World After War [v0.48] review
- Pre-game impression
The first bad thing I noticed is that the UX is pretty clunky.
You can't just press ESC or click outside of dialog windows to close them - no, you have to manually click an exit button.
I also noticed options like Borderless Windowed / Fullscreen / Window are all named incorrectly and the settings are not reapplied when relaunching the game.
- First ingame impressions and story
The first minute isn't so bad and has decent writing.
However the dialogue must be clicked directly to advance the scene.
You can't click anywhere on the screen and you can't go back to previous dialogue (like you can in Ren'Py).
I also have a distracting 1-pixel-wide bright border (background from previous scenes) in all current scenes.
Shortly afterwards the main character is being woken up by a girl.
She explains to him that there was a nuclear holocaust and he's in a bunker with 6 other girls (5 still in cryostasis) and then sucks his dick to analyze his cum for radiation.
Needless to say the writing isn't very good - it sounds very unnatural (not how humans talk) and doesn't fit the situation they're in at all.
- First gameplay impressions
After the initial dialogue the fetch quests begin...
They basically boil down to removing fuses and cables from working doors to open non-working doors and hoping to find missing keycards and other things (not fun).
And while the quest log always explains what you have to do - it often is very poorly explained and written in broken english.
As a result I had to search the game's forum thread twice for solutions in the first half an hour of gameplay.
Then after finishing the fetch quests I finally got to leave the base to gather resources...
Here on the world map the dreadful UI/UX really began to shine.
Absolutely nothing is explained and I needed minutes to figure out how to even move around and get to places to gather resources.
The resource gathering was simple enough once I was there, but I had no idea who I even sent to collect them or if they were even transported back to the bunker.
Back at the bunker I received a huge moral penalty (when moral is 0 it's game over) because I apparently arrived to late (which I was never warned about).
Here I decided I'll just load a save I did at the start of the day to redo the resource gathering.
I couldn't though, because my safe had been overwritten by the game's autosaves.
That's when I ragequit for the first time.
1 real-life-day later I decided to give it another chance and checked out the work assignment screen for the bunker.
Clicking the work type and then the hour where the work should be done did absolutely nothing 80-90% of the time.
When it did work it randomly assigned the wrong work type I hadn't clicked half of the time.
At this point I was pretty much done with the game and deleted it with no plans to pick it up again.
- TLDR
Interesting setting with absolutely dreadful UI/UX, poor writing and tedious, unfun gameplay.
I would usually give it 3 stars because I like the setting, but the UI/UX is just so terrible and barely functional I felt like I had to retract a star even if the rest of the game was a masterpiece.
- Pre-game impression
The first bad thing I noticed is that the UX is pretty clunky.
You can't just press ESC or click outside of dialog windows to close them - no, you have to manually click an exit button.
I also noticed options like Borderless Windowed / Fullscreen / Window are all named incorrectly and the settings are not reapplied when relaunching the game.
- First ingame impressions and story
The first minute isn't so bad and has decent writing.
However the dialogue must be clicked directly to advance the scene.
You can't click anywhere on the screen and you can't go back to previous dialogue (like you can in Ren'Py).
I also have a distracting 1-pixel-wide bright border (background from previous scenes) in all current scenes.
Shortly afterwards the main character is being woken up by a girl.
She explains to him that there was a nuclear holocaust and he's in a bunker with 6 other girls (5 still in cryostasis) and then sucks his dick to analyze his cum for radiation.
Needless to say the writing isn't very good - it sounds very unnatural (not how humans talk) and doesn't fit the situation they're in at all.
- First gameplay impressions
After the initial dialogue the fetch quests begin...
They basically boil down to removing fuses and cables from working doors to open non-working doors and hoping to find missing keycards and other things (not fun).
And while the quest log always explains what you have to do - it often is very poorly explained and written in broken english.
As a result I had to search the game's forum thread twice for solutions in the first half an hour of gameplay.
Then after finishing the fetch quests I finally got to leave the base to gather resources...
Here on the world map the dreadful UI/UX really began to shine.
Absolutely nothing is explained and I needed minutes to figure out how to even move around and get to places to gather resources.
The resource gathering was simple enough once I was there, but I had no idea who I even sent to collect them or if they were even transported back to the bunker.
Back at the bunker I received a huge moral penalty (when moral is 0 it's game over) because I apparently arrived to late (which I was never warned about).
Here I decided I'll just load a save I did at the start of the day to redo the resource gathering.
I couldn't though, because my safe had been overwritten by the game's autosaves.
That's when I ragequit for the first time.
1 real-life-day later I decided to give it another chance and checked out the work assignment screen for the bunker.
Clicking the work type and then the hour where the work should be done did absolutely nothing 80-90% of the time.
When it did work it randomly assigned the wrong work type I hadn't clicked half of the time.
At this point I was pretty much done with the game and deleted it with no plans to pick it up again.
- TLDR
Interesting setting with absolutely dreadful UI/UX, poor writing and tedious, unfun gameplay.
I would usually give it 3 stars because I like the setting, but the UI/UX is just so terrible and barely functional I felt like I had to retract a star even if the rest of the game was a masterpiece.