Mars: War Logs Review
I've got to be honest I'm not sure how I stumbled upon this game, but I got it through steam and decided to take it for a test spin. The whole game is one big log of events that happened or happened during the game. You will be playing the part of Roy, a man with a checkered past that just wants to be free, but has too much of a heart to let too much injustice occur under his watch. He'll get to team up with several different individuals through the game and try to find a way to truly disappear.
Graphically I have to say that this game definitely had its moments, there was some weird lighting issues from time to time when it came to cut scenes, but the majority of the time I liked the look and feel of the game. You'll get to traverse through caves, through towns, farms, and more. The one issue I had with some of the enemies that you'll be facing is that they reused the faces of NPCs that you actually interact with which feels wierd to see them after you apparently just killed their doppelganger(s). You'll be facing off against Abundance soldiers, Aurora soldiers, mutants, bandits, some really roided out moles, and dogs that look like the beasts from Ghostbusters matched with a shrimp.
The music in the game was light and fit well within the game. I have to be honest it sometimes blended in too good. The voice acting was interesting to say the least, there was definitely a list of voices but there seemed to be this push to make the voices sound too unique and it rubbed me the wrong way.
The controls in the game were your standard affair of WASD coupled with the mouse and the hotkeys. There of course were a couple of other buttons to pull up your character sheet (K), the inventory (I), and the map (M). My favorite had to be hitting TAB and getting the map super imposed over what I was currently doing so that I could navigate areas quickly.
As stated before you're going to be playing the part of Roy. There's a war going on the surface of Mars, and apparently humans have found a way to colonize the place. It's been a while since they first arrived and there is several different sects of humans that are vying for supremacy. You start your story in a POW camp, but you meet a young boy called Innocence that helps you find a way to get out of the camp. You'll have the chance to do many side quests through out the game, you're going to run into military officers, you're going to run into Resistance members, and you're going to run into some serious trouble wherever you go. The one thing you have to do is stay alive. You're going to find that as you level up you're going to have new abilities at your disposal. You'll also be able to personalize items that you find to give you extra boosts in battle, or to protect yourself from a certain amount of damage.
The crafting system seems sound, but I personally see it as flawed. There are several different items that I wanted to make multiples of but the system will only allow you to create that specific item once and then will go back to the main crafting screen. If you want to make more you're going to have to select the category and then select the item you want to create again. I did like crafting enhancements for my armor and my weapons, but I felt like there wasn't really a lot to it in the end. I spent skill points to open up new options, but I was never sure what I was opening up because I don't think they immediately unlocked until I reached a certain part of the game, which seemed like a waste.
Your currency in the game is serum. There's a couple of ways to get it, you can work sub quests to get it, find it on downed enemies, or once you've hit a certain part of the game you'll have the serum gun which will allow you to drain any human of serum, you'll always get 5 serum that way. Now of course there is a downside to that action, people are going to fear you and you're going to have to pay more when it comes to dealing with merchants, but to be honest everything that a merchant has you can basically find by doing side quests. The only times I really used merchants was to get some extra components to finish off the enhancement I wanted for my armor.
As I stated before you're going to have different allies that are going to help you out throughout the game. You'll only be able to take one at a time, so choose carefully. There's also the chance to have a romantic relationship with one of the females. Its not really steamy or hot, but it does make you feel like you accomplished something.
l really liked this game, even though there were quite a few flaws in it. The first one is that if you try to come at the game with a happy trigger finger chances are that you've probably negated about half the stuff that you want to do during combat. I can't tell you how many times Roy was in the process of healing of doing a special move that a click one half a second too soon stopped him from what he was doing even though it looks like he finished his animation for it. There's also the targeting in the game, I know that there's a way to lock on to a target but when you're in a room you want the ability to run around and smack everyone up a little bit, the problem is that after coming out of a combative roll if you don't quickly manually turn Roy around you're going to be swinging at a wall getting your back obliterated.
There was also the issue later sub quests no longer using the map. Through most of the game when you're trying to find someone or an area for something it was labeled on the map, sure there was a couple collection quests where it didn't give you exact locations, but for some reason later in the game, during the quests you're probably going to want to complete to give yourself that little extra EXP so you can level up its damn near impossible.
Although I enjoyed the majority of the story I felt like the ending of the game was forced, it definitely screamed a potential sequel, at least I hope that's what they were saying at the end of the game, but the way everything wrapped up real quick and not messy, after the story being so messy seemed really off for me. So with that being said I have to give this game a 7.3 out of 10.
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