For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Scars of Mars, from Acquire Games.
At the time of recording, this demo had recently come out on the Switch and the game itself is coming out next week, June 20th on the UK eShop. before seeing the game on the eShop, i had never heard of or seen this game before. but i was interested after reading that it's a real time RPG.
Unfortunately, other than having a small "Demo" logo, there's nothing else highlighting the fact. so, for example, even tho it appears to have an auto save whilst i was playing i never got a message saying if that save will carry over to the final game. there's no link to the eShop either. When there's this little effort put into the demo, it's difficult to know if this demo is from the final game, an earlier version of the game, or if it's bespoke.
Which is a shame because i don't think it's a good demo and i have to assume it's representative of gameplay, meaning i don't think it's a good game. other than the music, there was very little praise-worthy from my time with the demo.
The tutorial is more bare bones than some mobile phone games i play, with wasted space, and no call back to anything previously mentioned. i had a lot of trouble making sense of the upgrade menus. then we had the game changing the rules on inventory out of the blue. did this mean the tutorial was wrong?
So with the tutorial being as bad as it was, it meant my first introduction to actual gameplay was a nightmare. it's a real time RPG, this meant there's little to no time to think before either an enemy attacks you or the timer at the top of the screen counts down. this was at Normal difficulty and it was overwhelming. One of the stranger control decisions was that "B" wasn't cancel. i had to press "A" to select and then "A" again to deselect.
But the controls are compounded by the fact every interaction i do in combat is slow. i couldn't move my cursor fast enough to manage my team mates and keep them out of harms way or to get them to attack. as soon as we got 2 or more enemies on screen, i couldn't keep on top of it until i was down to one or two characters and with the slow speed i was able to barely manage the situation.
There's more i could say, but ultimately this demo paints such a negative picture of this game that i get the feeling it's nothing more than shovelware. I also suspect that there's been a heavy use of A.I throughout as the English was a little off, the pictures were a little off, and the backgrounds very repetitive. I don't think you should play this demo, nor do i think from this experience that you should buy Scars of Mars.
