Miasma Chronicles is a tactical role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic America where the divide between the haves and have-nots has grown immeasurably. This country is ruled by the First Family. A rambunctious and selfish elite born from the ashes of big business in a post-cataclysmic world.
They’ve got an army of deadly robots and lots of advanced technology, and they don’t care about the little people who live in small towns and villages and struggle to make a living in a harsh landscape. . The land is ravaged by miasma. A destructive and disturbing charming gray goo that blocks access to certain areas while displaying a seemingly malevolent lethal intelligence.
We play as Elvis, a young mechanic from the town of Sedentary. His mother vanished in her night, leaving him with his robot brother Diggs, and now Elvis wants to track her down. The problem is that you need to break through the miasma wall on the outskirts of town to do so. Elvis must therefore learn how to defeat and finally take control of the Miasma, learn how to destroy the Wall and venture beyond to the rest of America.
Along the way, Elvis and Diggs end up meeting several other characters who can join the party, each with their own backstories, secrets, and notable flaws. It’s a typical ragtag group united toward a common goal, not necessarily altruistic or decent, but interesting nonetheless. Their conversations can be frowning at times, and they miss more words than they hit, but worth it, we found them endearing. embarrassed brother some kind of way.
The camera captures the action from a high vantage point as you roam each town and wasteland you visit, converse with other characters, and explore the world in search of loot such as ammo, health potions, and possibly weapons and upgrades. There are secrets to find, light puzzles to solve, and side quests to participate in.
Strategic turn-based combat is at the heart of the game, and that’s where Miasma Chronicles shines. Each hero gets her two action points each turn, and uses those action points to move positions to get into better cover, reload if necessary, use items, or kill enemies. can attack. It has a chance to hit based on your distance from the target and whether you’re in effective cover, plus a small chance to land a critical hit and deal extra damage, but it’s nice to see them all. is. take a shot.
Like all good tactical role-playing games, the fun of Miasma Chronicles is in being aware of your surroundings and avoiding retaliation, while planning your moves and watching them unfold with deadly precision. . In this regard, Miasma Chronicles is mostly rewarding, with challenging encounters and a series of useful skills for each party he member that unlock as you progress. There are some minor combat-related issues, but this mostly has to do with some cheap-feeling enemies towards the end of the game, as well as frustrating glitches when they ruin the flow of combat. There are occasionally.
One of the coolest options you can have in this game is to ambush your enemies, lure your character into an advantageous position, or use stealth kills to annihilate them without receiving retaliatory fire. A silenced sniper rifle, a few distractions to separate your enemies from your friends, and with a little luck, you can take many problems out of the equation or even avoid combat altogether. And every time I achieved it, I found this to be incredibly rewarding.
There are also skills that consider miasma. Certain characters can control miasma to perform special attacks, and using these can turn the tide of battle in interesting and often spectacular ways. Our favorite was the ability to summon a barrel full of explosives out of thin air, place it in the middle of a group of enemies, and then shoot it for hellish damage.
Miasma Chronicles is a beautiful game at times. The animation isn’t very compelling, especially in the cutscenes, but the locales and characters are well-recreated and well-rendered. The hero designs are also unique, from Elvis’ junkyard rockstar chic to heads in bottles controlling giant robot frames.
The characters are visually well designed and compelling in their own right, but broadly speaking their stories and the overall narrative the game tells is a bit disappointing. There are revelations and plot twists and secrets to be revealed, but none of them are that great because the story ends where it starts to get interesting, and 25-30 hours of play time doesn’t give you enough time to develop certain narrative beats. Not important.
The Miasama Chronicles feels like the first part of a larger story, and while it may certainly be on track, as a stand-alone piece, the rushed nature of its late-game plot development leaves me bewildered. I was. To make matters worse, we encountered technical issues that occurred while playing the game. The most lethal issue that plagued the first playthrough seems to have been fixed in the day one patch, but he only had one endgame save available for testing. Just a little bit if you’re hesitant to buy.
In Miasma Chronicles, some lines didn’t play at all, so I always needed subtitles to understand what was going on. There was a strange animation issue where characters would repeatedly sit and stand during dialogue for no apparent reason. I also ran into problems when trying to get out of cover. Many times the hero would hit a half-waist-height wall and be unable to get out of it.
The most egregious issue we encountered was in the final showdown, where the game crashed repeatedly when performing certain actions. Hitting certain enemies with grenades will crash, but shooting enemies or using other skills will continue unabated. One of the critical errors we discovered meant that moving the menu to the right crashed the game, but moving it to the left was fine.
We spent a couple of hours learning the rules of what crashed the game and what didn’t, and managed to survive the battle, but it made our experience somewhat worse. I would be lying if I said I didn’t. That said, I didn’t face the same issue after reloading the same battle after the update. We don’t have to give the game full sanity just yet, but the biggest technical mishap was Seem that has been fixed.
