Forgotten but Unbroken Review (Homosapien Hal)
TLDR: Not awful but needs a patch or two before it gets a thumbs up...
With a bit more polish, this will be good and worth the current price tag. There are enough different game-play layers and depth of tactical options to be interesting. The cut scenes and narrative are nice (as long as you can be charmed by the hilariously bad lip-synching and facial expressions - luckily I was). I thought the graphics were just fine (though I have been playing a lot of Xenonauts 2 recently, so...).
However, as it stands, there are a just few too many bits of jank (clunky UI, missing mechanics explanations, screen edge scroll that keeps getting stuck, etc) that gently erode your enjoyment and at least the following design flaws that aren't really forgivable in a modern turn-based tactics game and which make it fairly annoying to play:
- Your units won't stop their movement if they spot an enemy. This means that, unless you creep along click by click by click, you will almost certainly run into the detection zone of an enemy even if your unit spots them before entering their detection zone. For a game with such a focus on stealth play, this is a big drawback.
- Your units do not have directional overwatch - overwatch is either on or off in 360 degrees. This results in them taking the first shot that is available to them even if that is an impossible shot to make. In turn, this seriously undermines your ability to set effective ambushes (the first of your units that is detected triggers a 'scramble turn' for enemies during which you can only overwatch fire, so it's sort of essential).
- Some of the LOS calculations are frankly laughable but this isn't something that can be fixed - this game is using squares to determine LOS not visual LOS as in Phoenix Point, etc
- Many missions end as soon as the last enemy is killed, even if that's from overwatch or you still have units with AP left on your own turn. Loot that you don't manually collect is lost at the end of the mission so this often means the mission ends without you being able to collect much needed (and scarce) resources.
I'll definitely come back and change this to a positive review if the developer spends a bit of time to polish this up a little more. Right now though, given the range of choice for TBTGs out there, hard to recommend this one over all the others.