Acaratus

Wasted potential. Acaratus has very stale combat, mech customization that offers little variety, and story cut scenes that would benefit with added voice acting.

I liked it a lot and kept saying to myself “just one more battle”. I love the gambling system to get loot at each town. By the end I was a bit too OP and took down the final boss easily on normal difficulty. I won’t be playing again, the story was too light and the fights too long to do that. Some Negatives: The game did crash a lot for me. I had to save every 10-15 minutes to make sure I didn’t lose progress. You have to bring a “pull” device with you to the penultimate fight with no forewarning. I had to run back and try to gamble in town to get one. Kind of annoying. Overall I still liked the game and played it pretty much straight through over a few days.

Light turn based gamne. My first recommandation was positive, as the publisher promised some neeed changes. We are now one year later and nothing has been done during the last 6 months. It's a cheap light game with a studio that does not have any means to support the game long term, sadly.

The game seems like it could be interesting, but the resolution can't be adjusted to my screen size, and half the video options don't work. There aren't any achievements either since support seems to have stopped in early 2017.

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ I had high hopes for Acaratus, but unfortunately, my experience with the game has been nothing short of a nightmare. The potential for an engaging turn-based strategy game was there, but the constant crashes and technical issues have completely overshadowed any positive aspects.

Greeting Everyone! Today I will be reviewing Acaratus a turn based strategy game that pulled at my nostalgia of classic Turn Based Strategy Mech games similar like Front Mission (R.I.P.). But, with what appears to be a small budget and graphics that of last gen does this game hold up? Rockem Sockem: At its core this game is all about punching or shooting other robots, or at least mechs. There is a story but assuming it even plays right (read below) it is completely forgettable. The enjoyment comes from solid (for the most part) turn-based combat with customized mechs. You click a mech, move it, shoot with it and punch with it. All very fun, if simple gameplay; finding different cores and equipping them with legs, arms and such is all neat but the interesting bits are finding out you can do other things, like putting turrets on a core where the legs go so you can put a propeller and have it fly around harassing things (I called him Air-Raid) or a big mech that had a huge chest cannon with a ballista on top (I called him Firebase). Really, I named all my mechs like they were transformers…don’t judge me. Welcome to the 90s: The game lacks any real amenities that you’d expect in our current gen of gaming, no voice-overs, a serviceable but incomplete tutorial and graphics that belong on a tablet. Even at the highest graphics settings the game simply does not look like it does in the pictures, but I didn’t play this game for the graphics, I played for the big mechs stomping over each other! There is a tutorial but it doesn’t really explain anything but controls…’hey, what are units?’ how do they work? Anyway the game ends up leaving a lot to be desired but again punching, slashing and shooting robots in a turn based game is what this is about. Rocks Fall: Let’s talk about the bad…which there are a bit. The biggest issue I had was in my game all the mid-chapter stories seemed to be auto-skipped. I even saw like a split second before it just loaded the next screen. I didn’t even get to see the ending, which soured me greatly with this review. The story also makes no sense as it doesn’t seem to be always told in order or even by the correct character. One time one of the characters was talking to herself because she was reading the lines of another character. Also, if you don’t watch you can go out of order of the story, which causes it to feel weird but also having no idea who the new characters are. Even if you avoid that there are still several story glitches and an odd bug happened to me multiple times where I accidently clicked a location and my cursor just ran through all the encounters without engaging them forcing me to make my way backwards through the story for some time. There were even times were the end of battle dialog happened at the beginning of the battle. Oh and don’t forget the battles you just auto-win for no reason as no enemies were spawned. So in the end, should you get this game? If you are a fan of turn based strategy mech games then I’d say just buy one of the old Front Mission games (3 is my favorite) but if you really want to give this game a go, then great. I enjoyed my time and actually will play through it again. But I can’t recommend it…too many bugs that create a bad experience which is an absolute shame because I see an endless amount of enjoyment on the mechanics alone if they were just cleaned up a bit and the story issues were corrected. Ultimately this game should be in early access and is in dire need of some updates. Until then, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. Regardless, enjoy!

First of all, whatever you do, don't quit out during a combat. You'll permanently glitch the game's audio into blaring out intermittent white noise so that it sounds like you're under attack by a group of machine guns. And yes, I do mean permanently glitch, as in I have not found a way to fix it yet. I've set the game's audio to mute in the meantime, but all this means is that the white noise machine guns have died down to the point where I don't hear them if my headphones aren't on my head. Also, after triggering the glitch, playing non-game audio (such as youtube) without restarting your computer lets you get about ten seconds of listenable audio and then the white noise kicks in. So basically, if you quite out during battle, be prepared to restart your computer. Yeah. Anyway, this is a weird but vaguely satisfying tactical rpg. It plays like a very simplified Front Mission had sex with the Path Of Exile node tree, and the plot is sort of dumb from the jump (you play as a slave-seller who decides to overthrow the peaceful, stable empire that tried to persecute you for having illegal weapons technology, and then like every NPC you talk to calls you a great savior for doing this), and the game balance is basically hoard-your-wealth-and-then-spend-it-on-having-more-units, but it makes some interesting design decisions and feels pretty fresh, so if you crave novelty in your gaming experience, this may not be a bad pick. I wouldn't recommend it at full price unless you're VERY sure that this is the kind of thing you want, but if you're already hooked on the idea of medieval mechs, you're probably not going to be wasting your money if you do buy full price. UPDATE: the second boss has a melee attack that, if it hits you and kills a unit, crashes the game and reverts your progress. This isn't an intermittent crash. It happens every time. Might be the strongest boss move I've ever seen in a game. SECOND UPDATE: sometimes your own melee attacks, if they hit and kill, crash the game and revert your progress. This IS an intermittent bug, but because melee is the most efficient route for damage-dealing, most of your attacks will be melee unless you know about this bug and deliberately build a squad that is very range-focused. Even then, you'll be playing sub-optimally to get around a glitch that shouldn't be there in the first place. I can't recommend a game that is so bugged and busted that it periodically wipes your progress or corrupts your whole computer's audio because you took a common action, so I'm changing this to a thumbs down.