Fracas Steam Charts & Stats

It really hurts me to post this review, because the first two areas in this game are [i]great[/i]. It feels tense but fair, and you're encouraged to experiment and explore. But man, the third area just ruins the whole thing for me. It's a massive difficulty jump. As in, you'll be taking little-to-no damage from enemies by the end of the second area, but you'll be getting almost oneshot by the time you reach the third. Even when you level up, start getting new equipment to get a fighting chance - it doesn't get better. The further you go into the third area, the enemies get tougher and tougher, deal huge chunks of your health in single attacks, and they just don't stop coming. You'll have to make dozens of trips back to the save point to avoid losing progress, but it never felt like I was making enough to make up for the time I spent backtracking to it. Items and your shoulderbelt are very useful, because they can stun enemies, but the game doesn't show weaknesses or anything so you'll have to remember what each enemy is weak to off the top of your head. And the game has various enemies that are almost identical but with slightly different names - things like "Malfunctioning Drone" vs "Violent Malfunctioning Drone". And hell, even with that, they don't even get stunned 100% of the time. The stuff deals low damage as well - so if you don't stun them, that's an entire turn you could have damaged them wasted. It isn't really fun. And man, the bugs. There's an annoying bug that locks your controls if you exit the menu too quickly after healing (It's solved by opening the menu back up again, but it's a pain when it happens so often, especially in that third area when you need all the heals you can get). If you load a save after getting a game over, the chests you unlocked in your previous life will be empty. I only wound up missing a few newspaper clippings from this, but if this hits you on some valuable armor, or God forbid a key item, you could very well just softlock yourself. I really wanted to enjoy Fracas. I adored the demo, and the first two areas of the game were amazing. But the further I got, the more the issues started piling up, and I just couldn't take it anymore. The last straw was losing about a half hour of progress on the third floor of the third area. I sighed, realised I wasn't having fun anymore, and just uninstalled the game.