A rich, original-Fallout-inspired RPG with a brilliant story. You can play it in any way you want and it’s the good kind of gaming freedom. But the sound design could have been so much better.
Just completed the game and i can confidently say that it was well worth the price. As an RPG it really does show your decisions matter especially when you get to the end. I love the armor sets they have (specifically the Carmine Heights sets are my favorites). Could use a little more variety with regards to high tech weapons but still a great selection. And to add i specifically made a metacritic account just to say how much i enjoyed this game
I give this game a 10/10
It doesn't quite manage to reach Fallout's brilliance and quality, but Encased is still a fun experience, capable of providing lots of meaningful possibilities and an interesting new post-apocalyptic world to explore.
I will say the amount of art, voice overs, and unique environments is really impressive. You’ll still have to do plenty of reading but they do a good job of making the world look, feel, and sound unique. Everything feels handmade and it almost makes me think if this developer team remade Fallout I just might make time for that trip back to the wasteland.
Encased: a Sci-Fi, Post-Apocalyptic RPG seeks to recreate the best moments of the first Fallout games. Unfortunately, it also brought with it a lot of outdated mechanics and repetitive designs. Along with this, technical problems, bugs, and unreliable localization ruin the experience.
Starts off great, but falls of a cliff after a while. I would rate it higher if the feeling of what could have been wasn't so strong. It ends up being rather disappointing.
This game could have been amazing, but its numerous flaws weigh it down too much. On one hand, you have great and varied tactical combat, exciting exploration, and a multitude of interconnected skill-based gameplay systems that offer a lot of interesting things to do. On the other hand, there's mediocre writing, lazy quest design, recycled assets and level structures, unnecessarily drawn-out traveling sections, and a bunch of other mechanical issues.
This game is definitely one of contrasts. Going through hundreds of office cabinets, trash cans, and suitcases is fun. Just like in Fallout, given enough components, you can assemble and improve pretty much anything, and that was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for me. Another thing that I very much enjoyed was the tactical combat. But every time I felt great after an intense combat encounter or clearing a dungeon (laboratory, woods, etc.), I would return to one of the hub locations and end up spending long, long, loooong minutes basically doing nothing but running errands from one point on the map to another. The Staying Connected quest chain is the worst offender here. I can't remember the last time I was so utterly bored out of my mind. Who in their right mind would think a quest like this would be fun for anyone?
This could have been fixed with strong dialogue, but there's almost none in this game. It basically reads like a subpar Roadside Picnic/STALKER/Fallout inspired fanfic. There are occasional good jokes (like when you get the opportunity to flash the exhibitionist), but that's about all the good I can say about the writing. The story is just... there. It's neither good nor bad, just functional. The game doesn't even have a proper ending—it's just several laughably easy fights and then boom—you've won! There's no final boss (the game has boss encounters, but somehow they didn't bother adding one at the end), no moral dilemma in choosing what to do with the Maelstrom, and no freeplay after the ending, even if you have a backlog of unfinished quests. Despite this, you can still recruit people back into your party on your way out of the final location and into the end credits. Like, what?
Big cities are a joke. What's with this trend of making big cities in indie RPGs? You clearly don't have the budget, so why bother? Smaller locations in this game are fine because they are packed with people you can interact with, and there's a new quest around every corner. But the big cities in this game (Carmine Heights, Phalanx Base, and The City) are a total chore to navigate, have almost nothing interesting, and actually have LESS content than the mid-sized locations you find across the map. I saw the same thing in Colony Ship. I have no idea why developers keep doing that.
The atmosphere in this game is kinda cool. It's derivative, sure, but it still feels nice to immerse yourself in that Gothic/Fallout/STALKER-type setting. Another big thing that contributes to the atmosphere is the music. It's not an outstanding soundtrack by any means, but it's still rather nice and fits the game perfectly.
Being an indie title, the graphics are obviously nothing to write home about. The level design offers very little variation, but I guess they simply didn't have the budget for that.
Overall, it's a pity Encased got riddled with questionable and at times outright bad game design decisions. This could have easily been an 8/10 solid post-apocalyptic RPG, but with this quality of writing, limited quest design, and a plot this lacking, I can't rate it any higher than 6/10.
Found it a grind. Combat is very clunky and I did not find it enjoyable at all. Lacks polish, which is easily forgivable when the core game play is good but this is not.
This game is unfinished and has a strange combination of copying something from good old games but at the same time managing to ruin it at the same time. Even Fallout Tactics had a better: design, combat system, story, content quantity/quality, gameplay. I am not even talking about Fallout 1/2.
I would say that this game is a junk collection simulator where you need to open around 20-50 containers in a zone, get some useless trash from it, while most of the containers will take a 2-4 sec animation to open it. Then you need to run in a slow mode across wide zone a couple of times to get and complete the 1-2 quests available there. Overall that will take 90% of your gaming experience. Then 5% is battle which has a terrible setting and decisions, you can also skip it and final 5% is reading which is not bad at all.
Then cleanse and repeate. This game pretends to be nice, but it has a set up to hide the lack of content by the actual time you need to spend to clean the location, by adding time requirements and tones of randomly generated trash in hundreds of containers.
Is it a good game? No
Could it be a good game? Yes, but I am so tired of unfinished games with "a good idea" but terrible implementation, that's not an excuse, do your homework, test your game, adjust and release only the playable version. If you released this piece ****, then I assume, that's what you wanted to create, and it is bad
Luckily, I got it for free in Epic, so, no money spent, just time...
SummaryEncased is a tribute to “Roadside Picnic” and the original Fallout games. Fight enemies, explore anomalous wasteland, level up your character, join one of the forces in the ruined world in this new apocalyptic turn-based RPG.