Darkwind

This game was very interesting to play. It is turn based in the idea that the game pauses every few seconds to let you select actions that will the play out in real time with physics over the next few seconds before the game pauses again. And though I liked it, I find I cannot play it. There is just too much to juggle with the clunky UI in the very short amount of time you have between "Turns" in this game. When you are controlling a single car with the clunky UI the time between "Turns" is enough. But once I got further in to the practice missions and they started giving me more vehicles to control at once I noticed the time to make decisions was not increased much if at all. Which made the situation very bad. You had something like 2 minutes to make decisions for 3 vehicles. Which include acceleration, turn angle, a separate menu to select weapons, then select targets, then prime weapons to fire should target get within range, all with drop down menus. Assign a gunner to weapons. All of which is in a very fiddly UI that is difficult to navigate and easy to mess up and then have to backtrack and fix what you did before running out of time. Now do it 2 more times because you have to do this separately for each vehicle or they will just default to running straight ahead while being affected by the physics of their previous movement. Though it was interesting that the actions are affected by physics, it meant you had to think a lot harder about your actions because simple things like accelerating too much could lead to a problem several "turns" later. This need to really think ahead to such a technical degree didn't do the game any favors with the short "turn" time and hard to navigate UI. It was a nightmare to try and get everything figured out before running out of time and as soon as you f*** up once it becomes a c***-up cascade as the next 5 seconds you did not plan for suddenly unfold and you are immediately thrown into the next short time limited turn frantically trying to figure out how to fix the mess everything is now because you failed to finish selecting stuff previously and now have to do things with even less time this time around because now you had to spend some of it processing the new pile of problems generated by the failure to finish last time. When it was one car to manage it was do-able. When it was trying to be in charge of 2 or more it became astronomically harder to keep track of the situation and execute anything correctly in part due to the UI and in part due to the extremely short amount of time to process the turn in. This became especially true when you cars got separated and you had to spend time evaluating each of their situations as well. I never really got past the tutorials at that point. The last one I did was a truck escort mission that I simply could not manage because swapping between the three vehicles and not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the actions of at least one was nearly impossible. I never got into the real game with gang management but I realized if this was a game where I was going to be versing other people and their gangs I probably was not going to get away with driving one car. That and seeing that a lot of the out of combat actions could take a lot of real life time to complete seemed a little excessive to deal with. Like car repair and injured drivers could put you out of being able to progress in the game for real life days if not weeks. If the UI wasn't a mess and the game wasn't so heavy handed on the management sim part being like a real life job I'd see this as far better game. The concept is very cool and the physics system itself seems to work very well. But as it stands this comes off as meh to negative.