Enormity: Extraction - Discussion

0:09 some viewers may find the following video disturbing viewer discretion is advised hey everyone welcome back to board games unlocked in Ethan and I are doing the discussion for the Excursion mode of enormity if you've been following the miniseries we ended on where we were about to do the first uh boss fight but we felt that since the this game has basically two major components of the Excursion which is kind of your Metro Vania uh segment and then you have major boss fights similar to Aon trespass Odyssey or Kingdom Death that we could probably talk enough about the Excursion and then do a separate discussion on how the boss fights work so Ethan you have never played have you played Kingdom Death nope okay not play kingom Death I've not played atto okay so now both of those games are probably going to be a lot more familiar whenever we get to the boss fights I'd be able to compare their fights a little bit more because in neither of those games do you have any of this Dungeon Crawl Excursion um but with this massive game that is a 40 page you know blog of of text I'm very curious to know your thoughts on on the game so far and for the record this is clearly a demo uh I'm not we're not even paid to do this it's a free demo on TTS that we just wanted

1:39 to do for fun um so everything is subject to change but this is kind of going to be our thoughts on where it's sitting at right now yeah so I so like you said I haven't played any big game like this the only big campaign game I've played is Gloom Haven and frost Haven um so there's some similar Vibes here and some not um I think my big I'm a little conflicted on it but also my biggest thing is that it's a demo and this is on tabletop simulator and learning a new game is very hard on tabletop simulator uh as opposed to you know playing a game you already know on tablet simulator so luckily for us we just like learned it on our own before we actually recorded our first episode so you didn't have to see any of that but that first I mean how long were we playing we didn't even finish the scenario we just learning the rules and it was like three hour it f like a really long time I I think it was about two two and a half hours before we finally moved our people into the next page yeah it it was a we were raw dog in that rule book and that first session pretty much pretty much like it was basically okay what do we do on our turn we knew the basics of how all that worked and then it was a lot of what's this token scour the rule book and because we don't have a physical rule book it was me having the PDF PDF up and scanning that and it's like well I can't find it I don't know where it's at yeah and the rule book is so this is probably maybe one of the biggest rule books I've read um you know basically

3:10 when we decided we were going to do it I was like I'll just read the rules the night before you know I'll spend like 30 minutes and I'll read the book real quick then I opened the rule book and it was 46 pages of straight wall to--all small text like completely filled up and it was a little overwhelming so learning it learning this especially if you haven't played ATL like me was very overwhelming um however I think if you're familiar especially when we get to this boss battler area that might not be a big problem for people who are probably going to be interested in this game because for instance multiple times during the play through Seth would say something like oh okay yeah this works just like atto and we could kind of move on yeah it was essentially like okay yep your stress is your fate Track Your vitality is your danger kind of um Your vitality is your health that go actually goes down here but and your adrenaline is your rage they they definitely took stuff from 18 and Reed it or tweaked it a little bit that does help when you're trying to read but even then like I don't even know atto you know front and back I every single time something would happen like there would there would be a deck of cards that I'm playing and I'm like I don't even remember what those are and my friend Devon would be like well they're this he would remember certain things and I'm like thank God I'm playing with someone else yeah um I think a lot of my complaints it literally is just oh well we're playing on on tablet simulator um so like for instance we multiple times our play through forgot oh we actually have this key card that could have helped us not get screwed over by this one but you

4:41 know it's this tiny little you know pixel over here in the corner of the screen and we're not really thinking as opposed to you know having all the stuff out in front of you completely different um so that was hard like I was I was forgetting the gear and stuff that I had and it took me a while to get through these six action cards um but that that when we started recording which is what you guys saw that first video it was a much smoother experience once you get past that really bad initial learning curve and I don't know how long that final video ended up being maybe like an hour hour it was about it was the same about an hour and a half yeah and we got through a good chunk of this level you know and then we had another hour to finish up so over yeah I I agree I think it the beginning of the Excursion feels very slow um but I actually don't mind that because to me it's that sense of exploration you're on the ship you don't know anything about it you're not there's not a lot of enemies and then they they really want to give the feeling of escalation and ramping and my God doesn't which it does yeah cuz at first I was like oh maybe this isn't going to be too bad and once you get swarmed a little bit with creatures then and then you then then you have the ammo available to kill them then you kill them and then more kind of show up and then you have to reload yeah or catch your breath yeah or the adrenaline now here's one thing about that so there's a lot of actions you know not dissimilar to rage rage in atto is

6:11 basically every time you attack which you can attack once on your turn your rage ticks up and there's other ways to increase it so because you get stronger which is a great system that they've invented of the escalation element of characters instead of like oh our adrenaline's up we're weaker or we're hurt so we're weaker it's like no actually you're you're stronger as things as things keep going um but I will say with the adrenaline the things that I feel like there's almost too many things that require adrenaline that become very very critical like reloading doing a full now you can do quick reloads if you have the gun that's not heavy so but to re load a heavy gun and then you also can't attack in the same turn mhm is feels very slow yeah this card is very like tough like you either attack or you do all of the important Mission things and every time your adrenaline is going to be shooting up and when we when the escalates and you actually literally have to spend an adrenaline to shoot and you can't that's kind of what screwed over my character at the final bit which I know is part of the system and maybe we should be like slowing down on taking these actions cuz we were taking them I was taking them every turn that's true cuz I thought I had to I didn't realize until the very end that there were some carard I could choose not to play all my cards I guess I misread the rule book there yeah there's 40 pages of rules so it's understand how dare you miss out one

7:41 line I know right um so yeah that's that's a it's a tough system but also it's just interesting like it ramps up really fast and you know it felt like we could resly kill anything we wanted but then they just throw throw so much at you all at once and like oh well I have no idea how how you know especially when you're it escalates but also you've lost a bunch of resources by the time it escalates so though you technically get more powerful you're like oh but I have to waste an entire turn to reload so I actually can't do anything if you didn't take the time to actually methodically explore get get loot get those ingrams that you know that heal you or reduce stress you've basically beled it to the end and you have and because you want to get the ingrams because on the back side are resources that you use at the end and that downtime area um but I I'm always very curious because again this is a demo we're all pretty much created equal but then the rule book they talk about how you you create these these cards are colorcoded there's like the red and the blue symbol above the actions if you see like so and the yellow mhm so you combine those so I'm wondering if there's a way that you can do like a full adrenaline build your actions are kind of a class build that you go about where you could have someone who can attack multiple times and kind of be an assigned role

9:14 yeah that makes a lot of sense that would be that's what I'm hoping because it would be very annoying if everyone's kind of created equal with their cards I will say because you were talking about like I like mechanically the inverted Paradigm whatever they call it you know system um I don't know thematically if it works as well in a survival horror theme as opposed to you're literally a greatek god theme from atto yeah you know um I mean I get it thematically like we're just Arin is running so high we're like doing all these things really fast I don't know that feels a little weird um but it's not that's not the big deal because mechanically it's a cool system I like it yeah it's definitely oh it's kind of more related to the um the boss fights because in the boss fights whenever you deal a wound there's three levels of attacks of AI cards and body partk cards so if you wound a level one well a level one AI card gets removed and a level two gets added in and then a level two body part gets added so they get tougher and tougher as the fight goes on but you do as well um yeah it's it's a great system but the the uniqueness of here that was my biggest concern CU I've watched this demo before cuz I wasn't even sure if I was wanting to even try it on TTS yeah um but the one that made me the most concerned are these blips yeah and I wonder

10:46 if there's if there's ways CU whenever you're rolling for noise you get to assign out the noise value and I wonder how fiddly that's going to be like I don't like how if you see it's an echo that it's like oh nothing there spawn a new blip that's stupid it's like why like I mean I guess I get it because if if there's so many Echoes so many empty blips and all of them happen to come out then you just have no threat yeah for like four turns before something before you actually get into the red and the black but what's kind of dumb about that it's like well give me a reprieve in the white anyway because every single round from turn six I'm having to spawn a blip on top of blips being on the tracker anyway yeah I feel like the escalation you can actually see it in our two gameplay videos like how you know it kind of feels like all right well we're kind of not exactly breezing but we're kind of breezing through those first four rounds and you know and it's supposed to be like kind of okay let's like increase it a little bit and then boom we're here but it felt like once we hit the red it was like all right now you're actually no you like pedal to the middle like it's go time now and I don't know how much of that is that were in the red or how much is we just drew a bunch of multiple uh you know Intruder tokens that kept spawning on top of us so yeah I don't know but while we're on the subject of noise um let's talk about the dice um you know we already mentioned this in our gameplay videos if you watched it um I don't I don't like the

12:18 graphic design on these dice no the you you're measuring success based on these like uh thick lines these long lines right so that's like a success but then there are like half success symbols which is this half line here yeah and I it's just I just wish they would just have a different symbol I don't know like if you had like a more thick symbol and then you could have like a hollowed out version to indicate a half success cuz this line Half line it I don't know it just doesn't look right and it's really bad in the red and black dice because you've got these these these symbols because you can get used to this half line it's when you get uh where is it this bit right here right there yep we're pretty sure this is two successes but because the crits symbol takes up part of the line we're not quite sure if that's a half symbol or full success um you know what I mean so it's just a little confusing and I wish that would be more clear which I I completely agree I wish I mean I will say I'm glad they didn't just take the die system from hoo and just poured it over here because these are completely different because in hoo you have d10s and it's a number value on trying to hit based off of oh you're trying to hit the boss you need to roll a seven your weapon does two d10s you got to roll two d10s and get seven or higher on both of them to get two hits then you take your d6s and those have values on them for attack damage and then also use d6s for armor when you're attacked and it's a different symbol you look at for absorbing mhm so that's already like

13:51 okay that's a little much for a dice system but you eventually get used to it and it's it's a good system but here they pretty much do away with the d10s and do everything around these d6s and I'm not sure how I feel about the criticals either because again in the little quadrants yeah it's and I I get that they want criticals to be they don't want you to crit all the time because then things get tedious and you just like they're going for the survival horror and if you can just crit every single time then nothing would be horrific but at the same time I think it's more confusing than anything you look at your weapon and it's like oh my Polymer rifle gives me a fourth of a quadrant like a fourth critical hit basically and you have to roll three fours more to get yeah and eventually yeah I get to roll three I get to roll three red dice if my adrenaline's high enough and maybe all get a crit which I I didn't I didn't get anything there so it's like kind of its chances of it critting or helping it's basically like instead of like to crit instead of like a system where it's like oh you rolled the highest number you crit instead you have to roll the highest number three times in one yeah to get a crit yeah you have to roll three sixes to get a crit basically think about like that

15:21 and and I don't know because I mean and this it's almost simplified because again with a on trespass you have one white die let's say you're rolling four d10s three of them are black and you have your one white crit if you're white Dy is a d10 a Natty 10 it's a critical hit chance doesn't matter if all your black d are 10 it has to be the white Dy so it's like all right whatever let's say your white Dy is a 10 you then have to still do a damage to it so they kind of they kind of made it weird here with the quadrant thing and it's almost like they're trying to get too cute with it yeah so I'm I mean they work they're serviceable it's Unique I mean we made a couple crits we made it like three or four is so it's possible yeah um and maybe like there's there's modifiers or with better weapons like we have these shitty ass weapons that the game starts with that feels like hey hey these don't even have live rounds in them they're bean bag they shoot bean bags So eventually we get that that gun from looking at these anomaly tokens that's actually has like a Contraband live rifle that has two innate um yeah some weapons make it easier to get a crit yeah two and eight criticals and it's also no longer linear

16:52 and when your adrenaline's five are higher it comes with two and eight power it's like that's that's already immediately better so I'm not I don't hate the dice system but the overall design choice that they made and but I don't know how what they would do to fix it I don't even know if it's broken it's just kind of weird and I don't know how I feel about it yet you know because it is just a demo it is just a demo and it might make more sense or it might be more clear in person yeah but something about something about the criticals because the half symbol I that I can completely like can look at these two and and see a difference it's whenever it's like that where it's like I I think that's the full well yeah it's it's the problem is by the the half symbol by itself is not bad it's when you get these symbols that like you know like sure you're Pro I'm 99% certain that's a full hit yeah but you shouldn't have the confusion at all right you should have 1% oh wait like you know you know what I mean so it's almost like the the crit the crit thing needs to literally be like moved over all the way to the edge yeah or just make the crit symbol and give us a number I get they want to they want to have the little quadrant thing see why is this quadrant doesn't really take up that much space of the line but this one does mean why don't they just do an asterisk or something hey your gun shows you know two asterisk on it and but you still need four total yeah to make I feel like we spent a lot of time on this it's just that one little thing I don't know it's like I just I just I think they should clean that up just a

18:22 little bit you know um and fix that yeah um here's my other thing is like I said with adrenaline four things require adrenaline mhm um like I I almost feel like that's that's again way too much but I'm almost wondering if their their reasoning for making four major things how pretty much how you do anything major on the ship is because you actually have a way to lower your adrenaline you can catch your breath yeah but realistically once you get into these levels you do not have time to catch your breath that's the other thing you know true like I did not feel like I had any time to do any of those cool down actions because once you get into especially once you get into around this area yeah there's so much going on you're like well if I don't do something right now we're goingon to get definitely overrun so I can't catch my breath now and then once you get down to these these rounds yeah it's like oh I guess I guess I can't reload um and I feel like it's part of the difficulty like we should be booking it I think the idea is they want to be booking it early so we're causing a lot of noise you know because you were saying how they said that you could totally 100% stealth this game that must take a lot of effort that's got to be real difficult to be moving slow and you got to be moving in such a way that you're making sure the the blips don't cross you I mean that's kind of I don't know how you would do that but I mean yeah it almost feels like they're like hey you can do stealth in the white turns yeah you can do stealth if you want to spend three additional hours each scenario making sure you're perfectly you know going

19:53 slow and mathing out where the blips are going to hit exactly or it's or it's a build again I really feel like that this demo doesn't show it shows the mechanics of the game but not the full not the character customization that you do because if you're able to sit there and be like here's an idea with this overcharge headlamp give you a more powerful light maybe a suit that has a further range so that you are constantly scanning blips and seeing what they are and then you avoid them and then you maybe make noise to knock them knock them away because the one thing that I I'd have to look at the rules if no one's making noise in the red and black sections where do the blips go well they're always going to move during their movement phase so they're going to hit people eventually but but in the red and the black they meticulously actually turn towards the noise oh yeah I see so no if you actually if no one has this token cuz you did not you have not fired your weapon you have moved two you know two to one spaces you're constantly moving two and three spaces and rationalizing to keep your stress down do they do they just follow because what happens is like if this blip hits the corner they just they kind of just go down interesting yeah I didn't even think about that because yeah that's an interesting question and then and yeah I mean eventually as you

21:25 keep searching for more eventually intruders are going to get on the board and they're going to go and you're you're eventually going to have to shoot your gun mhm but can is there way to manage the blips I almost feel like they need to kind of find a way to reduce I I don't like how blips are on the track yeah how they Spa blips get spawned on the track yeah because this if a blip just a little bit too much you think uh a little bit because the blip on the track what we initially thought was oh that's just what spawns but no you flip it and if it's an echo it's like okay great that goes away but then you spawn a blip anyway yeah so but if it's not if it's like oh hey it's the unique it it appears right in front of you mhm and I find that to be a little bit annoying because not only did you do you move the tracker up on it and you spawn a blip you then reveal what's on there and then spawn a a creature yeah and the creatures kind of get one note yeah I feel like or talking about the later rounds I really enjoyed so when we finished our first video of this level I texted you and was like yeah I'm really enjoying this a lot more than our raw run through like it's very smooth it's very fast the moment we got here it got a lot more fiddly and a lot more slow um and a little bit more personnic and I was a big fan of that that might just be a thing that's not that big of a

22:56 deal when you're person because you're just you know you're just going moving these levels it was like I felt like there was like okay there's some there's somei we have to do at theend of every round and we have you know especially when there's eight blip tokens and it's like okay like we got to move all these you know who are they moving towards okay three things are respawning and I get it's part of the escalation of difficulty but the escalation of difficulty also means it's the ex the escalation of finickiness and fiddlin exactly and on top of the fact that the the parts at the very beginning that was fun is because there were we we kind of got to see oh okay there's one there's two but we still got to do the exploration we got to go into the consoles and and gather stuff once you're in red and black it's just like yeah NOP there's no more exploration the rest of the ship nope it's just it it turns into mob mob boss or mob fight and to be and to be fair we're like you're saying we're level one characters at the start of this campaign so we don't have that many tools to fight things once we get into these harder difficulties just the but here's here's my theory I think they did that on purpose because it especially in this demo it's we did the exploration stuff by the time we got into red we were on the second book mhm you know what happened at the end of that a sticker got placed and the stickers the escalation or the uh extraction points are fast travel spawns mhm so to me it feels like to increase their um well that might be later stuff dude you're you're spoiling things I know I wanted to look at it anyway I don't care sorry I don't care and I

24:28 really care about what the people who are listening and watching they're not they're not going to remember this let's be honest um it's a demo it's not even going to be available to anyone yeah exactly here's here's my theory is they created the extraction points and spawn points or uh starting locations to um fulfill their infinite playability because what happens is we do this run again and we start here and now the first four white spots we now get to explore this more I say and then we go to the next page and it kind of is like a rinse and repeat it's that Rog like kind of feel yeah that's that's my theory that makes sense um which I don't necessarily hate um I'm anytime someone says you can play it an infinite amount of times it just gives me you know Starfield th000 planets from Todd Howard Bethesda Vibes where it's like it just works and it's like yeah no it doesn't and let's talk about that for a second okay because if you look on the kickstarter page if I'm reading it right what if you go all in you're getting a campaign plus like four other full campaigns or something ridiculous yeah how much of your time are you gonna be like well actually I want to go back and Replay that old level versus no we got four other campaigns we need to go we need to keep advancing right like realistically cuz they talk about this is like a Metroid Rogue kind of deal

25:59 people really going to be spending their time going back and replaying levels that seems weird to me that seems like you know if this was a video game that's a totally different story this this is hour level in a board game you know because in atto I finished cycle one and there was so much that I did not that we did not find we played cycle one out of five for a year yeah and consistently pretty much every month was like a day of of playing cycle one and recording and doing all that there was so much content in cycle one alone that I'm like there's no way unless I start playing it with someone else like to start a separate campaign never never happening look I don't even want to replay a Gloom Haven scenario that I failed after playing for an hour and a half two hours you think I want to go back and play through a three-hour survival horror exactly you know level yes probably probably not if this was your now but that's the thing it's like I'm not saying they need to scale this down I love Campaign games they are my favorite games to play and I love that I have the possibility to do it again instead of looking at it and be like well beat that guess it's over that was $800 well spent I love that there's a ton of content and tons of replayability um and so for people who can just back this one game yeah then they they got they got a game they got their a lifestyle game but the overall system like we haven't really talked about mechanisms or what you do in your

27:30 turn I like it I want I think I want to explore it more which is not going to be done with the demo but it ran a lot smoother on a second run through like we were a lot more like we knew our cards we knew kind of what we wanted how we wanted to approach it and we knew how to use it and that and it did run a lot smooth and it felt really good yes love I like the limited nature of how far you can move and what you can do yes I love that there's no diagonal movement any games like this have diagonal movement just feels trivial because positioning matters the linear even though it's like oh oh [ __ ] like I was trying to save Isaac and I was I was going to kill a guy and then shoot diagonal down but I didn't have that gun that stuff positioning matters and I like how n like you look at a book like this and you're like oh a tiny little tutorial level but actually when you factor in how slow we are and how we can't move diagonally suddenly this become feels like a big level you're like oh how are we going to get all the way down here you know I love the booklet system and apparently so in the in the demo it's just the grin but in the rule it mentions that the the M um minions I guess is actually supposed to be like a a minion book oh okay that's Co so I'm curious if it's like if it doesn't even really mention the grin or like for depending on how you're setting it up if you just flip to a random one and it's a different different creature um and I like how I mean these are quick they're they're they're Canon F they're meant to just pop up be a nuisance and shoot them but I also like the fact that some of them can be unique yeah and that's yeah unique specimens

29:02 while we're talking about like cool stuff that we like for a demo the art the amount of art that they've already thrown onto this thing is pretty incredible I mean voice acting as well it's got voice acting already in the rule booklets in the mission booklets which is crazy I didn't even know you could do that on tabletop simulator so that's cool and they have Legacy elements where there's they specifically mention there's no component destruction but clearly they want it's it's an explor a filling game when you finally put in that elevator sticker that's permanent for your game yeah like you revealed these stickers earlier who knows if you ever naturally get those what if you just never get to a point to see that there's a corridor that connects these so you just never reveal it until like you know you're playing your eighth game and you're you go back here and you're like wait a minute oh let's like let's explore that oh there's a corridor here yeah I like that I do like that as well I like the permanent changes to what's supposed to be like these multiple booklets yeah um my biggest thing is like I think my biggest my biggest probably complaint is just it's very overwhelming and things are more overwhelming on TTS but there's just a lot of there it feels like a component overload and Rule like I already talked about the rules overload there's a lot of different tokens every time they mentioned something in the book and you both you you and I I mean if you look at our vide like oh okay where's that one deck of cards oh where's that one kind of component what what is it yeah I think that's my biggest thing is there's just a lot and again once you get past that like you said this is a lifestyle

30:33 game when you get past that you that's not really a problem yeah you know I mean hell even with atto um Paul Grogan I don't know if you know who he is on no he does gaming rules um he was hired by into the unknown to do a how to playay video because he does really good how to playay videos it's five videos surprise me now I was waiting for it I'm like good I'm G watch every single one every single time I have to play that game cuz it's just too much of how many games you have to play but if you're sticking with a game like this then it'll just be second nature yeah but so that's kind of kind oh sorry what I was gonna say what are you thinking of of the theme like whenever how did I describe it to you what I said Dungeon Crawler Nemesis yeah that's basically what you said you were like it's a campaign Nemesis like that I don't know what it was yeah um listen I'm a Sci-Fi nut and I love sci-fi horror so the theme is totally at my alley yeah I'm to be truthfully to be honest with you not really that interested in ATO um but like you know like the theme and everything I'm sure the gameplay is fun all that this is totally way up more my alley like the sci-fi horror Vibe I love that and and the The Voice narration they've done for this is was really good very immersive and may like okay like I'm kind of in this you know I would imagine they're going to do something similar because they have their own app for atto that they're finally slowly releasing cycle voice professional voice acting with Ambiance and theme and if this is like a a example of like hey

32:06 this is what we're eventually going to release for the game it's it's a good example yeah it's good yeah it now they have it for very little things where it's like four words and it's like okay I don't I don't I'm not reading yeah we don't need to play we don't need to play that if we can just read it yeah but for the big sections it's it's very immersive yeah uh I mean like look at like the artist get like I love the box art and I love like just look alien art like that's so like that kind of this kind of sci-fi hor stuff I love that you're like oh like that looks like terrifying like I love that um and they do a great job with just descriptive words of like you know you hear like something in the vents and you hear Knuckles cracking and a hollow knocking it's just like what is it what is in the vents yeah what is it yeah like I I really I really like that and like the art for like the The Moth Man thing is really cool looking I know I guess we shouldn't show that since we're not there yet in our our game yeah so yeah I like the theme like I would never consider getting atto I would consider getting this U with a caveat which we'll talk about when we're I guess talking about quote verdict at the end yeah yeah I the one thing that makes these kinds of games for me Campaign games in general are character builds yeah because you can have this can all be fine but if my character stays the same then it just kind of gets one note so there's a lot more they kind of have to prove to me to make me be like this is going to be a slam dunk now it's into the unknown and my only you know example

33:38 with them is atto but which you love which I love it is my favorite game yeah so like I would consider it a masterpiece for all intents and purposes and they have a lot of really good stuff going on here like cuz that's the thing is like they you know what they did they made made a way and I know we were kind of complaining about it earlier but they found a way to kind of make Firearms difficult um and a good example is I don't know if you've ever played The Remnant the video the souls like video game Remnant The Remnant yeah I think it's the remnant I have not no um I'm Souls like get it away from me I suck at those games yeah so it's basically yeah like a Soul's like with guns and if you have anything that could be a fully automatic rifle and you could be a distance from your boss it becomes kind of difficult to balance that because hey there's four of us we can all shoot it and it has it can only target one of us and that's always something that's hard I would imagine as hard to do in a game like this or even it's just a horror game like the scariest horror games are the ones where you have a camera and you just have to run and hide once they give you a gun you're like I I feel Invincible yeah I do not feel that way because of the reloading and the linear system yeah so if you get into the the theme of it where your gun has limited ammo and you're having something that looks like the grin on all fours

35:11 Knuckles cracking running towards you down Galloping towards the corridor and you go to Fire and you click and it's like oh my God and you have to reload it think of it like D and D round seconds where it's like every round is like three or six seconds that it's like I need to reload you're a adrenaline is pumping and you're just like about to and then you look up and then you have a heart attack yeah so I think they found a really good way of still making guns feel powerful when you do get to shoot but then you're like I'm out of ammo yeah being out of ammo and not being able to do fast reload is really cool like okay I have a really good weapon but I can't fast reload it it's a cool trade-off like I like I got I both got really good guns both my guys got good guns but they couldn't do fast reload which oh I got to burn a whole turn to try and get these these bullets back in the chamber which is cool like I really like that and I like how ammo is still infinite like it's not like oh you have a reserve of ammo agreed that would be way too finicky for me exactly um I like how every character has a unique ability um the one thing that I actually find kind of finicky and this could just be because it's immediately pulled from kto cuz it's called the Kratos pool where at the end of your turn you leave tokens yeah here I thought it was the exact same thing but then I was reading the rules again I'm like oh no those tokens only go in whenever you're um when you do an an adrenaline action but and at the at the beginning it's not that bad oh here's a token

36:41 here's two tokens I love the system of let me go first so I can leave you tokens yeah when you go I love that but when you're all the way up at 78 adrenaline it's just like here's 50 tokens yeah that you got to keep track of and in TTS it's very annoying to keep track of the tokens yeah half the time I'd have these expertise tokens that I forgot to put on these special abilities yeah um yeah cuz the these are these are like unique abilities that you can get if we just place like this one Morpheus protocol flip this card when there are six expertise tokens on it oh okay what does it do recover three stamina deactivate when you use when you use oh those are charges when you use the last charge immediately flip this card okay so these should have charges on them ah gotcha so and and these are really cool like these are something that you should we should probably be aiming for get expertise dump them on this so that oh hey we still have this available so we can use a charge to recover three stress so these are cool that's kind of like a universal spacer ability which again is pulled from atto because you have the Argo and the Argo is like your city ship and have those Universal Tech uh abilities that can help you give you the edge um so yeah like I'm still Allin on this game there's there was never a

38:12 reality where I was going to be like I don't know um and but see that makes sense for you I think for me the story and I think people like me the story might be a little different um which is kind of kind of basically what I was gonna say you know what that makes sense for you well because you because at is your favorite game is what I mean right like that makes total sense so so I think if you're like Seth and atto is like your favorite game or Campaign games are your favorite games like totally like I think the potential is there you should go in for me here's the thing I'm looking at this I I I enjoyed this level I'm sure the boss battle when we get into it is going to be a fun time you know I like the theme I like the story I like the vibe you know what like while I've been playing I have my sci-fi horror music playing in the background and it's very immersive you know I get into it here's the thing so I think the the mechanics are cool the foundation is there like the foundation is really solid like you were saying you're waiting to see what you know character customization and things are going to be there the overall exploration what is their actual long-term thing because they could say infinite replab playability all they want but if it's the same game over and over and over infinite I don't want to play it infinite times I'd rather it's qu quantity over quality no sorry quality over quantity quality over quantity yeah so it's a good demo here's the thing I'm looking at the kickstarter page right now is it $350 is the potential there worth $350 for me to spend right now no um like I'm looking at this I'm like I don't need I don't of this just based off of the one demo right I'm not going to spend 350 so dropping down you could get one campaign for 140 all right now we're you know

39:43 maybe maybe I'd consider it again if everything if it ramps up from here uh here's the thing I don't think again I also don't know if I'm like all right yeah I'm ready to drop $140 on one campaign right now um right however there is and I'm so glad they're doing this because I don't need I'm talking about the amount of overwhelming things I don't need all of these things and a thousand Miniatures for five campaigns that I'm probably not gonna play right you know so one campaign okay but again I'm looking at this campaign box with all these minis I'm like it's totally not worth it thank goodness they have a standy only pledge yeah um so they have for $90 you could do just the the one campaign which to let's be honest is probably enough for most people if we're being honest let's be real here you're not going to play through five full campaigns okay yeah so for and I do not mind playing with cardboard standies one it's something I don't have to paint so you know it'll already have art on it and it's not going to take up a thousand acres of space because you have to store all those minis right so I'm looking at this I would definitely consider the 990 stande pledge um you know if I had right now if I had money to burn which I don't really feel like I do so I personally am probably not going to spend money on it if I did I think the $90 pledge is not a bad deal to get a full campaign not going to get minis but that's whatever like who cares like you can play just as easily with stand you know for $90 for a full campaign I feel like it's a pretty good deal for a lot of people and I would recommend people as much as cool as this looks and as fun as the demo is if you've never played ATO or if you're looking to get into it don't don't go

41:14 all in okay that's a lot of money and a lot of time get the get the $90 standy pledge and like test it out to see if you really like it and then you probably get the other stuff second hand if you finish the campaign here's the thing I this was my first first running with TTS fully like actually setting it up and and recording to to play out the game and we're still not done yeah um I don't know how much we have even if the boss fight because they said that their that their demo was 8 to 10 hours and I'm like that's insane honestly if don't even don't even back the $90 thing pay 10 to 20 bucks for TTS yeah and try this on TTS and read through the PDF rule book and and and play it here you're going to literally get how the game plays for the most part and they mentioned this is also very good on them and here for the demo as well as on the rule book they mention full game stuff here's what it's in the in the full game here's where here's what you would do in the full game here's what happens because they mentioned multiple things even even even in death they were like yeah death is not the end um full game there's a lot more that goes for that resuscitation things that they haven't fully put out so you're going to still get what the main experience for the most part and and then that's going to let you know if you're going to want to spend the 90 to the 400 which it's going to be

42:45 more they're going to add more content it's not just 400 to me after paying for everything for a on trespass I'm like 400 that's cheap true but for somebody who's like doesn't know if this if they're going to love this or play all of it you don't need to buy five campaigns worth of material no absolutely not yeah the amount of times that I've like been unsure about getting a game and I've tested it on TTS first for free and realized okay I actually hate this game or okay actually I really love this game is a huge like it's a lifesaver honest I me I used to I used to back games literally Willie just oh back back back because at the time I was like I need to keep making new content I need to get new videos and keep doing that because that's how I'm going to grow my channel my Channel's grown slightly enough that I'm I'm like this is my Niche you you come to my channel for this like I yes I do Standalone games but it's mainly big Campaign games that I focus on um but nowadays with certain YouTubers like I'll I'll just watch them I'll be like I want to know how this game plays now I don't want to randomly drop 300 get the game play it realize it sucks and be pissed yeah yeah so so yeah I think keeps getting you know more advanced it's fiddly as hell I I still don't like TTS but I'm enjoying the demo yeah and you do get used to a lot more and and even with fiddlin like you said it's a way you can play games for free to to test them out you know part though you just click up the setup

44:17 so good yeah it's the best part of TTS it's so amazing we need to load the back half okay let me just press this button oh God that's so it's so sexy yep it's all done it's all done for you oh hey here's here's yeah there's new creatures the OTAs oh nice that's cool so that's what those minis were that we that we pulled out yeah hot so damn that's more demo so let's go now whether or not we'll continue the full demo or if we'll just end it after the boss fight we'll just kind of depend on what Ethan wants to do we're feeling yeah um but I'm very excited to see what the boss fight is like um so that will be the next the next video so Ethan on a scale of 1 to 10 with a very very hard caveat that this is a demo and it's for half the game on the extraction part yeah where are you sitting what's what's kind of like your your second impression okay well I feel hypocritical because we did a two-hour video where I said I don't like doing number ratings and I don't think it should be inter reviews but um I I'd say again with all the caveats like I think a solid seven out of 10 is very reasonable whether or not somebody out there thinks out of 10 is bad or not whatever you can decide it for yourself I don't think that's a bad number so that's a good very good number in my head saying it's perfect yeah it's like well first of all no I don't have the game it's not it's technically not finished um that's actually where I'm at too um is is a seven out of 10 that is that's a very

45:48 loose seven for the for literally not even ranking the full game yeah it's got good potential with a good foundation yes if the boss fights are just as exciting and thematic and exhilarating as they are in atto um then then I think uh then I think this could definitely definitely go up but the real question is Seth where do you how do you compare this to arcs your favorite game of all time [ __ ] ARS you know what um this is memorable that's fair there you go you know what's funny though it got it's one point High LOL higher than what I gave ARS the demo is better than the full base game of arcs a million perc man don't watch my top 10 dis or top five disappointing games of 2024 this year um but yes so that's it everyone that's our thoughts on the Excursion section for enormity um keep watching the series cuz the next will be the uh will be the the boss incursion I think is what they're called um and we'll just kind of keep going from there yeah or you can just jump to the boss discussion cuz we'll probably do one for the boss fights themselves but yeah let us know what you're thinking of the demo and what the game potential is in the comments below but other than that like comment share and subscribe and every wonderful whatever time of day it is for you hey everyone thank you for watching and I really hope that you enjoyed the video if you would like to see more of my content go ahead

47:20 and click that subscribe button and the bell to be notified whenever I upload any new content if you feel like supporting the channel you can go ahead and click that patreon link to be taken to my patreon and any help is truly appreciated other than that stick around for any any other run throughs or reviews or cool top 10 or whatever I feel like putting on other than that like comment share and subscribe and have a wonderful whatever time of day it is for you