Ok so I finished this today.
I must say that there are good and bad points in my opinion.
The good: The gameplay is brilliant - very easy to pick up and play, items are everywhere - You have lots of different status affecting items which you can use or have used on you. Also, unlike other RPGs, if an item says that it's going to reduce the enemy's defense by 100%, then it reduces their defense by 100% - this is regardless of whether they are a normal enemy or a boss enemy - They are all treated the same and the game is balanced to account for this.
Being a Penny Arcade game, it's set in the Penny Arcade Universe - a strange one where pretty much anything can happen and people all hate each other. O and the Penny Arcade sense of humour is rife throughout, as you would expect.
Combat is in real time - Each character has 3 actions that they can use, each taking longer to charge up than the previous : Use Item, Standard Attack, Special Attack.
When your standard attack is available, you have the choice: do I use this now and inflict a moderate amount of damage or do I wait until my special attack (which takes about 2.5 times the time of the standard attack to charge) is ready?
You also get the use of "support characters" - characters who join your plight and can be called in to help whenever their attack has charged - their attack charges in real time during combat, and can be saved for a special occasion or used straight away - it depends on the fight.
Also, every single attack against you can be blocked. It requires perfect timing but there is a small indicator on-screen that helps with this. Once you get to know the enemies' attacks a bit more you can begin to block the attacks. Again, unlike other RPGs, bosses are not some kind of "super" enemies that stop half this stuff from happening - EVERY attack can be blocked - if you get the timing spot on, you even take no damage and counterattack your enemy. Which is nice.
The controls are as simple as they could possily be too, which is good!
The bad: The bad points - gameplay-wise, you run around and you have ALOT of objects which you can interact with. Sometimes these objects are too close together and though it seems like you should be targeting the one you want the one highlighted for you to interact with is in fact not what you want to interact with.
You meet Ann-Claire, Tycho's niece. She is supposed to give you clues as to what to do next, however right at the end I found myself needing one item and not having a clue where it could have been. It turns out that this item was in the starting area - unless i missed somethign blatantly obvious there was nothing anywhere that suggested that to obtain said item I needed to return to the starting area - I had collected all of the "spare parts" (which you use for weapon upgrades) from there and that was it as far as I was concerned.
The price - This game is prices at 1600MSP rather than the usual 800MSP for games on XBLA. Having now played the game right through in only about 5-6 hours of time I find that the ~£13-14 that I paid for it is too much - The game has achievements which are there to try and encourage you to replay it but I really don't want to... I'm not the kind of guy that will replay the game like that just to get those achievements (especially the one that says I need to play through the whole game without letting any characters get to 0 health in a fight
). An achievement like that where I could play for 5 hours then get an unlucky run of missed blocks that will waste that time has absolutely no appeal to me whatsoever.
In conclusion: A very good game, let down only, I think, by the lack of content you get for your £. I feel that there could and
should have been so much more in it, especially as it has apparently been 2 years in the making!
