spuloo

Basically an extremely linear visual novel with a detective story that didn't even have an "AH HA" moment. The game just feeds everything to you. Animal heads on human bodies are all there is to drive the game. Pros are the artwork and voice-over work, but that's just a shell that needs to be on a good story for it to amount to anything worth playing.

Played this without having played the first two games. That being said, I found it underwhelming. I don't know if there would be backstory from the previous games that gave me the motivation to find the story from the beginning of this one to be interesting, but nothing in this game alone is going to make a lot of people care about the overall story arc. The main story dilemma didn't really give me a compelling reason to go for either of them. I just found myself not caring and basically flipping a coin on which direction to go. I guess with story options, writers aren't supposed to make one way more attractive than the other, but imo that should be accomplished by writing them both as compelling, instead of writing them both as uncompelling. I found the story to be uninspired, derivative of the opening "oh you were attacked, so at least dislike these people" with a few funny quirks in the identities of some factions. So that's the main pro - factions that have quirky, memorable identities. But quirky wont make you have a tough decision if circumstance invites you to completely obliterate them to finish some quest to be rewarded with a random widget. Other cons are the armor and weapon mod system that discourages using mods until you get to your endgame weapons, and I felt like every mechanic was borrowed from 100 other top-down turn-based games. Some weapon categories, it just seemed like the developers got tired of making them once they got to like 7-8 tier, so that's where they topped out. Idk, I guess it wasn't terrible, which is why I'm giving it a "mixed" level score, but it was a disappointment and I'd probably rather have the hours of my life back.