Age of Grit Review - Page 3
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You also don't get that much input on how the actual conversations unfold. Sure, occasionally you can choose between several options, but as I understand it you never get to roll any dice there. Things just happen as they're supposed to. You can choose to be rude or polite, but you'll end up in the same place anyway.
Now, the game's actual story has you stumble onto what looks like a conspiracy with ties to your painful past. Naturally, you set out to investigate, yeeing and hawing and being a gruff cowboy along the way. Eventually, you'll have to deal with plenty of traitors, old friends, plot twists, and even an ancient technologically-advanced civilization.
While it's not exactly original, I enjoyed the game's story a great deal. It was pretty much the only thing that kept me going when just about everything else served to annoy me in one way or another.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see how it all ends, as near what I thought was the end of the game (based on Steam achievements and the general trajectory of the story), I ran into a fairly nasty bug. A particular conversation screen wouldn't turn into a scene transition, essentially softlocking my playthrough. And seeing how the game only offers autosaves you have no control over, and there's only one save slot, I wasn't able to reload from an earlier point to try and avoid this bug.
Now, once again according to Steam achievements, some people have apparently been able to finish the game, so this may very well not be a universal issue.
If I were to summarize this entire game, I would have to reach into my bag of elaborate metaphors. You know how back in the day we usually had family PCs? And in a larger family, the older brother got to play games, while the younger one got to watch? Well, this feels like a game designed by those younger brothers.
The developers here clearly have enthusiasm and appreciation for the genre, and they're skilled enough to design unique and interesting systems and great art. But it's like they have no idea what makes games fun to play, and it shows in just about every aspect of Age of Grit.
Technical Information
The game's 2D visuals are simple, but possess a certain charm and fit the setting. Its soundtrack is similar in this regard. This is a steampunk cowboy game, and it feels like a steampunk cowboy game.
I have already mentioned the fact that the game only has a single autosave slot. But I should also point out that at least you can also save when quitting the game.
The options menu is honestly laughable. When launching the game, you get the standard Unity prompt with resolution options and visual presets. I'm not sure the latter actually change anything. Inside the game, the options menu allows you to adjust the volume, and that's it.
This being a Unity game, despite not using that many resources, it suffers from that thing where after you go through enough loading screens, everything slows down to a crawl, which is especially noticeable when you try to manage your inventory where it feels like you're getting seconds per frame, not frames per second.
With how much text there is in the game, you can't seem to have a conversation without a typo of some sort. It's not the end of the world, but it's very much noticeable.
And while the game never actually crashed or froze on me, some of the gear you can find clearly doesn't work. And without a stat screen, it's hard to tell how much of it actually does anything.
Conclusion
With game-breaking bugs, poor performance, a general lack of polish, and underwhelming systems, I can't in good conscience recommend Age of Grit to anyone. That said, some of the game's elements, namely its writing and weapon design, did manage to impress me. Meaning that if the developers here take this game as a learning experience, I firmly believe they're capable of producing something great in the future. But for now, you best give this project a wide berth.
