I guess it depends on your definition of "Excellent" - of course it's not quite there with the latests AAA titles from what I've seen, but it looks hardly worse then AAA titles form just a few years ago, and it has a strong and stand-out art direction. So in a casual sense, and taking the budget price and dev budget in account, I would say "excellent" is not wrong.

Ghan - why do I always agree with you 100% ? - are we long lost brothers or are we walking on the same metaphysical plane :)

I don't think it's close to being excellent in any way, shape, or form. I'd say the visuals are average for a budget title, but that's about all.

I'm talking about from a technical perspective of course, not an artistic one. Artistically, I think it looks very good, but that's a bit more subjective.

Ok just out of curiosity, would you show me some other recent budget titles, that you think look significantly better? Or could you point to specific technical elements that you are missing here?

Anyway, just to clarify, for me Graphics always means both: how technical quality and art direction come together to create a convincing whole. I'll admit that I don't have a good eye for the purely technical quality.

I wasn't thinking specifically of budget titles when I made my original comment but more of today's visual standards in general.

I don't even know what officially constitutes a "budget title". I only used that term because the game costs $20, and I assume their development budget fell in line with that. Regardless, the visuals are sub-par to me.

It could just be the graphics whore in me though. ;)

The graphics were excellent for me from the artistic and atmosphere point of view. The graphics created the almost perfect mars atmosphere, and characters' facial graphics and cloths were very fitting and 'artistic' in their way. The combat animations and graphics where excellent and technomancy effects were impressive.

The graphics are not the same as the latest AAA title as the game file size for Mars War Logs is only about 3GB in size.

Forgot to give more detail about the story. The true story of the game, which many reviewers overlooked, is about the struggle and priority of ordinary people through war and political unrest, told through the eyes of two people and hence the name 'War Logs'.

So there is no black or white and good vs evil, or an end boss to kill, but peoples' and situation dramas unfolding through the player's decisions.

Well, if anything this thread has definitely made a lot of people not want to do reviews here, bravo.

Agree. The game is quite a decent indy RPG. This review surprised me.

After all this, I'd just like to contribute one piece of wisdom:

Criticism is always constructive.

Yes it is. Whether you criticise a game or a piece of critique, when you say that something is bad, you also explain, implicitly or explicitly, how it could be better (which is constructive) or what you offer is not criticism at all, but merely an insult.

Guess you will be equally surprised by most of the gaming press reviews too, as in general, they come to much the same sort of conclusions that Fluent did.

I don't think its helpful to take account of developer budget when reviewing games, they should be judged as good or bad in absolute gameplay terms. Who want's to play budget dreck, just to save $20? As an Indie, you can't compete with AAA games by making cheap clones of them, you need to do something different, which usually means more niche and less reliant on expensive assets, which add little to gameplay anyway, after the initial ooo factor. And since all AAA games are adventury, shooty, beat em ups (to a close approximation), there is plenty of scope for indies to do other stuff.