Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG

"Its fallout", most definitely. But not AAA, you can see that production value is pretty low in many aspects. But it does its trick. Not recommended at full price but in a good sale, go for it. Especially if you're craving the FO1/2 experience Edit: Ok it doesnt advertise itself as AAA, its an indie game! Then most certainly go for it when its low price, not 30eur

norm)

Ambitious, but flawed. I'd still recommand it if you can cope with some jank. Edit after some more hours: Can't recommend this game; it's so heavily unfinished, it's almost hurting. At a certain point, there is an extremely jarring drop of both density and quality in gameplay. While the first half feels like a flawed, but still interesting and somewhat enjoyable game, the second half is nothing more than an early alpha, where development suddenly stopped.

Like a lower budget Fallout or Fallout 2. I enjoyed the characters and the exploration, and the freedom to make your character how you wanted. However, too many of the ability skills get locked out if you stats are low. Then you ask yourself, why bother investing points in this or that ability?

This one is a bit of an underrated gem. Sure, it has its flaws, but all in all it's a truly fantastic CRPG experience that perfectly satisfied my desire for a well thought-out party-based roleplay adventure that I, as a big fan of classic isometric RPGs, greatly enjoyed.

So before I get to my review, I've heard that the devs kind of just... disappeared, so I'm not sure if they have anything else planned for this game, or if it's just completely done. But there's been no word from them since last year (the last update was in May 2022 and it was a hotfix update), and at this point, without any word from them, I assume there will be no more updates. With that said, I enjoyed my time playing this game. There have been others saying things feel incomplete, or just downright unfinished, and I do agree to a certain extent. Some questlines feel rushed or lacked a satisfying ending, like they were trailing off and expecting to come back to give more. But overall, everything felt complete, and I finished the game with a lot of the quests done and not seeing anything that looked incredibly off or unfinished. However, there are some issues with certain puzzles or clarity with the quest dialogue. One puzzle expected you to look at a sign and be able to determine the order through color coding. I don't know if they gave this puzzle enough quality testing because I could not figure it out at all. The colors I was seeing were not right, and maybe it was because of the lighting or something else messing with things in the area I was in. But at a certain point I got frustrated and looked up a walkthrough for the puzzle. Turns out, I DID do the puzzle right, but this puzzle might have some kind of bug affecting it if you talk to an NPC and resolve their issue first. I think I managed to fix it by reloading my save, but it was annoying enough that they didn't do enough testing to see if the color coding was good enough, and now there might be a bug hampering it. I think this was the only serious issue that I came across involving bugs (thank goodness), but this was only my experience. I have no idea what other bugs there might be out there that still exist. Unfortunately, clarity with the quest dialogue was something I had to keep fighting against throughout the entire game. While there are general spelling and grammar mistakes still present, and not that big of a deal, some of the quest instructions and dialogue could've gotten another pass. At one point, you're told to go to southeast of a city for something but it's not clarified what exactly that is. You're told what to interact with, but not if this item is in another location you're supposed to visit, or if it's in the southeastern part of the city. And then it turns out it's barely registered anywhere near the location of where you got the quest. Turns out, the place you're supposed to go to is not just another location you have to visit, but it's also MUCH MORE CLOSER TO A DIFFERENT CITY. This is just one example of a weird lack of quest dialogue clarity, I have encountered a few others but enough time has passed and I (unfortunately) have a poor memory so I cannot remember them off the top of my head lmao I think my biggest gripe is how slow everything is outside of combat. In combat, you're able to fast forward by holding down the SHIFT key, but outside of combat you're at the mercy of the natural clock. There's no fast forwarding long stretches of walk time and every container you loot has to incur a small process before you're able to see what's inside. So if you see a lot of containers around an area? I hope you have the patience to loot them all! Speaking of combat, yeah I didn't have any major problems with it. You have access to 2 different toolbars: one's for weapon skills and the other's for items or skills learned from expertise like medical healing or robot repair. As far as I know, you can't organize anything from the weapon skills, which is very weird since you can switch things up for the other toolbar. It might not be an issue for most but it was something that definitely bothered me, especially since I hyperspecialized in hand-to-hand and my weapon skills bled into the 2nd layer, and I barely used most of the weapon skills on the first toolbar layer. Other than that, sometimes it was annoying trying to target enemies, but your mileage may vary and this is also a small gripe. I think that's pretty much it other than some other small gripes. If you're a lockpicker type, know that your skill won't have a cooldown, but if you were bruteforcing things like I was, for SOME reason, there's a cooldown for that, and it lasts a few seconds before you can use it again. Sometimes followers can act wonky and you can't transition off a level until they're near the doorway, so you'll have to select them and round them up like a lemming. I was a servoshell user (read: power armor guy), and you can upgrade your servoshell a few times... IF you run into the servoshell manuals, which I NEVER DID, so I finished the game with basically a mk.0 servoshell acting like a tanky fisto for my followers lmao There are some balancing issues with that, and at the beginning of the game past Concord. I was having a lot of trouble fighting roaches because there so many, but I was just simply not equipped well enough to do some of the new quests, so I basically made due from exploring, scanning, and looting stuff until I was ok enough to buy items and gear up my character. I had a very particular playstyle though, so it might be better for people who were ranged or don't do a lot of combat and sneak around. TLDR, like I mentioned before I enjoyed my time playing this game despite its issues. It has plenty of rough edges though, and it wouldn't be right to ignore them while making my review. Best case scenario I recommend this game if you are interested in checking out more CRPGS, because I thought the story in this game was nice! However, I would buy it on a discount, especially because I'm not sure if the devs are still around or not. If any of the issues I talked about might concern you, it might not be addressed ever if they disappeared. But still, it was a nice time for me, so maybe it might be a nice time for you.