Cowboys, steampunk and the city of dreams – “EMPYRE: Dukes of the Far Frontier” review

Mixing different styles often leads to amazing results. Is the mix of neo-Victorianism with steampunk and the wild west in EMPYRE: Dukes of the Far Frontier one of those successful mixes?

Neo-Victorian style, wildness of westerns and the ubiquitous pair of steampunk machines, plus robot fights and a city of dreams, where the chosen ones can bask in luxury without worrying about such trifles as work. EMPYRE: Dukes of the Far Frontieris a game that makes many promises, tempting with mystery, exploration and an extensive character editor. In fact, the creation of your own hero can be proud of its great openness. Six statistics and a whole bunch of perks allow you to let your imagination run wild, and even a rather poor appearance wizard, consisting of only a few head and clothing patterns, does not stop you from doing so. An interesting procedure is also the presentation of film cutscenes in the form of pictures made of sand on a backlit canvas. It corresponds perfectly with the world presented, where plant creatures threaten humanity, allowing them to live safely only in deserts.

Unfortunately, this is where the good sides of the production end.

Gothic zdetronizowany

In EMPYRE: Dukes of the Far Frontier , we play the role of a lucky person who has received a ticket to a utopian city, where they do everything for the inhabitants, thanks to which they can only enjoy pleasures all day long. As you can easily guess, something must have gone wrong at the station and instead of miraculous laziness until the end of our days, we face the hardships of living in the slums. There is no need to dwell on the further plot, not only because of the desire to protect you from spoilers. The game is divided into four acts, and the connections between them are residual. Ba! The few choices that are made before us have practically no effect on the rest of the story, which in the last act goes far beyond the limits of the absurd. However, there is one element common to all parts of the story – terrible boredom.

The isometric view, the tactical grid and the cover system ask for a turn-based fight in which a well-thought-out setting will decide whether to win or lose – my beloved Jagged Alliance 2 , Mutant Year Zero or the XCOM series have proven this . Looking at the productions mentioned, it is even more frustrating to see how it was broken in EMPYRE. It is enough to mention that with such possibilities, for some reason, the creators decided to fight in real time with an active pause, the latter of which is simply broken. Yes, when the action is suspended, we can order to move to a specific place, but the instruction to reload or change weapons is simply ignored. Artificial intelligence does not help either, or rather artificial anencephaly. Opponents with melee weapons run straight at our heroes like Leeroy Jenkins, shooters equipped with shotguns are welded to their positions and only opponents with pistols rush behind cover first, although flanking them is not the slightest problem (yes, there are as many as three types of weapons). The whole thing is not only incredibly clunky,Gothic , but also incredibly extended in time. The reloading of firearms takes ages, and after each skirmish, before we return to free travel, there is a pause so long that you can easily eat a sandwich during it.

Is the situation for unfettered exploration better? Unfortunately not. The locations are huge and quite sterile, and the speed demons are definitely not. It is especially painful in the last act, where we move around a huge and terribly empty area, which is a strong illustration of how the ratio of boring space to the heroes’ mobility should not look like (in practice, after issuing the march order, you could go have dinner ). The earlier areas may be more populous, but NPCs are so clumsy at imitating life that it can only arouse pity.

The problem that definitely lengthens the game, in addition to large and empty locations, is their number. Perhaps the sheer plethora of areas to explore isn’t a pain, but the often clipping screens in between are already damaging to your blood. Let’s add to this the frequent cuts when pressing some options in the menu, sporadic throws to the desktop in the absence of automatic save and freezing character development (from the third level I could not assign new points in the statistics without selecting a development feat, although the list of the latter was stubbornly empty) and we get a picture of gameplay poverty and despair.

And this, sorry, where are you from?

Maybe at least visually there is something to admire? Definitely not, because with empty and sterile locations and very crude animated characters, the whole thing is simply ugly and often illegible. In addition, there are very inconsistent motives of the next stages – the first one mixes tin, makeshift houses like those from the Dharavi slums in Bombay with the Italian mafia accounts, a utopian city with people dressed in identical uniforms goes into something like an accompaniment, the prairies present truly Western pictures, a village Indians are more reminiscent of Tatooine as a classic cluster of teepee sizes of different sizes, and the last one… well, in the end, it gets you a fool of logic, physics and player, so let’s just keep it quiet. And where are the steampunk and neo-Victorian themes promised by the creators in all of this? The former can be counted on the fingers of one hand, the latter, on the other hand, can only be seen in promotional graphics, as in the game itself I have never experienced them at all. It is also worth mentioning the very unreadable interface, as well as the inconsistency of avatars – when our protagonist can enjoy a clearly digital face, everyone else has to be content with sketches. Why so? Who knows?

Now it’s time to praise the audio layer. And the button, because the creators didn’t show off here either. In fact, it can be safely assumed that the authors of the musical themes completely did not know what production they create sound for and created their works blindly. Thus, during the fight in the slums, we are accompanied by a cacophony of random sounds, which becomes more and more bizarre as the skirmishes progresses, and while exploring the deserts and deadly jungle, we hear cheerful music straight from a lazy holiday in the Bahamas. The tracks are not only completely mismatched with what and where is going on, but also quite short and looped, which makes them very irritating. Ambient sounds are also problematic, though this time not because of their quality, but their use. Take, for example, the sounds of a crowd playing in a casino among the slums. We can hear them only by locating the camera in a specific point, because each deviation causes them to disappear immediately, even if we are still looking at the interior of the same building.

Blockiness, lengthy, ugliness, boredom, irrationality and a rather strong failure to promise are elements that definitely do not allow for a positive note for EMPYRE: Dukes of the Far Frontier . An interesting idea for cutscenes in the form of sand pictures (there are only two in the entire game, so there is no madness) and a promising character creator is definitely not enough to save an ordinary spartan title. Every potential this game could have was buried by strange decisions and an incoherent vision of what it was intended to achieve. The truth is that the only positive thing I can say about this production is that, despite the ubiquitous debts, the whole thing remains quite short and I was tired of less than five hours until the end credits were seen.

What about the robot fights promised by the developers? Well, during this show I wondered several times if something had crashed or there was some error that caused the ending script to not fire, including this …