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As soon as Brian Fargo tweeted 'So, the awesome Fallout-inspired RPG Age of Decadence in now on Steam early access' I jumped online. The Age of Decadence is an isometric, turn-based, single-player 3D role-playing game set in a low magic, post-apocalyptic fantasy world, inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire. The game features a detailed skill-based character system, non-linear gameplay, multiple skill-based ways to handle quests, choices & consequences.
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Summary
A 2020 Review - The Age of Decadence (PC, 2015)The Good
- Has an honest demo.- Multiple routes may be taken to beat the game.
- Incredibly funny and useful skill/ability descriptions. More games should take inspiration from this.
- Some hilarious ways to find yourself dying, made out as a fool, or being separated from your money.
- Budget-friendly in cost and in required/recommended system specs.
- NPCs are hilariously evil, greedy, untrustworthy, and always out to get you.
The Bad
![The age of decadence review The age of decadence review](http://www.geeksundergrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Age-of-Decadence-info-pic.jpg)
- RNG in combat is grossly stacked against the player, and always in favor of the NPC combatants.
- The non-combat path becomes a trivial point-and-click game that leads to instadeath anytime you find yourself having clicked the wrong dialogue choice and end-up in combat.
- Boring story with a boring end-conclusion. Dialogue becomes a chore.
- The most important choice you will pick are your attribute points at the start of the game. Once you set yourself on that path, there is no deviating from it. You are locked in and cannot improve your stats in the game.
- Complete exclusion of black or dark-skinned racial choices. I mention this as it does let you choose skin shades, but only of the white variety. Take this as you like. It doesn't affect gameplay, just something of note.
- Lacking equipment options to suit your character with. I felt it was far too shallow.
![Simon heffer the age of decadence review Simon heffer the age of decadence review](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126255827/956934931.jpg)
The Bottom Line
Score: 4/10Mediocrity Score: Mediocre at Best.
The Age of Decadence is a strangely unbalanced turn-based CRPG. It rather uniquely takes combat out from being the main focus and pits the player into a scenario where you can take different approaches. Touted for being a game where 'choices matter', the game somehow feels so linear - locking the player into a path chosen early on. Choices in the game will keep you on your toes, that is until you realize the pattern of don't trust anyone, ever. My advice before buying is - play the demo first.
Tags:
The few words that come to mind are: mediocre, unbalanced, dialogue-heavy, cheap.
Quick Take:
Play the demo first. For the intention of being redundant for effect, if there is anything you should do before buying, it is to play the demo. This game is both very difficult and very easy. Rather unique in its approach, within The Age of Decadence you can 100% avoid all combat in the game by taking a more charismatic-stacked approach in your character build. What they don't mention is how incredibly simple the game becomes when you go for this non-combat route. It turns into a dialogue-heavy, point-and-click game where if you make the wrong choice you likely will be thrown into a combat situation where you will surely, and cheaply, die. Go with the combat route, and you are faced with a stacked-against-you RNG-based combat which is difficult to the point of coming off as both brutal and cheap. The one thing both routes have in common is the smoke-and-mirrors masking the cheap game-ending situations it constantly throws your way. In complete fairness reading reviews, watching let's plays, playing the demo, or even the reading developer's own disclaimers - potential players have been warned that 'there is a good chance that you won’t like it, precisely because we took too many liberties with the established design'. I can't help but feel like this is akin to being told 'Here's the really over-cooked steak you ordered. There is a good chance you won't like it, but since this is all intentional - we've taken an extra heavy-handed approach with its blackened design.' Yet here I am, disappointed that I paid for a really over-cooked steak that has an impressive char-broiled aesthetic.
Concept:
Throwback to the days of the classic-RPG. A bit experimental in its choice to take the focus away from combat and place it on the decisions and paths you take within a brutally corrupt and greedy society. Strongly driven by narrative with a big emphasis on dialogue (over 600,000 words of dialogue alone). Name of the game is: survive or die. Expect the unexpected. Unless you're not expecting to die. You're gonna die.
Graphics:
Nothing award-winning for sure. Still seems dated for 2015-standards, and even more so for 2020. Keep your expectations reasonable, and it will be fine. Good enough so as not to detract from the gameplay.
Sound:
I'll hand it to the audio/sound team - they did a stellar job. Great music and sounds are very fitting. Unfortunately for the rest of the game, for me, this might be its strongest aspect. No voice-acting though.
Gameplay:
Narrative-driven gameplay where your choice can either get you killed, your pockets emptied, or if you're lucky - you'll come out on top as champion. Classic, turn-based RPG elements push you to become a character of your own. The variety of skills and abilities adds to the enjoyment of seeing your character progress throughout the game. Become a master-manipulator or a bag-man for one of the many houses of power. Your choices will never be quite as black or white as you'd first think.
Entertainment:
The best part of the game for me was letting my guard down only to be tricked again by another shady commoner within one of the towns. The game did have many enjoyable moments, mostly in the form of laughs at the sticky situations I'd incidentally put my character into. The frustration of too much dialogue mixed, or on the other hand the frustration of one-sided combat, far too often soiled the good times that I found elsewhere in the game. I had a hard time finding a point where I felt the game was balanced. It was either too easy or too hard. Call me Goldilocks.
Replayability:
At a minimum, this game has enough variety in your character-build options to have two playthroughs. One combat-oriented, and one non-combat oriented. There are some more granular choices or even skills that could push some of the bigger fans to further runs through the game.
Cheats??:
Yup! To be honest, this is one of the few games where I did not find additional entertainment value in them. Feel free to try them out for yourself and be the judge.
---Full Review Below---
I get concerned when a game is overall and recently rated as very positive, but the first several reviews in the 'most helpful' category are overtly negative. To me, this immediately means it's a more divisive, polarizing game - typically on a 'love or hate' scale.
I'll give big props to the devs for making a free demo, strongly recommending people trying before buying, as well as provide much insight and caution to the difficulty of combat. After-all, combat tends to be a major selling point for many games - RPGs included. With all of the existing warnings and disclaimers, no one should be surprised by the difficulty. You've been warned by practically everyone.
What they don't mention is how incredibly simple the game becomes when you go for the non-combat character build. It really becomes a point-and-click game with a really, really heavy amount of dialogue and lore. It's trivial. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily, it just gets a bit too drab for my liking. Becomes an interactive book - which again, isn't an insult, just a distinction.
This game is highly acclaimed for its wide variety of choices and how they affect the game greatly. I disagree. If you choose a combat-based build, you can't deviate without near-guaranteed failure. Vice-versa with non-combat/civil builds, getting into combat is a sure way to die. This forces you to make far more linear choices and sets you on a path that will corner you into only being able to succeed in a few ways. It's certainly realistic, but not something I'd tout as being non-linear and that 'choices matter'. They only matter in the immediate sense of fail or succeed, die or survive. It would appear your choices made an impact, while somewhat true - most of this is decided at the very start of the game; attribute point distribution.
I finished the game in a single evening [5 hours with breaks, maybe??]. Which seems...very fast. So I looked into speed runs, and without gross exploits - it can be beaten in under 5 minutes. Technically - no combat is even required from what I can tell, which again is not an inherently bad thing, just an unusual one. I did find the game rather...boring overall. I found myself dragging my feet to continue playing through to the end.
One bone I would like to pick is character creation. There is a complete exclusion of black or dark-skinned racial choices. I mention this as it does let you choose skin shades, but only of the white variety. Take this as you like. It doesn't affect gameplay, just something of note.
$15 USD is a good, reasonable asking price for the game. If a sale put's it at 50-75% off, then all the better. Great budget recommended system specs and even better minimum. If you've got an older, or perhaps simply not as high-performance of a computer, this game would be a great fit and all the more worth the price. That being said, I don't know that I can put much more than maybe 10 hours into the game. Sure - there's some replay value but the same NPC conversations and quests get dull rather quickly. It's simply not something I'd generally recommend. Only with asterisks. Which brings me to my rating and recommendations:
I can't broadly recommend The Age of Decadence. Only for certain people.
For me, a 4/10. Strangely unbalanced. It does some things really right, and some things really wrong. I preferred the non-combat, more dialogue-driven paths - but that required a lot of reading of a rather...mediocre story. I did like how dishonest and untrustworthy almost the entire NPC base is. Kept me on my toes... until I realized the pattern of don't trust anyone.
I'd recommend the game to people who:
-Loved the demo.
-Love hardcore combat.
-Love point-and-click games and are willing to stick to non-combat builds.
-Have a budget or low-performance system, but are itching for a different RPG.
-Getting it with a significant discount
Everyone else, probably don't bother. There are much better RPG titles out there more worthy of your time and money.
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Thanks for reading!
As soon as Brian Fargo tweeted ‘So, the awesome Fallout-inspired RPG Age of Decadence in now on Steam early access’ I jumped online and bought the game sight unseen. It’s been since Skyrim that I’ve played a decent RPG and I’ve been looking for something to keep me busy until Wasteland 2, Mad Max, or WildStar, but having spent a good day and a half on the game so far and progressed not much at all, I’m thinking I may have to just wait a little bit longer.Any game that soaks up 9+ hours of my time and has me progressing no further than the first two introductory missions is either way too punishing or an indictment on my gaming skills, and as a veteran RPG’er I would sincerely hope it’s a case of the former rather than the latter. My first issue with the game (and there are many thus far) lies in the descriptor. Why bill a game as a ‘low magic, post-apocalyptic fantasy world, inspired by the fall of the Roman empire’ when there is no magic and the the definition of post-apocalyptic has been stretched to mean ‘post-war’? By that definition Prague in 1918 would fall under the same category of ‘low magic, post-apocalyptic’ and I doubt many people would rush to play a game set then and there.
At this stage in game development and marketing, especially given the strength of titles such as Fallout, Rage, and Last of Us, terms like ‘post-apocalyptic’ carry with them a weight of expectation. To label a game such, and not deliver, is a disservice to customers and misrepresents the title.The Age of Decadence is inflexible and unapologetically so.
Three hours of game play later and not progressing beyond the starting area I begrudgingly acknowledged my second issue with this game; it’s punishingly difficult. Now I don’t have a problem with difficult.
I regularly play through titles on harder settings for a challenge, and there are some fairly simple ways to increase difficulty without it feeling like the AI is unreasonably strong. Baldur’s Gate, for example had a simple sliding difficulty scale that altered enemy damage output by a percentage. Skyrim has a similar mechanic that can also reduce the player character’s damage output.
These are fairly simple ways in which players can give themselves a challenge appropriate to their skill level or playing style. Age of Decadence however, is inflexible and unapologetically so. The introductory screen warns that ‘The Age of Decadence is a hard gamea single mistake can prove fatal’. This is on normal difficulty. Your only other option is to play the game totally unchanged, but with a pre-made character that will ‘make short work of even the most dangerous enemies’. My pre-made character died in his first fight, in the first round, but this is not the punishing difficulty I’m talking about.
I’m referring to unrealistic expectations the game has of players, and it’s refusal to empower them to achieve. Knowing that the game is designed to be hard, and expects players to invest in their character’s appropriate skillset, I rolled a rogue and made sure I had good sneak, steal and lockpick abilities, raised my dodge skill, and ignored things like craft and lore. Feeling better suited to explore the world of AoD, I headed out and successfully completed the introductory mission – infiltrate a merchant’s room and steal their stuff.
My next mission involved persuading some guards to look the other way while the thieve’s guild moved some contraband. OopsI didn’t have any points in streetwise or persuade, which meant I had to try to steal a document. No problem, I’m a thief. Oops againI need a disguise skill to be able to steal the document. I failed, despite my relatively high steal skill, and was forced to run away.
My Dexterity isn’t high enough for me to be able to run away, so I die. No combat, no options. This all occurs through a dialogue window that reads like a ‘Choose your own adventure’ book, and this is the crux of the problem.
The narrative of the game is too rigid and relies too much on set criteria being met before players are able to succeed. This same thief character was able to sneak into the palace compound with his high sneak skills, get into the guard area undetected, steal some guard armor and leave, but the guard armor was useless to me because I didn’t have enough disguise points. I also failed at an attempt to get past some guards in a higher up tower because I didn’t have enough points in critical strike. As with the document theft scenario, the penalty for not having an appropriate skill was death.Where AoD compounds its ability to frustrate is it’s lack of clarity.Some players might like this brutality, arguing that it’s an RPG and it reflects a harsh world.
That’s great, and I would generally include myself in this group, but where AoD compounds its ability to frustrate is it’s lack of clarity. Thinking that I could sneak into a townsperson’s house using a grappling hook, I found myself unable to do so because I failed a skillcheck using the throw skill. That a thief may need this skill is unintuitive and not flagged anywhere. It would be useful to have a note in the item’s descriptor identifying that its use is dependent on a skill, and what level of skill you might need in order to successfully use it. The tooltips for your character’s skills are similarly vague. At the character creation screen when I was trying to select skills that would assist me, I looked at the ‘lore’ skill and while the descriptor was fine ‘knowledge and understanding of the events long gone, ancient languages’ the benefit listed was ‘you can write your own name’. I bumped the skill up to 4 and my skill is now ‘you realise knowledge is power’.
That’s not of any use when trying to figure out how to build my character and it is about as useful as tits on a bull when it comes to giving me an idea of what this skill level will help me accomplish in-game. In contrast to this, combat skills are clearly defined as a percentage chance to accomplish X or to deflect Y, but the core skills, you know, the ones that let you avoid conflict if you aren’t specced for it, are frustratingly vague.Ten hours in and I get to my third issue with this game; it pushes me to choose certain skills in order to progress, then throws me a curveball by making me rely on skills I dropped in order to get to the point I am at. An example in point – walking around the streets of the starting city I have my money stolen by a street urchin because I failed a streetsmart skillcheck. I reloaded a save point and dropped some points in streetsmart so the next time she appeared, I was onto her and could prevent her from taking my cash, only to end up in a close quarters fight with three armed thugs. I didn’t have the skills I needed to survive becauseI had put them into streetsmart instead.
Trial and error is no way to have an RPG run. It just frustrates players and hiding behind a ‘this game is tough’ tagline doesn’t make up for poor game design.These gameplay issues are, for me, the most offputting.
Everything else seems in place; decent graphics, OK music, reasonable lore and good combat. I just get my hackles up in an RPG when I walk around a city and click on a door only to be told ‘the door is locked’. And I’m a thief. With some lockpicks my guild master gave me.Disappointing.- This article was updated on:January 13th, 2014.
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