Skyshine's BEDLAM - Release Day Reviews

Today is the release day of the rogue-like Skyshine's BEDLAM - two sites have already reviewed the game:

PowerupGaming:

Skyshine’s BEDLAM, overall, is an extremely challenging rogue-like RPG. It offers a fresh take on the genre, with a futuristic setting and an interesting mish-mash of mechanics. While battles can sometimes feel extremely unfair or one-sided, it does offer what hardcore fans of this genre really enjoy – a challenge. It is definitely worth checking out and spending several hours playing into the wee hours of the morning. I highly recommend this title for all, as it can provide endless hours of brutal but enjoying adventures trying to perfect your route to the Aztec City.

Score: 8/10

Superb rogue-like with great tactical battles.
Use everything at your disposal to reach the Aztec City. Make some friends and enemies along the way.

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Mousenjoypad:

Despite the difficulty, the game strives to be a journey through an unforgiving wasteland, and it succeeds. As I dug deeper into the game, discovering more about the lore of Bedlam, I found myself enamored with the game. It’s a difficult one, that offers very little forgiveness, and when you do fail, you usually have yourself to blame. This would be a great introduction to gamers unfamiliar with tactical role playing games, and a fun experience for veterans.

Score: 86%

WHAT WE LIKED

Battles system is simple and fast-paced with varying strategy.
Travelling across the map is easy to pick up but still a challenge.
Cartoony style is a great contrast to the hard-as-nails gameplay.

WHAT WE DISLIKED

No introduction or backstory to explain what’s going on in Bedlam.
Artistic shortcuts such as scaled backgrounds and reused models.
A boring soundtrack that fails to add to the beauty of the visuals.

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Thanks Eye!



More information.

Looks good, already in my Steam Library waiting to be installed.

Reviews on Steam are a little negative (mixed), would love to hear some more input on this one.

Yea, played it for a couple of hours but cannot recommend it. Especially not in this state.

What I wrote on steam for now:

Trouble at release. And even if it becomes better it has no chance in reaching a quality of FTL or Invisible inc.

-The release is quite bugged. Achievements not working. Saves are not done with every action (was set back 1h of gametime). Unlocks (probably) not working as achievements are not working. Game Crashed in final encounter. AI had harsh problems now and then. And in one fight the own troop was placed out of the usable battlefield (in the same fight the AI didn't do anything). This is an absolutely no go in a roguelike.

-The Pacing is basically broken. You have a couple of resources, but it doesn't feel like they are worth something. Food and fuel are essentially the same. And then you have energy. Which in the first hour is used to buy dozer upgrades which are just % values and in the other ~3h of one runthrough you only use energy for special abilities. You have absolutely no sense of accomplishment besides of "leveling" your elite characters from fight to fight. But also the later fights which you win via the special abilities don't feel like you accomplished something becase you resolve them mostly by throwing energy-abilities into it. It feels like you bury the enemy with casts, to a degree that the single unit isn't actually doing that much anymore.

I recommend to let the game rest for a week or two at release and check back later. However the deficits in balance/pacing are serious and it's highly unlikely this will become a really good game.

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Also the difficulty is very…weird…
I mean I did the very first fight like 3 or 4 times (started over the game each time) and when I thought "ok…won't get better" and just continued I made it through until the very last fight and it was quite easy most of the time. Until the boss fights start, but at that point you only throw your Energy abilities into the battles.

To show some numbers:
Played the game for 4 hours:
After 2h I already upgraded all the possible options in the vehicle. After that point it was just collecting more energy to do the last battles.
After 3h the game becomes linear and you just do the 5 final battles. If you have enough enery and elite units you win. Otherwise you lose. After 4h you are through.

I haven't seen all of the dozer abilities, but mainly I was only using 2: Shielding and activating a shield which coverts damage into heal. My energy would have run out in the very last battle. But before that could happen the game crashed and I had to repeat everything after the 3rd hour.

Btw: I played on normal difficulty.
Easy difficulty excludes all boss fights. Hard difficulty let's you play without a proper interface. I use to play games on hard, but I absolutely hate difficulty via crippling the player.

I'm disappointed to hear the state this game is in. I was going to buy it but will probably skip it now at least for 6 months or so.

I didnt buy it for the simple fact that the marketing nonsense was absolute garbage. It seemed to me they did a few lines and then started filming. No thanks.

From Steam reviews and Kordanor's description, game doesn't sound great, yet the two reviews give it a good score, wonder why the difference?

I've played a bit less than 1 hour this morning before going to work and I agree with the reviews which were given it good grades.
Of course it's too early for me to know if I'm going to be addicted but from what I've seen so far I can say that I'm going to stop playing Mad Max to play Bedlam first because it seems more of my taste (I love turn based games).

Well, I can only guess, but I think the Reviews are on a very "first look" base and not deeply about mechanics. But a roguelike is about mechanics.

It's maybe similar as the Civilization 5 release, which got stunning reviews. But the people who wrote the reviews only played for like 5-20 hours. That might be enough to judge a shooter, but not enough to judge such a game. Reviewers didn't see that the AI was extremely bad and couldn't handle water for example.

And something similar goes to bedlam.
If you aren't a good player and die after 2 hours….well, you might not see the issues the game have. You didn't get the whole picture, you didn't understand the mechanics in the first place.

But it's hard to describe it to someone else.

If you played FTL, I can maybe give an comparison: "If Bedlam was FTL":
If Bedlam was FTL:
-You had food next to the fuel ressource. Neither food nor fuel can ever run out.
-All you could do with Scrap, your main resource, is to upgrade one of 4 percentage values: Lesser use of fuel, lesser use of food, faster heal, lesser use of energy in abilities. Once they are full (after 1/2 of game length) you just collect it.
-when fighting, you don't fight with the ship. You only fight with the crew. Every fight is basically the same. There is no tactical use of any weapons. The only question is: which crew member do you kill first.
-in the last 1/4 of the game you need your main resource to win any fight. You only do 5 boss fights from that point onward. Almost every turn you have to use an ability, which costs scrap. If the scrap is empty, you died. Doesn't matter too much what you do with your crew
-once you fail you start over. You have to do all the fights again. But there is absolutely nothing which canges besides of that. There aren't different weapon systems you can find. You cant just switch to rocket systems, or drone combat. All you have is your crew. And the crew is more or less always the same.

Now…if you only played Bedlam like 2 tries with 2h each before you died, you might have fun with that. But I hardly doubt that there are many players who will finish Bedlam more than once. Or who will play 5-10 tries.
Because due to the complete lack of ressource management, and complete lack of variety of your playstyle it will always be the same.
I can't really judge how different it gets with different dozers. But considering that it became boring even playing through with the first dozer, I doub't it will add a lot of replay value.

And now…you also have to consider it's bugs. Which you might not encounter in the first 2h.

I mean, it's not magic. You can see my complete playthrough, from the first steps till the final encounter (which crashed) on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maUYyRTBsdI&list=PLNU8jxMn6ejr--yZJmks_GAlkeRFxlLoh&index=1

The three boss fights are all in the 4th video.

It seems to me a ton of the complaints about Bedlam amount to: "It's not FTL." I remember the devs saying they were influenced by FTL (as well as four other games), I don't remember them saying, "We're making FTL, so if you loved FTL you'll love Bedlam because it's basically a reskinned FTL!"

And indeed, it's not. I personally like it for what it is. Still needs some tweaking though.

screeg said:

It seems to me a ton of the complaints about Bedlam amount to: "It's not FTL." I remember the devs saying they were influenced by FTL (as well as four other games), I don't remember them saying, "We're making FTL, so if you loved FTL you'll love Bedlam because it's basically a reskinned FTL!"

And indeed, it's not. I personally like it for what it is. Still needs some tweaking though.

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I don't agree with that even though it might sound like you wrote.

Fact is that FTL is nearly perfect if not perfect for what it should be.
FTL is a game without complicated systems with with complex gameplay nevertheless. As it's element are balanced out ~perfectly.

And to me that, and the fact that most people know it, is the reason why I use it as comparison.

The problem isn't to be different. The problem is to be worse.
A different game in that genre is Invisible Inc. And even though it is even more different than FTL, FTL is a good comparison imho. And while Invisible Inc isn't as good, it is a very good game.
As alternative I could compare the games in this way:

A: Resource Balancing
B: Quality of Combat
C: Interconnectivity of different game systems
D: Replayability

I think these are the main components of these games.
And an FTL would receive a thumbs up in all 4 categories.
An Invisible Inc would receive a thumbs up in 2-3 categories and a "mediocre" in 1-2 categories.
And Bedlam…well…the Quality of combat is mediocre. The other three components I would vote with "Thumbs down".