portraits, some better graphics here and there, ton's of new features, bugfixes etc. That is what Carsten Strehse (the guru of SS) promised. After that I think they'll put their efforts into the English/NA releases.

Ohh, and there's already an Addon in the works.

When the "Extended Version" content gets released, I'll give it a shot again, and should I somehow find some joy in it, I'll write down a real review again.

[Tayl]

So just to be sure, you have the latest patch, right? That solves a lot(although definitely not all) of the problems. I have no idea if the German versions come with the 1.6 version of the game, but I have been told 1.6 solves a lot of issues. And 1.7 is coming out soon, so that might be worth a look, too.

 

I'll be honest, I read the entire mini-review and it really sounded like you went into it already disliking it. *shrugs* I've talked to a few German players that have told me that once the technical issues were ironed out it was a pretty decent game for the most part. From what I hear it's not outstanding but I've been told it's definitely not the suck-fest you describe. To each their own, I suppose. I'm not going to argue since I haven't played it. :D

[nightcleaver]

I'm trying to form my own opinions here, so please, if you would oblige me, answer me the following questions:

 

What did you feel about the gameplay itself? Did you get into it much? can you go into specifics, like about strategic options, difficulty, high/lower ground bonuses and such? What about controls/interface did you actually dislike; you don't say anything too specific here.

 

I also wanted to know if you could clarify what you meant about the character models feeling especially blocky? NWN has pretty blocky character models, and I didn't care for most of the portraits. Did you feel this game was worse than NWN in these respects, or are you comparing to, say, KotOR? Like, is it all a matter of the art direction being bad, and feeling too lifeless? I've played games like that, and it's hard to pinpoint. Arcanum, much as I enjoyed it, seemed to be lacking in similar manner.

 

Just something to consider: if you expected this to be a great RPG, ala KotOR or VtM: BL, and this was actually intended to be a strictly comparatively lifeless tactics game, it's to be expected that the game would be a let-down for you. You make it sound like no one should be interested in this in their right minds, and so my next question is this: Might the game get a better review from someone NOT looking for amazing VO and dialogue and such?

[Darque]

I think I'll........... pass.

[Morgoth]

So just to be sure, you have the latest patch, right? That solves a lot(although definitely not all) of the problems. I have no idea if the German versions come with the 1.6 version of the game, but I have been told 1.6 solves a lot of issues. And 1.7 is coming out soon, so that might be worth a look, too.

Yes, I've installed 1.6.5 plus Beta 1.7. Does that solve a lot of problems? According to the Bugfix list, yes. I even heard that the retail version couldn't be started on some Ati Radeon cards. Well, now I can run it (but with choppy framerates.... and yes, my machine can even run Bloodlines smoothly! And there're also some strange graphical artifacts... seems like the Mip Mapping doesn't work properly). Anyway, it still feels very unpolished.

 

I'll be honest, I read the entire mini-review and it really sounded like you went into it already disliking it. *shrugs* I've talked to a few German players that have told me that once the technical issues were ironed out it was a pretty decent game for the most part. From what I hear it's not outstanding but I've been told it's definitely not the suck-fest you describe. To each their own, I suppose. I'm not going to argue since I haven't played it. :D

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

No, I was really looking forward to play this game, so there was no negative bias in advance. Here again, maybe, just maybe the game has some strengths, but then why does it piss me off from the beginning? Even Gothic2 or Arcanum with their slow starts kept me up to try harder till I got rewarded with more involvement into the world, but TF fails in that regard. It's just bad design.

[Morgoth]

What did you feel about the gameplay itself?  Did you get into it much? can you go into specifics, like about strategic options, difficulty, high/lower ground bonuses and such?  What about controls/interface did you actually dislike; you don't say anything too specific here.

Strategic options? Uhmm not really. Combat isn't the strength of this game anyway, and the battle I had with the wolfs wasn't anything special. You pause the game, select your weapon, select the enemy, unpause, look what happens. But it was quite boring. No battle screams, weak weapon sounds, no splatter, jerky animations....meh. There're 5 difficulty levels, I started with normal. Although it's supposed to be easy in that level, the wolfs were quite a hard nut. Or I just didn't care too much. And I already said that the interface is nothing special. You activate the items directly in the inventory (a'la Gothic2) and then make use of it. But I didn't get the chance to exchange some stuff with a merchant. But there're plenty of screenshots that shows you the interface.

 

Edit: Did I say no battle screams? LOL how should I know when I turned off the VO? Maybe there're some, but that won't change anything.

 

I also wanted to know if you could clarify what you meant about the character models feeling especially blocky?  NWN has pretty blocky character models, and I didn't care for most of the portraits.  Did you feel this game was worse than NWN in these respects, or are you comparing to, say, KotOR?  Like, is it all a matter of the art direction being bad, and feeling too lifeless?  I've played games like that, and it's hard to pinpoint.  Arcanum, much as I enjoyed it, seemed to be lacking in similar manner.

Yes, NWN had blocky characters, but Bio did a relatively good job to let them look quite good. The animations there are much better too. If you thought NWN has a static world, oh boy, prepare what you awaits in TF. Everything there just looks and behaves ugly. But maybe they make new animations for the Extended Version? And yes, NWN had a thousand time better art direction than TF, and that matters to me certainly.

 

Just something to consider: if you expected this to be a great RPG, ala KotOR  or VtM: BL, and this was actually intended to be a strictly comparatively lifeless tactics game, it's to be expected that the game would be a let-down for you.  You make it sound like no one should be interested in this in their right minds, and so my next question is this:  Might the game get a better review from someone NOT looking for amazing VO and dialogue and such?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I wasn't expecting a game that could be compared with the big boys, neither did I expect such an unpolished Beta software. In the current state it just makes no fun, and I doubt the Extended Version could change that. I can live without VO, but the dialogs, characters, story is something very essential to me, and when TF doesn't manage it to keep my interest up from the beginning, it's just a sign of bad design.

[Morgoth]

I think I'll........... pass.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Smart girl.

[Musopticon?]

Let me get this straight; you played only 45 minutes? And think you can just go and review the game after that? Geez.

[Kaftan Barlast]

45 min is often enough. It was about the time I needed to determine that Morrowind was complete garbage.

[Morgoth]

Let me get this straight; you played only 45 minutes? And think you can just go and review the game after that? Geez.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

No, if you would read the text, you would know that this isn't a review. I just shared some impressions, and probably will write down a review when the Extended version gets released.

[Musopticon?]

Giving scores based on impressions is not reviewing? <_<

[Morgoth]

Giving scores based on impressions is not reviewing? <_<

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Scores? I don't see any scores here.

[Musopticon?]

 

This what I get for posting on several forums at the same time. Sorry, I blame it on the lack of sleep.

[Tanuvein]

45 min is often enough. It was about the time I needed to determine that Morrowind was complete garbage.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Really? The game really pays off once you get into it. There's not enough time in 45 minutes to get anywhere serious. Of course, its a much better game if you download a ton of mods to make it more to your liking.

 

There are many GREAT games that, had I only judged them by the first 45 minutes, I would never have played - KotOR 2 just the most recent.

 

Of course, sometimes I shouldn't keep waiting for the game to get started. 20 hours into Pool of Radiance before I stopped

[Tayl]

, I've installed 1.6.5 plus Beta 1.7. Does that solve a lot of problems? According to the Bugfix list, yes. I even heard that the retail version couldn't be started on some Ati Radeon cards. Well, now I can run it (but with choppy framerates.... and yes, my machine can even run Bloodlines smoothly! And there're also some strange graphical artifacts... seems like the Mip Mapping doesn't work properly). Anyway, it still feels very unpolished.

 

Fair enough, can't argue with that. Like I said, the patches don't fix problems for everyone. Just from what I have heard it fixes a lot of problems for a lot of people. And yes, I've heard about it not running on ATI cards on release. The release was downright terrible, I'm not going to argue that. I'm hoping the english release will be smoother, but...who knows? <_<

 

No, I was really looking forward to play this game, so there was no negative bias in advance. Here again, maybe, just maybe the game has some strengths, but then why does it piss me off from the beginning? Even Gothic2 or Arcanum with their slow starts kept me up to try harder till I got rewarded with more involvement into the world, but TF fails in that regard. It's just bad design.

 

Well, of course I'm not going to argue with your frame of mind upon playing the game, I was just going off what I saw in the mini-review. I guess I just expect a lot of RPG's to start off slow and/or not capture me right off the bat. I just started playing KOTOR2 and I am really forcing myself to get involved, for some reason I can't get sucked so far. I'm sure it will pick up, but right now it seems boring. Same went for NWN and KOTOR1. Even Torment didn't have me from the get-go. Fallout had me from the beginning, but...well, it's Fallout. :D

[roshan]

Torment engrossed me from the very beginning.

[Llyranor]

45 min is often enough. It was about the time I needed to determine that Morrowind was complete garbage.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Really? The game really pays off once you get into it. There's not enough time in 45 minutes to get anywhere serious. Of course, its a much better game if you download a ton of mods to make it more to your liking.

 

There are many GREAT games that, had I only judged them by the first 45 minutes, I would never have played - KotOR 2 just the most recent.

 

Of course, sometimes I shouldn't keep waiting for the game to get started. 20 hours into Pool of Radiance before I stopped

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It took me 100 hrs to realize Morrowind was garbage.

 

...

 

...

 

Yes.

 

Not complete garbage, though, the soundtrack kept me in a trance, I guess.

 

...

[Kaftan Barlast]

45 min is often enough. It was about the time I needed to determine that Morrowind was complete garbage.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

There are many GREAT games that, had I only judged them by the first 45 minutes, I would never have played.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

 

Well, I know what I like and I know how to spot a stinker. And Morrowind reeks.

[Poot]

45 min is often enough. It was about the time I needed to determine that Morrowind was complete garbage.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

You thought Morrowind was garbage? You are off your rocker my friend. I will admit it was not the best game ever, but it surely was not garbage.