benzeneboy: A game with a good story and poor mechanics is a bad game.
A game with a poor story and great mechanics is still fun to play.

InXile stated that this game would be a successor to Planescape: Torment. They did not succeed. They made a bad GAME, so I stand by my review.

Lodium: Well, Some Adventure games did have bad mechanics but are still considered overall good.
Take for intance dreamfall the longest journey.
Most people didnt like the combat or the sneaking but the game is still considered good but not great.
So this formula isnt always correct.

benzeneboy: Hyping your game up as Planescape: Torment is a bad idea if you can't deliver in the same way that taking the homecoming queen out for prom is a bad idea if you don't know what you are doing.

The consequences for failure are magnified because of expectations. T:ToN fails to deliver on expectations in a way that dreamfall probably didn't (I haven't played the franchise.) If T:ToN had not advertised itself as a Torment game, there would not be the need to criticize it so harshly. But it fails in nearly every way to live up to Planescape:Torment, a game that many people regard as the greatest RPG of all time.

Lodium: Well i havent played the game yet or bougth it, nor did i care about the hype.
Beliving in hype is a really bad idea that several games have proven, Migthy number 9 forexample.

benzeneboy: And I believe that games that don't follow through on their hype deserve to receive bad reviews, if nothing else to let others know that the hype is not real.

benzeneboy: And I believe that games that don't follow through on their hype deserve to receive bad reviews, if nothing else to let others know that the hype is not real.

Cattlehunter: Yeah, tried and failed.

Lodium: I think i will let the game speak for itself
or wait for a more objective comment since i feel your judgment of the game is based soley on the disapointment you had with the Hype that didnt meet your excpectations.

benzeneboy: Well, the two people in this feed who have played the game and reviewed it seem to agree. But please, by all means spend $45 of your own money and write us a perfectly objective review of the game you have yet to play. You just might want to do it sooner rather than later if you want that opinion to mean anything at all to anyone who was interested in purchasing this game.

Cattlehunter: Yeah, tried and failed.

Planescape: Torment feels like a work of art. Like a coherent vision that came together harmoniously, put together with the tools the people who made it had available to them at the time.

Torment: Tides of Numenera feels like a dessicated corpse prancing around in PS:T's clothes desperately trying to form an association between the two in the audience's mind. Where you'd be hard pressed to find flaws with PS:T in much but the lacking combat and pathing and it's sometimes excessive writing, T:ToN does almost nothing right. It's hard to even know where to start. Though the start itself is a pretty good point: Don't overload me with text before I've even started playing the game! Let me get established as a character and THEN start having me interact with the game world. I can't made decisions in an RPG if I don't know who I am or what the consequences of my actions are! You're just wasting my time with all this text!

Then the second thing you notice is the characters. The characters are nearly to a man awful and unlikable. None of them (except the player character and arguably Erretis, the only companion who was even remotely likable just becuse at least the poor guy wasn't responsible for how he always acted like an obnoxious asshole) have sensible or often even coherent motivations for anything that they do.

The keystone figure that unleashes the entire storyline comes off in every scene you have from his perspective as a confused, blundering idiot who's constantly torn between doing one thing or doing another thing, making it feel totally unbelieavable that this guy could've continued doing what he has been doing for as long as he has. And where the goals of the antagonist(s) in PS:T make perfect sense (he just wants to live), the changing god's goals (which are not just living) are at times stupid almost beyond belief.

The second major antagonist, the sorrow, utterly fails to even put on a show of justifying its own existence, relying entirely on shallow anedcotes and spacious reasoning to justify the horrible atrocities it has enacted in the name of... something something, it's not really explained why what it's trying to stop it worse than a countless number of far more horrible things people do right out there in the open without the universe needing to manifest a literal god to stop them from doing it. The character may as well have carried a huge banner around with it that said in glowing, blinking neon letters: "THE AUTHOR NEEDS ME TO EXIST TO PROVIDE YOU WITH AN OBSTACLE".

And the final antagonist comes off as a clueless weakling who's mere moments away from simply killing themselves in their own stupidity before you show up to do it for them.

Then there are companions, which are just terrible. Where PS:T has amazing companions whose motivations feel sincere (Morte alone, once you finally know his full story and see that he isn't just a comic relief but as deeply tortured as anyone else in the game, is one of the best player companions in any game ever), T:ToN's companions rarely even manage to give a compelling reason for why they follow the final castoff around at all - to face almost certain death at the hands of the sorrow or the bloom or the changing god or any number of other unspeakable horrors at his side. They feel like they just follow you around because the game needs to have companions that follow you around. Add that to the way the first two are shoved right in your face it feels almost offensive in how shameless it is.

To add insult to that offense, some of them will even abandon you for utter trivialities, as if one moment ago they were able to tolerate the horrors they suffer at the side of you castoff body with its inherent associations to your disgusting leige, then the next some minor slight against their morality will suddenly cause them to abandon their entire life's goals to instead og sulk in a slum or something equally ridiculous. You even have a character like Rhin, which is perhaps the most shameless embodiment of the "predictable and stupid" trope that PS:T's mission statement stood in rejection of that has been put to text in years.

Then you have what should be cardinal offenses, like dialogue trees that exist just to be exhausted, where you don't click on dialogue options because you're interested in talking to a character about what that text says, but because the game's dialogue is so poorly set up you know you have to click all the options before the game allows you to do the thing that you want to do. A thing that shouldn't logically - in context of the characters conversing with each other having a conversation - have follow from exhausting those dialogue options, but because the game thinks that the player is an idiot it refuses to let us choose any dialoge choices that we haven't asked to have explained to us whether we're allowed to choose or not. It's so unnecessary it's, again... it's offensive.

Like in the final conversation. There's an extremely obvious choice to make in that dialogue that players can easily miss being able to do, not because at any point in that exchange does it not make sense for the character to be able to do that, but because the player will not have asked THE POINTLESS RHETORICAL QUESTIONS necessary for the dialogue option to unlock. It is INCREIDBLY badly written. Just shameful. I could not believe people were paid money to write a scene that ended up so poorly executed. Maybe if it were some heavily combat-focused game and conversation was kind of half of the game and you were at the end of a 50 hour compaign or something, sure, I get it, it can be forgiven. But this is THE FINAL CONCLUSION to a VERY SHORT, ENTIRELY DIALOGUE FOCUSED GAME. You're fucking up the most important part of your game! That's not even touching upon all the other parts of that dialogue that was poorly written, such as the atrociously ambiguous descriptions of some of it that made it very unclear what choosing some options would actually do. Whoever wrote that should be ashamed. This is your JOB. You are incompetent!

It's not just unforgivable to my eyes, but in fact it stands in representation of the entire game. Where PS:T feels like... like the vision of someone who really knew what they wanted put together as well as they were able to do so, everything in T:ToN feels like it was the product of someone trying to put together what they thought someone else wanted, but not actually knowing how to do that. It's a shallow simulacrum robbed of the talent and passion that made its namesake good.

I could easily expand another 20,000+ words upon all the stuff that's awful about the game in excruciating detail. Yeah, this is harsh, and while the game did have some positive parts - few things are ever total shit - those few good parts do not even remotely begin to compensate for all the absolutely terrible parts. The pointless combat system, which really is A BIG DEAL in a GAME. PS:T's combat wasn't good, but T:ToN's is disgusting.

Then there's the small world with its tiny, cramped areas with near-MMO-level shamelessly obvious quest hubs and quest NPCs all situated within pissing distance of each other and makes everything FEEL artificial. Yeah, we know, it IS artificial, but it shouldn't FEEL that way. This is just terrible design. And the inventory and equipment system so anemic it's hard to believe it exists as anything but a vestige. The bland and uninspired character models so terrible that PS:T's decades old sprites look positively radiant by comparison. The pointless tide system that nobody would notice if was removed. The shallow classes and other character fluff. The terrible skillchecks that may as well not even exist by 'virtue' of how easy they were. The Choose Your Own Adventure-sections that jank you right out of the game so jarring and terrible that they're hard to see justified even as resource-saving efforts. The total absence of any kind of storytelling THROUGH THE GAME ITSELF; where are the in-game cutscenes, like those we got plenty of in PS:T, quaint though they were? Where are the videos that give flavour to the world?

The list goes on and on and on and on and on...

It is a terrible game that doesn't deserve to share association with it and should be forgotten by history.

Just like the inane rantings of this disappointed fan hopefully will be alongside it. I had to get this off my chest before I went to bed so it wouldn't keep me up for hours. Good night.

benzeneboy: But please, by all means spend $45 of your own money and write us a perfectly objective review of the game you have yet to play. You just might want to do it sooner rather than later if you want that opinion to mean anything at all to anyone who was interested in purchasing this game.

Cattlehunter: Yeah, tried and failed.

Planescape: Torment feels like a work of art. Like a coherent vision that came together harmoniously, put together with the tools the people who made it had available to them at the time.

Torment: Tides of Numenera feels like a dessicated corpse prancing around in PS:T's clothes desperately trying to form an association between the two in the audience's mind. Where you'd be hard pressed to find flaws with PS:T in much but the lacking combat and pathing and it's sometimes excessive writing, T:ToN does almost nothing right. It's hard to even know where to start. Though the start itself is a pretty good point: Don't overload me with text before I've even started playing the game! Let me get established as a character and THEN start having me interact with the game world. I can't made decisions in an RPG if I don't know who I am or what the consequences of my actions are! You're just wasting my time with all this text!

Then the second thing you notice is the characters. The characters are nearly to a man awful and unlikable. None of them (except the player character and arguably Erretis, the only companion who was even remotely likable just becuse at least the poor guy wasn't responsible for how he always acted like an obnoxious asshole) have sensible or often even coherent motivations for anything that they do.

The keystone figure that unleashes the entire storyline comes off in every scene you have from his perspective as a confused, blundering idiot who's constantly torn between doing one thing or doing another thing, making it feel totally unbelieavable that this guy could've continued doing what he has been doing for as long as he has. And where the goals of the antagonist(s) in PS:T make perfect sense (he just wants to live), the changing god's goals (which are not just living) are at times stupid almost beyond belief.

The second major antagonist, the sorrow, utterly fails to even put on a show of justifying its own existence, relying entirely on shallow anedcotes and spacious reasoning to justify the horrible atrocities it has enacted in the name of... something something, it's not really explained why what it's trying to stop it worse than a countless number of far more horrible things people do right out there in the open without the universe needing to manifest a literal god to stop them from doing it. The character may as well have carried a huge banner around with it that said in glowing, blinking neon letters: "THE AUTHOR NEEDS ME TO EXIST TO PROVIDE YOU WITH AN OBSTACLE".

And the final antagonist comes off as a clueless weakling who's mere moments away from simply killing themselves in their own stupidity before you show up to do it for them.

Then there are companions, which are just terrible. Where PS:T has amazing companions whose motivations feel sincere (Morte alone, once you finally know his full story and see that he isn't just a comic relief but as deeply tortured as anyone else in the game, is one of the best player companions in any game ever), T:ToN's companions rarely even manage to give a compelling reason for why they follow the final castoff around at all - to face almost certain death at the hands of the sorrow or the bloom or the changing god or any number of other unspeakable horrors at his side. They feel like they just follow you around because the game needs to have companions that follow you around. Add that to the way the first two are shoved right in your face it feels almost offensive in how shameless it is.

To add insult to that offense, some of them will even abandon you for utter trivialities, as if one moment ago they were able to tolerate the horrors they suffer at the side of you castoff body with its inherent associations to your disgusting leige, then the next some minor slight against their morality will suddenly cause them to abandon their entire life's goals to instead og sulk in a slum or something equally ridiculous. You even have a character like Rhin, which is perhaps the most shameless embodiment of the "predictable and stupid" trope that PS:T's mission statement stood in rejection of that has been put to text in years.

Then you have what should be cardinal offenses, like dialogue trees that exist just to be exhausted, where you don't click on dialogue options because you're interested in talking to a character about what that text says, but because the game's dialogue is so poorly set up you know you have to click all the options before the game allows you to do the thing that you want to do. A thing that shouldn't logically - in context of the characters conversing with each other having a conversation - have follow from exhausting those dialogue options, but because the game thinks that the player is an idiot it refuses to let us choose any dialoge choices that we haven't asked to have explained to us whether we're allowed to choose or not. It's so unnecessary it's, again... it's offensive.

Like in the final conversation. There's an extremely obvious choice to make in that dialogue that players can easily miss being able to do, not because at any point in that exchange does it not make sense for the character to be able to do that, but because the player will not have asked THE POINTLESS RHETORICAL QUESTIONS necessary for the dialogue option to unlock. It is INCREIDBLY badly written. Just shameful. I could not believe people were paid money to write a scene that ended up so poorly executed. Maybe if it were some heavily combat-focused game and conversation was kind of half of the game and you were at the end of a 50 hour compaign or something, sure, I get it, it can be forgiven. But this is THE FINAL CONCLUSION to a VERY SHORT, ENTIRELY DIALOGUE FOCUSED GAME. You're fucking up the most important part of your game! That's not even touching upon all the other parts of that dialogue that was poorly written, such as the atrociously ambiguous descriptions of some of it that made it very unclear what choosing some options would actually do. Whoever wrote that should be ashamed. This is your JOB. You are incompetent!

It's not just unforgivable to my eyes, but in fact it stands in representation of the entire game. Where PS:T feels like... like the vision of someone who really knew what they wanted put together as well as they were able to do so, everything in T:ToN feels like it was the product of someone trying to put together what they thought someone else wanted, but not actually knowing how to do that. It's a shallow simulacrum robbed of the talent and passion that made its namesake good.

I could easily expand another 20,000+ words upon all the stuff that's awful about the game in excruciating detail. Yeah, this is harsh, and while the game did have some positive parts - few things are ever total shit - those few good parts do not even remotely begin to compensate for all the absolutely terrible parts. The pointless combat system, which really is A BIG DEAL in a GAME. PS:T's combat wasn't good, but T:ToN's is disgusting.

Then there's the small world with its tiny, cramped areas with near-MMO-level shamelessly obvious quest hubs and quest NPCs all situated within pissing distance of each other and makes everything FEEL artificial. Yeah, we know, it IS artificial, but it shouldn't FEEL that way. This is just terrible design. And the inventory and equipment system so anemic it's hard to believe it exists as anything but a vestige. The bland and uninspired character models so terrible that PS:T's decades old sprites look positively radiant by comparison. The pointless tide system that nobody would notice if was removed. The shallow classes and other character fluff. The terrible skillchecks that may as well not even exist by 'virtue' of how easy they were. The Choose Your Own Adventure-sections that jank you right out of the game so jarring and terrible that they're hard to see justified even as resource-saving efforts. The total absence of any kind of storytelling THROUGH THE GAME ITSELF; where are the in-game cutscenes, like those we got plenty of in PS:T, quaint though they were? Where are the videos that give flavour to the world?

The list goes on and on and on and on and on...

It is a terrible game that doesn't deserve to share association with it and should be forgotten by history.

Just like the inane rantings of this disappointed fan hopefully will be alongside it. I had to get this off my chest before I went to bed so it wouldn't keep me up for hours. Good night.

fortune_p_dawg: i'd just like to say that the biggest issue i have with numenera is it's title screen. i'm well aware of how goofy that sounds and know it's a total nitpick, but it's true. planescape's title screen was distinct and had an otherworldly-industrial vibe going on with a percussion-heavy main theme. the main menu itself encircled the visage of the lady of pain while rusted pipes and alien architecture filled out the rest of the scene. it set the tone for the game.

numenera's title screen is just blackness with some wavy blue beams of plasma radiating out from behind a very 'unity-esque' looking main menu with a decent but unmemorable song playing in the background.

i think a good, catchy main theme is soooooo much more important than most devs seem to think it is. the music is one of the main things that pushes itself to the forefront of my mind when i think of an amazing gaming experience.