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Klei's (makers of fine games like Don't Starve and Mark of the Ninja) new game comes out on Early Access today, and I've heard surprisingly little about it so far aside from a few posts about it on RPS. The concept of a turn-based stealth tactics game sounds interesting to me, mostly because I tend to screw up in games like Mark of the Ninja due to my own clumsiness. 

 

I'll probably hold off on getting it for the moment since I've bought into too many early access games already, and it seems likely that RPS or someone else will post a review or impressions that will give a sense of the state of the game. Still, it looks interesting. Thoughts?

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Played this game for about 30 mins at this past year's PAX East. Enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a Rogue, and the theme fits the gameplay (moving through the area turn by turn) in that sense. Positives I remember (this is a little less than half a year ago) lots of meaningful decisions, satisfied that room clearing dungeon crawler itch while feeling very tactical. Negatives was the UI, there was a ton a info to process and it wasn't immediately clear where all of it came from, or where I would need to go in the menu to activate an ability or use a resource. MotN had a fantastic UI so I have no fear of it being great in the final product.

 

I'll definitely check it out when its a real game, and I'm sure the UI stuff will be cleaned up (more centralized representation of some of the information)/ more comprehensible in a different context (in my house and not at a convention). Would love to hear from Early accessers how it is coming along.

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I'm taking one for the team; it's downloading now. I'll answer any questions that I can find the answers for.

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I'm enjoying it. Indeed, it is as they describe it. At the beginning of the game it says you have 72 hours before your final mission (which I imagine is Olmec). They show you a map with about five locations and tell you what bonuses you may be able to gain from doing a run there. Some locations give you an additional party-member, some locations give you better hacking programs, a nanofiber station will have an opportunity to hack a machine that can manufacture weapons for you (if you have money that you gain from hacking safes and stealing from guards). When ever you choose a mission, time advances. The missions themselves are basically trying to go through tile-based office-buildings looking for things to hack and steal from then finding an elevator to get out. Because it's procedurally generated, sometimes the elevator will be easy to access from the first room. Other times you may need to steal a key-card off a guard to get through a door to the elevator. If you were to just go into the elevator from the beginning, it would end the mission, some time would advance and you would pick the next location having gained nothing but some persistent xp. Every attempt earns you persistent xp that unlocks new potential abilities, potential characters and potential upgrades. The game is very difficult for me, but that's largely because I haven't realized my limitations yet. There are mechanics to learn such as how if one of your party members gets caught, you can use another to sneak behind the guard and knock them out. There's lots of stuff like that, your stun gun takes two or three turns to cooldown for instance.

Stealth is emphasized. You can do things like open a door to get a guard to come through (in order to knowck them out) or you may have one party member make noise to attract a guard so another can run past. There are a lot of potential techniques to discover and invent so I'm excited about that. 

The game is completely playable from what I've seen (I usually fail the second or third mission). I get the impression that the action-point assignments are not final, but the game is fun as it is.

 

Edit: I was wrong about being able to get new party-members. Turns out that the detention-centers are escort missions that promise financial rewards if you get them out. 

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After playing this for a while, I'm kind of surprised that not one has done a tile-based, turn-based, stealth rogue-like before. The game in its state has no explicit narrative, so it's not directly comparable to Shadowrun Returns but I feel that it does a better job than Shadowrun Returns in representing runs mechanically.

I have been enjoying Invisible Inc. I came very close to what I assume is the last level last night. Missions get  progressively harder and my two agents had been doing the run long enough to get to alarm-level 3 (where more guards come) and they still hadn't located the elevator. In a panic, they split up to look for it. Only one made it out alive and they didn't last long in the mission I took at zero hours.

I'm glad this game is early-access because it is very much systems driven and I look forward to seeing new things added in one at a time. The main areas I can see expansion in are spy-gadgets, and defense-systems. 

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This sounds really interesting, between this and Counterspy there finally seem to be some good stealth games coming out again.

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This sounds really interesting, between this and Counterspy there finally seem to be some good stealth games coming out again.

 

From what I saw in GB's quick look Counterspy didn't seem all that stealthy to me. Killing everyone is heavily incentivized, and sometimes unavoidable, though doing it silently gives a bonus and avoids running up the meta-awareness level of the factions.

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A good example of the stealth-incentive is that the guards get up after you get off of them. Because your stun-weapon has a cool-down, you can't take many guards in a short duration of time. All this means that I tend to sneak around the guards on the way in to steal the stuff, and then I run and stun guards on my way out.

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I just did an epic run and had three guards pinned down. I was waiting to make a break for the elevator. We all ran across the level back to the elevator and it wouldn't let us leave. Then I realized that this was the spawn-point for the level, not the exit. What a sinking feeling. Now I have to somehow get my people back through the level to an elevator I haven't yet found with the alarms at high alert. This job is botched.

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So, would you say this is worth the purchase during Early Access?

Since it's a rogue-like, there is nothing really to spoil. I've played for 8 hours thus far with no technical problems. The only thing that might have been a technical problem was that while I was in the game, the power to my home went out and turned off the computer. When I loaded the game back up, my persistent xp (which unlocks new gadgets that you can build your party out with at the beginning of a game) was completely gone. It didn't really bother me since I like using the default builds and I just assumed it was some sort of scumming-prevention.

I'll put it this way. I've only gotten to the last mission before the final one, but I would be satisfied with the mechanics, polish, and art I've seen if they announced that the game was complete tommorow. I'm not playing it as if it was an early-access game, I'm playing it as if it is a full release. That said, I do have hopes for more spy-gadgets and such to be released.

Another thing I'd like to see added is mission-types. Right now theses are the types of missions:

-Break into a detention center and get a prisoner out alive.

-Break into a firewall server(?) building and get programs that help you hack.

-Break into a facility that will put more missions on your map to choose from (if you get the data).

-Break into a financial building to get cash to spend on upgrades.

-Break into a nano-fabrication building to use their vending machine for supplies

-Break into a R&D facility to get an over-powered spy-gadget.

All the buildings use the same art-assets, but they have proceduarally generated lay-outs and depending on what the mission-type is, they will have particular things to steal from. I'd like it if the buildings had more variation in the art-assets and if there were additional types of missions. But you can only do 5 or 6 missions before Olmec anyway.

Actually I did encounter something that might annoy y'all. I was playing this morning and there were three guards in one room. They were all facing away from me and did not turn around. It was way too dangerous so I just pickpocketed the guard closest to me and we ran. We did not get the data.

Edit: It occurred to me that my not having played Gunpoint may be relevant to my views on Invisible Inc.

While I'm here, I should mention that I just played a mission 30-40 hours in where I had to tell the guy I was escorting to go through a door so that the guard would shoot him. With the guards ability to fire suspended, I ran my two agents through the hall and into the elevator. There was no other way to do it with what I had. Good thing I had a prisoner I was breaking out of detention. He may have been valuable, but we take care of our own.

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I got to "final mission" last night. Before it begins, a prompt informs you that the finished game will include multiple missions like it. It was pretty brutal. You just can't possibly have enough resources to be thorough so unless you get a better roll than what I had, you will have to make large amounts of compromises in order to get the job done. Not that I was able to get the job done. It ended with my team in a room with four guards becoming conscious again. It was the only exit back out.

I made some mistakes though. I think I can do it if I don't make any mistakes and I make some good gambits.

Pro-tip: if you are escorting a prisoner, don't assume that they can use all of your equipment.

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How intuitive is it to play at this point? I picked it up back when the game was called Incognita, and while it seemed promising, it was also fairly difficult to understand the consequences of certain actions, and how a lot of the systems worked.

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I've had a couple of moments where I've come up with a plan on how to use a system in a way I haven't before, but for the most part I'm sending my agents through infra-red walls once to see what happens. The systems are generally not intuitive for me, but they are consistent.

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I just assume everything will kill me. 

Seems to have worked fine so far, getting close to reaching the final mission on my third run.

 

The first two runs ended in the first mission with me knocking out too many guards and sticking around in the level until the alarms killed me respectively.

 

The thing I dislike most at the moment is how the game shows/doesn't show details about items in the game.

For instance, when purchasing items from a Nanofab you only get a description of what it does but not all relevant information. One of my agents was carrying a Mark I Cloaking device and opened a shop window where a Mark II was available. However, from the info text displayed on mouse-over I was not able to determine what was the difference between the two. (Turns out it is probably cool-down time).

It also doesn't show you if the item you're about to purchase/pick up has a too high attribute requirement for your agent.

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What bothers me is not being able to switch their loadouts before the mission. It's just an inconvenience though since I can drop an item in the starting lobby and have the other agent pick it up, but it is annoying.

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Yeah, that would be nice.

 

I remembered another thing! I mistakenly thought I could purchase augments with one agent at a nanofab and drop it off to another one. I think a warning about that or somehow making more distinction between the different items in the store would be helpful to avoid stuff like that.

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Just so you know, infra-red walls will knock you out for a few turns if you try to walk through them, something every agent should know from basic agent-training.

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Thanks for the discussion. I think I might wait for another few builds before jumping back into this one!

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So, last night Capt. Hastings pointed out to me that I have started to close the doors in all the games I play once I go through. She's right. I was playing something the other day that has doors that can't be closed once you open them and I was unhappy about it. Thanks for giving me an obsessive compulsion Invisible Inc.

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