Eve of Calamity Reviews

cool game, has room for improvement though

woof, listen... is the game good? wrong question; irrelevant actually. It's true to form for very old rpgs with all of the good and bad that entails. It has Random encounters, unrewarding; harder than necessary generic fights, long windows of grinding, huge text blocks and uncharacteristic info dumps of exposition. all of these are bad on their own and they wore on me quick. The fights are classic and have a lot of depth and characters and class options and expression, i just won't get to see for a while because i can only play it for 15 minute stints before getting 1 shot by every wolf and goblins makes me wanna commit sudoku while get interrupted every 4 steps on the way to recover. the lack of modern QOL is noticeable. If none of that matters to you, give it a shot, i've heard more than enough from trusted enough sources to know the RPG bits of the game are good.

Score: 2/5 I purchased EoC based on Humblemud's very positive video review. I will never take him seriously again. With significantly better writing and moderately better mechanical and narrative balance/choices, I would have stuck around to see how the developer(s) handled some of the better ideas/systems/narrative hooks. [b]The Good[/b] 1. Some variety/replayability thru randomized elements. Primarily based on the player's class/mechanical progression choices. Some combat encounters have unexpected twists like [spoiler]bandits bribing you in exchange for their life, or surprise potential party members events[/spoiler]. 2. Freedom of choice for exploration. I was not directly prevented from going almost anywhere by way of invisible barriers, or dumb physical roadblocks, but by mountains or large bodies of water or, less reasonably, absurd difficulty spikes from entering a higher-level zone. 3. Fast movement speed in towns/dungeons and on the world map. 4. Cool boss progression system [spoiler]based on play-time[/spoiler]. 5. I dislike strong meta-gaming in most single-player games, especially speed-running. However, like my appreciation/approval for meta-gaming in Morrowind, or speed-running in Neon White, EoC has good mechanical and narrative support for speed-running (but not the player knowledge meta-gaming required to do so), so I appreciate how it was handled here and want to give credit where credit is due. [b]The Bad[/b] 1. [b]Grinding/Repetition[/b], Balance, and Progression Mechanics a. Leveled zones have large gaps in difficulty, requiring meta-gaming and/or grinding. b. Differences between a character/NPC even comparing their early and mid-game effectiveness/performance is too strong/pronounced. Zero to hero crap (for viable builds/NPC party members). c. Multiple character builds heavily under-perform when approaching mid-game. d. Some choices/strategies for a run (economy/trading in my case) are unbelievably cheesy, but strongly reduce the grind/difficulty of a run (while still being boring and repetitive). Attempting to play the game without cheesing it was moderately boring and highly repetitive for most of my play-time. 2. [b]Writing[/b] Bland and poorly paced. Unbelievable characters blatantly telling the player the plot while placed/engaged in artificial situations. Humor doesn't land. Info dumping. Narrative choices are mostly disappointing, with many having only 1 branch that has a beneficial outcome and the others being uninteresting dead-ends with minor, non-mechanical role-playing benefits (I do not see how attempting to role-play or create your own story in EoC would be anything except disappointing for almost any player). 3. [b]Visuals/Art style[/b] Many parts of the game, especially the characters, are ugly or difficult to tell what you're looking at without the associated text box that has the character name/monster species/description. 4. Some of the music is grating (most is fine or even good).

Fun game. Music can be maddening rarely. Gameplay is simple on the surface, but you can do some rather amusing combos, and I enjoyed the variety of characters that can join your party. I def got my money's worth