Reprisal looks to be a god game contender. A small indie project with the standard quirkiness and charm, plus something I happily pointed out to everyone when it was free for a day. I loved the original demo from over a year back, but does the gameplay hold up after a return with the whole game unlocked?
Who would have guessed being a god was pretty much just gardening with human lives thrown about?
Reprisal is one of those games with a really, really good idea, with marvelous execution, and a good sense of design, but absolutely no idea what to do with itself. Imagine if Portal had gone for about 5 hours longer, literally just having you do the same puzzles in retextured rooms while they reused old jokes with a new AI besides GLaDoS? That wouldn't have been fun and unfortunately, Reprisal does the equivalent with its campaign mode.
You start off a godlike tribal leader beginning their, you guessed it, "reprisal", and the game makes sure you remember it. See that guy down there in the image? He is pretty much the only person conveying the story, and boy does he like to state the obvious. I get the feeling he was meant to be a Wheatley sort of character with a bit more tactical savvy, but my gosh does he just come off as boring. His attempts at humor don't really hit their mark and it feels like the effort would have been better suited providing more than two mission types, three if you count combining the first two together.
You will either be collecting a totem in a hurry or fighting off other nations, hoping your people are smart enough to place towns in the right place to generate mana. This all you will do. Even the challenge maps just simply limit what powers you have available to defeat other nations. There is no peaceful means of dealing with opposing nations and there's no way to win a match if there's a totem to collect without grabbing it. For the first ten or so missions, this isn't so bad as you're constantly getting new abilities that really differentiate. Except, once you have the ability to call down lightning, there is no point really to unlock any new powers unless you count the endgame abilities that are so hit or miss in usefulness that they barely merit wasting the mana unless you're in a rush/feeling risky.
I'm sorry, you want me to make swamps instead of use this fist of God ability? DO YOU SEE THE RUINS?
As a result of everything being the same and the fact you can only vaguely command your "tribe" (somehow continually shrinking even though you can conquer whole maps and have a civilization greater than Rome!), any real tension is sucked out as the game drags on. Your primary means of influence are by terraforming the terrain. This is about all you really need to do for about 50-75% of every mission. Level the terrain, make bigger cities, summon a hero of an element or two, order everyone to attack their neighbors, spam lightning as needed.
There's no established growth to cities beyond flat terrain, and mana for molding the earth is incredibly cheap and certain angles of molding can be exploited to triple the output if you're clever. This means any real difficulty comes simply from the odds being so stacked against you that only repeated tries can get you to victory. This sort of spike in difficulty only happens two times though. Once mid-campaign where you can just run past the enemies and grab a totem to be done, the other is the final mission of the campaign, which I honestly couldn't bring myself to finish. Why? Because I was literally so bored I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. What kept me going was simply the wish to be done so I could say I completed it but you know what, it was free, and if it's -that- boring, no one should be forced to play that.
Which brings me back to my main point, Reprisal is a good game for the first ten levels or so. It's after that, when you've gotten into the groove of how things work, that you never see a change. I rarely would expect an indie game to feel as monotone as this. The gratingly loud music that repeats the same few notes over and over doesn't help, and I eventually just started playing Nostalgia Chick in the background with all sound effects and music muted as a last ditch attempt to keep myself sane.
Why does this guy have to talk before -every- mission? Why?
It is officially free to play now, according to the developer's blog, so there's that. Like I said, it's not a bad game in of itself, it just is like a kid at show and tell for his class, but merely brought a shiny rock. Sure, it's shiny, it may be neat, but there's nothing else they have to say about it or do with it. In the end, it's just a time sink. If you're going to download it, maybe save it for an airplane flight for on your laptop where anything to keep you busy is appealing or something quirky and less violent to show the non-gamers in your life.
A brilliant concept with a boring presentation, it's a hard sell despite such great graphics and design ideas. As it stands, Reprisal gets a 6.5/10.
Reprisal can be found on Kongregate, with a desktop version on the developer's website: http://www.reprisalthegame.com/
Cheers,
Paradigm the Fallen
Trivia: This is the first game to ever nearly bore me to tears.