Torment: Tides of Numenera review

Recommended

by Max Savenkov

Very good Game, sometimes something very different from the other Games you get popped in front of the latz, and one is sold as An Epic RPG. I must say quite honestly rarely has caught me as a Game as Torment: Tides of Numenera. First Of all I was a bit sceptical When I looked at some reviews here, but then I made the Decision to buy it after the Description stated that you have to read a lot, or. The Game is a kind Interactive Book. It's no ordinary Hack & Slay RPG, but a profound hard to understand but exciting Book written in a great RPG! But there are of course also Downsides, the Graphics are not really the Upper Hammer, a real Tutorial or an Introduction does not exist. You get thrown ice cold into the Game world and you have to get started. But after the first Hour full of Guesswork, what this Game is all about, I didn't really care. The Story had already grabbed me. + Exciting Story and Great Main Quest-Weak Graphics + Challenging Side Quests-Long Music + High Playful-Fighting System Weak and Not Really Exciting + Many Decision Options + Tiefgr Hourly Character Creation All in all a great Game Mn like not in a long time. But If you expect an Action packed, RPG, where it's all about Fights or Farmen/crafting etc, you will be visibly disappointed. The most important one to READ MUST, click the Lyrics away is pointless, then you prefer not to buy it!

For me as someone who hasn't played the "Predecessor" Planescape Torment, this Game is a truly unique new Experience. I liked the Setting from the Beginning, the Mix of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Since I had already read in some Preliminary Reports that the Combat Mechanics are not so plump, I expected little and was therefore not really disappointed. It's pretty simplistic and doesn't really require tuning any skills of each character. Strangely enough, you can change the Type of Damage through Weapons or with The Help of Skills. But That was never necessary for me. However, I also have to say quite clearly that Fighting in this Game didn't itch me at all either. I tried to avoid as many Fights as I could and that worked out brilliantly. As a result, the Game has developed a Flair and Character like an interactive Book. And I mean that absolutely positively. When I started Tides of Numenera, Hours passed like in Flight and I was able to completely immerse myself in this fascinating World and hide everything else around me. I thought the Dialogue Options are fantastic. In other RPGs, I often lack Dialogue Options that really fit my spontaneous Feeling. There you read through the three possible options, no one pleases you, and then you take the Ones that still suits you best, only to find that the Result is different than you thought. At T:TON, I found myself largely in the Dialogue Options. Also, you always have the Feeling of "moving" something with the Dialogues. In most RPGs, the Dialogues serve as An info for any Quests and as a Background Story. Here are the Dialogues of the Quests. This has been a Game for a Long time, which I played through again until the End. And I really took EVERY side quest With me and solved it. I'm glad to have had that Experience. For me, the Purchase was definitely worth it.

I love cRPG's I grew up playing Fallout, Arcanum, Baldurs Gate and so on, so I was in love that this genre got a second life with games like Divinity, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun and boy oh boy I was happy to hear about this one. A spiritual sequel to one of the best RPG's of all time, how could you go wrong? Well, you could!

It will be a short as no one reads long reviews, including me. The main issue with Torment that it's a bad game, it's well written, but it's a bad game. Fighting is bad, the tutorial is atrocious, graphics not appealing to the eye, menus are bland and grey and clunky and the game has overall cheap feel to it, I know it was a kickstarted game, but when you compare it to the Pillars of Eternity, other game which was kickstarted it's like a night and day in all departments. I can go on and on about how bad it is (the lack of items in an rpg game), the lack of actual gameplay ( after 5h I had 5minutes of fights, other than that was going from one NPC to another and reading) but my main gripe with the game is how bad it is presenting himself to a newcomers. It doesn't teach you anything, I am not speaking about handholding, but there is a way to teach about the game, it's mechanics, the intricacies of skills and stats in clever and interesting ways, but instead, they were lazy. 

There are people who like this game and it's ok, as I said the game is very well written (but even then, it throws so many lore and text at your face that you feel overwhelmed)  and the world itself is interesting, but this one fails as a game and for that reason I stoped playing it after 5h of playtime and it was a first RPG I haven't finished. 

Torment Tides Of Numenera was an impulse buy. The box and blurb promised a deep story and old style RPG trappings. The game itself delivers on all these fronts but like a complex fantasy or sci-fi series, it is not for the faint-hearted. I’m currently working my through the Malazan 10 book series by Steven Erikson and what drew me to this was it being described as the hardest literary challenge you can set yourself. The first few hours of Torment feel exactly the same. Literally hundreds of themes, constructs and lore are thrown at you with little or no explanation. In fact, it is possible to die from your first conversational choices in the game. The selling point of Torment is that situations can be talked around instead of resorting to combat. This is clear from the first few interactions when you eventually land on the planet. You play the last castoff, in essence, the last bodily vessel of the antagonist in the game ‘The Changing God’. When the Changing God gets tired of a vessel he casts them off and moves to a new one leaving a strange consciousness and fragments of memories in the empty vessel. You are this empty vessel identifiable only by a tattoo all your kind share. Needless to say, this is a good starting point for the storyline of the game but rather than let you get straight into the game the story throws another few plot points at you as a way of character creation. When you are falling to earth you are trapped in a palace of your own mind and have to negotiate your way through this. Your questions in this phase form the character creation section of the game making you choose between the normal warrior, wizard or rogue classes not that you’d know it from the decisions you made. I made the kind of choices I usually do expecting to be classed as a rogue yet ended up a Nano, the game’s version of a mage. Nevertheless, you are intrigued enough by this stage to go with the flow and then you have your first encounter with an enemy called the sorrow. It hunts you in your mind from what I can tell so far and will be a constant threat throughout the rest of the game. Despite the excellent plot and branching storylines, there are a few things people should know before diving in. The game itself is very poor at telling you where you should be going and what is a priority. There is no ability to set a marker to head in the direction of the next quest for example, or at least none I have found so far. Also using you or your companions abilities uses up points in one of the set fields. These points don’t replenish unless you sleep and recharge yet there is nowhere obvious to sleep in the first few hours of the game. This can lead to much confusion and wasted time as you naturally take on many quests at the beginning but waste your points on unimportant ones. One early quest had me convincing a young boy not to spend money on cosmetic or physical augmentation and instead focus on education. While a worthwhile and enjoyable task on its own merits it doesn’t seem to have got me anything other than some XP. Maybe further down the line, this boy will return but he hasn’t as yet. Another issue is the poor graphics in the game. The world design and character models are nice and unique yet they are from such an isometric zoomed-out viewpoint that it is hard to truly appreciate them. If you use the right stick to zoom in then they become blurry and even ugly. Even worse than the look is the sound quality. The music is nice and stirring and the relevant shocks sound well yet other than this there are periods of complete silence. Only some of your companions words are voice acted and the rest is via dense pages of text. While some may prefer this it is hard to take everything in when you are reading it against a backdrop of silence. When you are presented with 6 or 7 conversation options at the end you often find yourself asking the question again as you have lost interest and don’t want to pick the wrong option. There is also the matter of the horrible menus you have to navigate through. You access these by hitting up on the d-pad and not through the start menu or the touchpad on PS4. When you get in there you have a functioning view of your items but no real idea about the skill trees or the aforementioned Tides that your decisions are putting points into. Unless you dig into the lore and pay real attention you could find yourself wandering around the starting area out of points and out of ideas what to do next. Despite all this, there is a very deep and brilliant storyline to be found in here and the genuine ability to deal with confrontations in any way you see fit. Being the number one funded RPG on Kickstarter at the time and the successor to Planescape the game will attract much attention. You just need to be aware what you are getting yourself into before you begin. It is a deep, old school, isometric RPG that requires time, patience and dedication. If you are in the mood for this then Torment offers something unique on modern consoles.