Solasta | Crown of The Magister Review

so i woke up a couple days ago which is great i feel grateful for every day that i wake up i've woken up before but this time i woke up to an email most of the time my business email is just for show but every now and then i'll get an email on my business account that piques my interest a sponsorship opportunity oh i wonder how much i'm worth today like an auction house for influence it's weird that i'm a part of that system i never imagined it i've always gotten a chuckle from these offers before but lately those offers have become more serious the is offered and becoming much more enticing and i found out that i'm not quite an upper-class prostitute but i'm at least an instagram escort you know so like a sex worker posing as a model i'm gonna try a few of these dicks out and see if i like him a couple months ago back when i did wrath the righteous i mentioned that it was supposed to be a sponsored video but i backed out because i was afraid of the message that might send some of you responded to this by clapping me on the back but even more of you told me i was an idiot i should have taken the money and you were right i should have so the makers of solasta asked me to do a review and then shortly after that and case contacted me for the same thing suddenly i'm hot i honestly didn't know what to do so i went out and looked at what was out there for selasta and i didn't see many videos so i decided yeah i'll take this deal i have a lot to say about this game both good and bad and if i didn't like the game i'm sure there'd be a clause in my contract stating that they could back out at any time because that's how works people want your influence until your influence turns bad for them so no pressure i could look at this game with confidence that it wouldn't affect my opinion so here it is a maybe sponsored review of celasta will it suck i don't know let's find out [Music] all right talking points so celasta is a turn-based tactical rpg on the dungeons and dragons srd 5.1 rule set in selasta you make the choices dice decide your destiny wizards of the coast granted tactical adventures a license to use the dungeons and dragons srd 5.1 rule set further anchoring their will to make the most faithful video game adaptation with the table top rule set and craft the game you're hoping for in celeste you take control of four heroes each with unique skills that complement one another every hero expresses himself in the adventure making each action and dialogue choice a dynamic part of the story players will create their heroes just as they would in a pen and paper game by choosing their race class personality and rolling for their stats the dynamic and mysterious world features elements of verticality allowing players to use their surroundings as an element of strategy players can position ranged characters on high vantage points or send nerf thief down in the shafts and caverns to scope out what lies ahead the first selasta crown of the magister dlc primal calling will be available on november 4th this new dlc features a half orc ancestry two additional barbarian and druid classes and an original two hour wander request tactical adventures will be also releasing a free update to the game that increases the level cap to 12. more character personalization options and several upgrades and features to the dungeon maker tool now with that aside what's this game really like the game starts with a character creation screen but not just that you aren't just creating a main character but a whole host of people a party of four to be exact this system's aping 5th edition dnd pretty closely so if you're familiar with 5e all this will make you feel right at home the only thing i believe that isn't here from the og manuals is the barbarian and druid class but i've read that's coming in the next dlc no dragonborn though as far as i know yet another game that has ignored my favorite race for attributes you have the option to use a standard array or roll your stat yourself if you're like me you roll everyone once and keep what they come up with and then you get a bad roll and decide to make a god my health my high elf sorcerer was a bit on the ridiculous side and the funny thing is i could have made her even better if i just kept rolling and it's pretty important to have a beefy character because this game loves the dnd rules including ones that are a little ridiculous like legendary actions which will allow certain creatures to take three actions before their turn but limited to only one per turn then they get to attack on their turn it's a bit ridiculous but it works to make you fear certain encounters and judge for yourself if you really want to deal with that kind of trouble there's a lot of options here including sub races but like with most games based on 5e you won't be intimidated by the amount of stuff on screen unlike a game like pathfinder and to that point uh even in baldur's gate 3 i find leveling up to be a little bit underwhelming in the 5e system because well there's like nothing for you to pick just everything just comes and that's it once you have a group of four people you're greeted with a cutscene and i want you to take particular notice of how this cutscene plays out each character talks on their own without your input and their personality is determined by the tags that you picked in character creation the way this works is you pick these personality flags and each one of these flags lies on a side of the alignment grid the issue i had is that my paladin ends up saying things that make no sense sometimes for his character though that could just as easily be my fault i might have picked the wrong flags so anyway your characters will be sitting around a table chatting about how they got here and all the hardships on the way and this scene serves a dual purpose you know the first purpose is to make the game feel more like the tabletop campaign because in those games each individual player usually starts out on their own and circumstances bring them together and they're forced to either work together or like in this game you were brought together to do a job the other purpose is that it teaches you about the mechanics in the game and it does a really good job at it the first story teaches you about the types of traversal and how objects in the environment can be manipulated and it teaches you an important lesson and that is to use the environment against the enemy mostly this comes in a form of pushing boulders down on the enemies or shooting down chandeliers to some more inventive ones with very challenging monsters which i won't go into too much because i really don't want to spoil those encounters you can even use magic the light torches to illuminate a target hiding in the shadows you even have a spell that acts as an artificial sun another thing you might notice is that the game uses the right mouse button to rotate the camera which is perfect because the middle mouse button is always the first button on my mouse to wear out because so many games inexplicably require it for a lot of the things you do constantly the ui is also functional but there are some minor annoyances but that's mostly with the logic of certain systems like for instance having the button for meta magic pop up every time you cast the spell and you have spell points to spend the way they've designed it turns a clean experience into a clunky one what happens when you cast a spell is before you confirm the action the screen will ask you if you want to supersize your fireball but it won't let you do anything until you confirm your choice the same logic is applied to spells you have to close the spell menu before you could do anything else and it feels clunky i sometimes like to pop into my magic menu and see what i've got available and if i've got nothing good left i'll just melee or range attack instead but this adds a step where a step isn't needed then again i can kind of see this as a developer saving us from ourselves you know i've run into many situations where i've done that in another game like i've clicked an enemy only to find out that i didn't pick a spell and instead shot an arrow so while it may be an annoyance what i can say is that i haven't experienced a single problem with the combat so far so maybe that's because the game is watching out for me another thing you might realize is that the pathfinding is pretty damn good and on top of that the characters will reliably do things like climb objects or jump over to objects without much input on your end unlike a game like baldur's gate that requires you to do three different actions to jump without your group running around like trying to pathfinder away to you and instead running into a group of goblins ruining any chance at an ambush now this comes with some caveats though because you don't have to push a button to jump it does it on its own whenever there's a place that it need that the characters need to jump to the problem is is that you also have this skill called spider walk and you can't use it in battle and i have a feeling that the reason you can't really spider walk in battle is more a concession of the pathfinding being a problem so for instance so normally what you'd want to do is jump this gap here right and you could do that without spider walk but if you have spider walk and you're not in combat what the person does instead is go down the wall across the platform and then back up the other wall so if you did this in combat it would waste a lot of your movement points so i think that they disabled it in combat for this very reason but that's how that works right so sometimes you'll catch other characters running off and going a long way and i initially thought ah there's that garbage path finding that i know and love but i later realized that this was happening because not all of my characters are able to leap a 15 meter gap so they had to take the long way that's how strictly the game adheres to the rules in 5e if you don't have a good athletics or acrobatic skill or whatever it is then you're not going to be able to jump these gaps and you're going to have to take the long way around so it adds another layer of strategic thinking during battle and i think that most of the credit for how good this game controls is due to the grid based system of movement grid based is a boon to this game because it seems to make the pathfinding easier but also in combat it's incredibly accurate when compared to systems provided by games like pathfinder where the combat is fairly accurate but you find yourself just a millimeter away from an enemy you should have been able to attack this round but because you don't have a micrometer in your eye you misjudge the distance in pixels you don't ever run into any of those problems with this game and in all the time i spent with the game i never had a single problem with how the combat actually worked i had the occasional camera difficulty where an input wouldn't be recognized because i was facing at a weird angle but that didn't happen often and when it did happen all i had to do was just rotate the camera so it wasn't a problem and of course the second time reading this script i realized i left out an exception because i took it for granted because no game out there ever has or seemingly ever will get burning hands right this game comes close and oh my god does it ever the problem comes when you introduce height i've tried to hit flying objects the targets hanging on walls now this could be due to some obscure rule that says burning hands can miss against flying enemies but i don't know of one what it actually seems like it is is that the game has a really hard time detecting when you're hovering over the enemy and targeting that enemy when there's height involved so i'm going to chalk this up to being an actual problem for future devs here's how i've heard burning hands described it's a thin sheet cone it has a wide arc but it's like a thin blade of heat like a line from a laser cutter it can look however you want honestly so long as it hits people reliably i don't care now most of my issues come from a misunderstanding of certain things like the fact that if the enemy is in darkness it applies disadvantage on your attacks but i figured that out pretty quickly once i failed an entire round to hit anything that fight taught me how to approach each fight by checking the icon that changes on the mouse whenever you hover over an enemy if it has a plus and it's green that means i get advantage if it's red that's bad and i need to find out why it's happening and solve that issue quickly spoiler warning here skipped in the next bit if you want to avoid it final warning one two three green light i can't brag on this one piece of design enough here's what happened so i went into this fight with these sore acts and every fight up to now has been fine because they always happen in areas where they're well lit then this fight happens and it happens under very dark circumstances out here where there appears to be an infinite drop below us and the sorax are crawling on the walls closing distance i had disadvantage to hit them at range so i decided to close distance and i was getting disadvantage at melee too i don't know what triggered it because honestly the reason for disadvantage would have been clearer if i was fighting an enemy that didn't have dark vision because if we both had disadvantage then it might have jogged the player's intuition quicker but at some point i started pulling out torches because maybe just maybe that was the reason and when i realized that it made every fight like that i was always checking the conditions of the fight against what i was fighting and when i fought my first vampire sure they're tough but sunlight's tougher the other thing that this realization did was make my spell book feel much more versatile and i started picking spells that i never would have picked normally guiding bolt for instance seem to be one of the most important spells against tough enemies because it gives advantage to whoever hit the same target next and as you know advantage increases your chance to crit greatly but your chance to hit is also very high due to the fact that you get the roll twice and keep the highest number advantage is stupidly powerful so it would reason that you'd want to have advantage or confer its cousin disadvantage on the enemy in this way the game becomes about thinking of a way to give yourself some kind of advantage in the fight and less about say out damaging the other team sure it comes down to that in the end but if you can apply disadvantage to the enemy you'll always out damage them because they can't hit you if you like tactics this game is going to tickle the hell out of your brain conceptually the combat is amazing because i don't think i've ever seen anyone go in on the rules of dnd combat like these guys and gals have and it's not just in service to the moment-to-moment actions but this strict adherence to the rules also affects the environments as well what's in the environment we can use is it dark or bright day or night the other thing that the game does really well is it doesn't waste much time the battles feel quick and i timed out a couple of them a quick battle might go on for two minutes while a long difficult battle might go on for 20 minutes it's interesting that the fights never seemed that long to me because the fights were always novel this game does the opposite of what most crpgs do which is throw a metric ton of fights at you to ensure that you're never bored and then it ends up becoming boring because of it they throw less fights at you in this game but when they do throw a fight at you it's usually something with interesting mechanics or a gimmick you can exploit so the fights never seem like a grind and by the halfway point in this game i look forward to coming back to it to play a couple more fights because the combat is really satisfying i mean they really need like some kind of arena mode or some kind of just like dungeon delve mode like uh the lost aslani dlc for pathfinder right the tutorial goes on for a while longer and you get to a portion that teaches you some stuff about the combat that is a lot of fun for example you can push dogs off of cliffs mostly what this does is set up a sort of backstory to the character and even though these characters are technically made up they each have backstories and some of them come up in the the game later on in the form of side quests so that's pretty great i think the common thinking on this sort of thing back in a day was that you couldn't do this with player generated characters because you might disempower the player from creating their own backstory but i never felt that way i thought it worked for what the game was going for but all that sort of sets your expectations for what this game is this is not an rpg that allows you to build a character's personality through interaction it's also not a game that allows you to make decisions outside of combat all that often you might get to choose what route you take through a dungeon or whether you pass a speech check and get out of a fight or if you fail and really that's not even up to you so you have to understand that going into it you play this game for the combat and laid back pace of the story not for the involved role-playing mechanics you might find elsewhere celasto went all in on combat and it really shows as far as the story is concerned this game is about lizard people who get this can disguise themselves as human this guy even says it this is a human this is what we look like this is what we act like wouldn't surprise me if some of them were even sore acts in disguise you know they can shape-shift [Music] now listen i'm no conspiracy theorist but i swear to god i saw this blink once with one pair of eyelids then again with another set you know what i mean so the situation we got is this we got a bunch of lizard people sacrificing babies of an evil god and the council knows not only everything we know but it's a foregone conclusion that at least one of them is a lizard in disguise and honestly this is where the story gets a little interesting at least in your imagination because on screen there's not a lot happening and each event starts to add more features like in a lot of games you have this situation where the game seems to get worse the more you play it this game is actually the opposite it starts off slow and starts introducing more complexities as you go along the scope gets more epic and the encounter is more ridiculous and a lot more fun and i'm not gonna lie at first the lack of dialogue really bothered me because i kept thinking about how cool it would have been to have more dialogue choice or just more dialogue at all but then i thought about how that would drag out the pacing of what is already a pretty well paced game and honestly the game started to feel like a jrpg to me because of the way you watch the story instead of take part in it so i'll say this if you like jrpgs and you really like tactical combat you might like this game because it plays out a lot like these games except the pacing is far better because you're not watching 10 to 20 minute cut scenes every few minutes of gameplay you know what i mean this is a very linear game when it comes to exploration within towns for instance you can't go into hardly any buildings you cannot steal from chests hell you can't even open doors to the rooms in the end and steal everything inside that should give you an idea as to what we're dealing with here all the interactions that are meaningful happen in missions so for instance you might bypass a fight through persuasion or you'll find little puzzles containing extra loot and because the loot you do find is super limited and magic items are so rare i found myself searching out every area just to find that little bit extra this game is all meat no fat the item system is pretty interesting there are magic items in the game but they're rare some magic items such as rings bracers and so on require attunement to work you can attune an item to your character by taking a short rest and you can only attune three items in total and only one item per short rest the limitation is there to force concessions in a way you can't equip every slot with magic items so you're forced to pick which items you can't live without this doesn't seem to apply to weapons and shields however you can also craft magic weapons but honestly i never tried to do this at first but i soon found that i would have a much easier time if i just crafted my own weapons from the myriad guides i was finding everywhere in the game i made a really powerful greatsword and then i never touched it again until much later in the game when the ingredients fell into my lap i'm sure you could exploit this system nice and good but i wasn't very interested in it myself because i kind of liked where the challenge level was at and while we're on the topic of magic some magic spells require components and some require very specific components and not just the grab bag some of the best spells require you to equip a focus and there are several different types there's component pouches which can be equipped in your off hand there's a wrist component pouch circlits holy amulets and robes if you wear the component on your wrist you won't be able to wear bracers on armor but you also won't have to unequip your weapon to hold a pouch in your offhand because to cast most of these spells you need a hand free to do the somatic components it's a really nice little limitation and i think it comes straight out of basic dnd 5e rules i think it's just one of those things that most dms just don't do because they think it's a pain in the ass in my in practice i didn't think it was a pain in the ass at all like it it felt annoying at first but as i started playing it i was like i really like this so you know maybe i don't have this guy do sword and board maybe i have my paladin do two-handed swords that way he could still cast his components it really adds another layer to everything basically this is dnd 5e rules the game it's these limitations which help make the combat so deep and entertaining the game is meticulous about simulating a real battlefield in the game rules and the only thing that i could see that it's missing is maybe height advantages and ranged combat with arrows and such and conferring a disadvantage when you're below someone i'm not even sure if that's a rule in 5e but honestly it should be ambushing is the name of the game here because it doesn't matter how good your characters are if you get ambushed the fight is going to be that much harder which is why it is so puzzling that the game takes control away from you at times to force you into a conversation that will then dump you back into a fight here you'll see that an entire cadre of people just spawned in and they hijacked my game you were just in a battle so you can't even hide from the conversation then there's times where you've got all your people lined up ready to execute a perfect ambush and once you do you realize the game has triggered a cutscene and after that cut scene you'll be teleported to a less optimal location just because that's where the cutscene needed you to be i guess i've also had instances where i will try to sneak attack an enemy and the game won't register what i'm trying to do until i've either been spotted and forced out of advantage where i execute it last minute and watch as the character dies or gets into one hell of a fight this is where the game shows its more linear nature in a bad way as far as i'm concerned because it makes sense that if you're trying to simulate dnd combat tactics ambushing would be a large part of how the game plays either ambushing or getting ambushed by enemies i prefer the way some games have approached this where if you want to set up an ambush you can do that but you might miss out on information or how some games do it where after you attack you initiate dialogue in case there's important information that still needs to be conveyed it could still all end in combat if that's the goal or you could give the player a way out add an increased dc of course because you fired the first shot my reasoning for this goes back to games that my dad used to play and talk about with the whole minnesota crew he tells me that his philosophy was to always play an evil character because evil characters have more choice than good characters an evil character always chooses to shoot first that way they're never taken by surprise if you wanted to play selasta that way you can for the most part but as i said no matter how stealthy you are you aren't more stealthy than a forced cutscene i hope they take a different tact with any future dlc that they might put out that has any story content or that they take some of the player feedback and maybe release a patch fixing those issues we can dream the characters are fine i only bring this up because i've been reading steam reviews on this game because i'm still weirded out that i haven't heard more about selassian until recently a common theme seems to be that people dislike the art style in this game i can't say that it's amazing to look at i mean it's definitely a small team but the environments look great the lighting looks okay at times but the shadows sometimes look like a bit like unity shadows at times because unity has horrible shadows just awful shadows i hate them i wish i knew how to fix them somebody please tell me how to fix my shadows in unity so i didn't have a problem with these graphics though i did notice that there wasn't a whole lot of cosmetic features going on in the game you weren't going to be equipping an exotic weapon and see it held by your fighter a sword is a sword as a sword but i have heard that they're going to be releasing some free dlc and some dlc to has some cosmetics in the game so maybe they might add some different looks to weapons and character models and things like that the character models suffice nothing special but they did the job the enemy models were also much the same serviceable nothing that's going to blow your hair back but um listen i was zoomed way the out so i didn't see any of that it all looked fine to me if you're looking for an art design like that of baldur's gate 3 keep in mind that larian had a team of 300 people celasta was made by a much smaller team with a quarter mil budget take it from someone who has seen how the giant studios work from the inside it's much easier to have a vision when you got 300 people working on it in closing the game reminds me of a guy i used to know don't know where he went off to but when i met him it was because we both answered the same meetup ad to play d d and that is like the most pathetic thing that anyone has ever said in a sentence this guy was trying out a new campaign that he was trying to publish so a group of strangers myself included decided to go meet the guy at a local game shop and beta test together but one of us was dressed in army fatigue so of course that was the guy i talked to the most he invited me over to his house to play a game with his friends so i decided to go there's probably a bunch of army buddies sitting around a table getting drunk and bullshitting so i was like yeah i'm going what i didn't expect was to walk in and see all these set pieces that this guy had made himself out of insulated foam painted and put together in what looked like the ruins of an old temple that's when i realized i'm not playing d and d i'm playing d and d and that's really what selasta captures and this has been a rant from strategy and now that you heard it go play some games and if you want to play this game you can find it on steam and a link in the description [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Strat-Edgy Productions

Views: 62,256

Keywords: solasta, crown of the magister, game review, video review, Strat-edgy

Id: HWOmeVmmkj0

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021