Confrontation - Review @ GameBanshee

GameBanshee serves up a review of Cyanide's Confrontation. As you may remember from our own preview, Confrontation is based on PnP rules and strips the typical RPG elements down to focusing on the pause-play party battles - GameBanshee enjoyed the combat itself but found the overaching game tedious:

A lot of the sloppiness I've listed above can be fixed with patches, but I don't think there's any such hope for the campaign, which is about as dull and repetitive as a campaign can get.  First off, despite controlling a dozen named soldiers, none of them talk or have personalities.  Some aren't even mentioned in the story.  Instead, from time to time (such as during the mission briefings) a narrator drones on about what's going on.  Secondly, the storyline itself about disrupting Scorpion plans to mass produce Mecasyatis clones might make a fine chapter in a larger story, but there isn't nearly enough there to support a 30-hour campaign.  You're basically dropped into a world without explanation, and then nothing happens, which isn't too exciting.

And then there's the gameplay of the campaign, which isn't any better.  I mentioned earlier that the battle mechanics are fine.  The problem is that you just fight one battle after another, without any motivating force behind your actions.  The campaign is just a linked sequence of about 500 battles, with the occasional boss fight thrown in for good measure.  A boring campaign can still work if character development or equipment hunting is fun, but they're not.  Confrontation uses a level 40 cap, which means soldiers get to learn just about everything, and the equipment of your soldiers is fixed.  All you find during the campaign are weapon / armor points and glyphs, which are used to upgrade equipment, and bandages, which one soldier can use to heal another.  Enemies never drop anything.