Sigma Theory: Global Cold War

Несмотря на довольно простой геймплей, Sigma Theory умеет увлечь. Игра цепляет атмосферой холодной войны, интригами и сложными моральными выборами. Отличный вариант для любителей глобальных шпионских стратегий.

TL;DR. Don't ever buy this game for its $18. If you REALLY want to try it out, you should get it at least 70% off. A scientist in my team decided to indulge in a side project to induce sapience in animals. She came back a few days later having died and uploaded her brain into a dog, which could be sent out as the best agent in the game. Another scientist came to me and demanded she get her performance heroin back. I picked the option to tell her if it's so good with enhancing performance, she should share it with the science team. She went "hell yeah" and ended up overdosing herself and a different scientist to death and instantly researched multi-dimensional gate. I sent a korean hacker to Russia so that her international hacking activities wouldn't trace back to my country. I noticed both russian scientists were bisexual and ordered her to seduce them. So she became permanently stationed in Russia keeping watch on her polycule and deleting arrest warrants in Britain, which in my mind she's doing it while sipping coffee in Star Coffee shops. (Starbucks pulled out of Russia in 2022, fun fact) This sounds incredibly fun! So why am I not recommending this game? This game is shallow as a puddle and wide as a puddle, and the puddle shrinks! In this game, you win by monopolizing the scientists using agents. Agents have 2 numerical stats (Intelligence and Strength), and traits which most gives bonuses to actions and some bypasses checks or hinders. You lose if the other AI finishes Sigma project first, there's too much global instability and nuclear war happens, or your government loses faith in you and pull funding. As the game goes on, countries drop out the Sigma and become inactive on map. I completed 3 games in 7 hours, and I am pretty sure I already did all the interesting strategies in this game. It's the same thing: acquire scientists, and stop other countries from stealing them. There are just two ways you get scientists: you either exfiltrate them out or buy them off through diplomacy. And defending your scientists is trivially easy. "But what about different builds?", you might ask. The countries have different bonuses that are trivially different. Agents? There are only two stats that ranges from 1-8. It can throw me dozens of "unique" agents, but you can only have so much variety. The traits mainly help with exfiltration, which is a series of RNG events you can't really plan for. I don't like exfiltration, which is a problem because it's a major part of the game. The only thing you're doing is you're throwing an agent in that you hope has enough positive traits to get you through. "But what about the world-altering Sigma technologies? Surely they shake things up!" Biggest disappointment, the answer is an emphatic NO. They hype up the impact of these technologies with quotes and character dialogues of them being shocked, but mechanically their impact is really lame. Most of them are just, "more health", or "+1 to a stat". You perfected cloning, so now you have a couple agents that can't die, but you have to be really dumb to get your agents killed. You can access parallel dimension, which gives 1 agent access to gate, which only thing it does is halve exfiltration so it's just not as obnoxious. The vast majority of the dialogue options and scenario text you are required to read to pick the correct option are so cookie cutter that my mind just eventually glazed over them. There are some exceptions, like the stories I laid out to you, but they are the very few exceptions. The characters and agents don't feel like real people because all their dialogues are copy-pasted. The Spouse is so unimportant that it's mind-boggling why it was included. The grave accusation that I will levy against this game is that it is nowhere as interesting as it [i]imagines[/i] itself to be. I'm happy I only paid 6 bucks for this.