Encased Review

You recently had a chance to read our thoughts on Dark Crystal Games’ Fallout-inspired RPG Encased. But if you’d like a second opinion from someone who goes into more detail than your average reviewer, you can now check out this RPGWatch review. Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

Encased includes all the necessary ingredients for an engaging combat but it still needs a phase of tuning.

The combat involves your party and possibly friendly NPCs against the enemies in a turn-based mode with action points. You have full control of your companions but the other NPCs act on their own. There are seven combat styles: light, heavy, melee and high-tech weapons, hand-to-hand, contraptions and psionics. The proficiency is obtained through the corresponding skills, each tier giving you additional combat abilities. There are multiple and varied weapons in each combat style and, what is even better, you can craft upgrades for them.

There are several problems, however. Overall, the AI is not brilliant and the fights are easy to win. The enemy AI being average is not a big problem, but sometimes friendly NPCs are silly and draw friendly fire with grenades and area-of-effect weapons.

Then, there is little incentive to use more than the base ability of each weapon, because the higher abilities require a cooldown or are very costly in action points for the advantage they provide. And since it is fairly easy to unlock tiers in multiple combat styles, there is no real need to build a strategy with the other companions, except maybe raw power support when you face more dangerous foes.