You will also become very familiar with the dialog screen (shown above). You will spend a lot of time on this screen, as all dialog with NPCs takes place here. Dialog is displayed in the upper left pane, and your response options are in the bottom pane. A flavor image occupies the upper left, making the screen look a bit more interesting. Most of the story options are encountered in this screen. The game has a few stat checks elsewhere, too.
You will also have many cases where options that are displayed will be ineffective and fail because of your stats. This is a bad thing because it leads us right into one of the biggest problem areas. The game has many dialog options that can lead to your immediate demise, and I’m not talking about a situation where you chose to enter a fight with a character that you set up as a primarily non-fighter character, either. There are dialog options in The Age of Decadence that can lead to your instant death. Of course, such options are fine as long as they aren’t everywhere and the player has an idea that the option is a poor choice, but this is not always the case.
The image above shows that the game does have a training option when you start a new game. However, this tutorial mode is extremely short and only teaches you the bare bones basics. There is also a help screen you can access by pressing F1, which amounts to about 10 pages of text to browse through. It gives you more insights into the underlying game mechanics, but isn’t as helpful as it could be.
Earlier, when I said you will die a lot, you may have guessed that the game has roguelike elements, and you’d be right. The campaign itself is relatively short and requires numerous attempts to complete. You also have to play with many types of characters to eventually see everything in the game and discover the full story. So the gameplay becomes a repetitive task of spending large amounts of time doing more sessions with new characters to find out what works. This leaves you feeling like the game is a bit more puzzle oriented as you seemingly have to figure out just how the developers wanted you to set up your character and what they wanted you to do in order to succeed. Some players resort to reloading previous saves to try to advance or retry something repeatedly, or using commands in the console to cheat. This is another one of the areas where the game falls flat on its face, because it requires absurd amounts of time to get even decent at the game because death is waiting everywhere in the game world around every corner.
The graphics are decent (though a bit dated), and the ground looks like someone painted the textures on it quickly and didn’t put much time into it. You can kind of see this on the paths in the screenshot above. The music adds some nice atmosphere to the game and does its job pretty well. The sound effects, on the other hand, are fairly sparse, and used for things like doors and other interactive objects.
The gameplay becomes annoying fairly quickly because the game is extremely unforgiving and cheap at times. Walking around to the next person you need to meet on your current quest line feels bland as the environments are somewhat empty. There are some people scattered around, but not too many and the game could use more sound effects to make the world come alive more. You are also limited in each run through the game in terms of what content you can see, so you need to play it many times with many different types of characters to experience most of the content in the game. This adds replay value in high amounts, but that’s kind of a moot point when the gameplay is lacking.
You can see from the earlier parts of this review and the screenshot above that The Age of Decadence has quite a bit of depth. This is a good thing without a doubt, but the game dissuades you from playing due to how harsh it can often be. You can literally end up in a position where there is no way to advance and your only option is to start over with a new character and some tweaked stats that are different from your last run to find out what works through lots of trial and error.
Overall, The Age of Decadence just isn’t that great because it falls far short of what it could’ve been. Yes, a minority of players will surely enjoy it, but for most its difficulty and highly unforgiving design will ruin the experience. The developers would’ve been wise to include difficulty levels or something similar to help new players get into the game, rather than crush them and turn them away in droves. A game does not succeed by begging players not to play it, and this design pretty much condemns The Age of Decadence to languish in obscurity, since only players on the hardcore end of the spectrum will have the desire to play it. Don’t get me wrong, the idea behind the game is very cool, but it is sadly overshadowed by poor design. It’s hard to say how long this one will take, as one session can range from minutes to perhaps around 10 hours give or take (depending on how well you know what you’re doing, how much you explore and fight, or when you happen to die). Seeing everything in the game will take many playthroughs and well over 100 hours of gameplay. The Age of Decadence is available on Steam for $29.99 (for Windows only). The Age of Decadence is the game that pits you against a post-apocalyptic, Roman-themed world that is hell-bent on ending your existence!
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Review Copy Provided By Publisher
