Dustborn Demo - Bad Game

There has been a shitstorm around Dustborn so big that I just had to play the demo and see how things really are.

I didn’t manage to finish the whole demo, because 4th scene was too painful to play. So I went through the first 3 scenes - unstuck the person fixing the tour bus, just chat around in the bus and the scene on the border with Republic where they had to play song as a band. And there was fourth, the combat. And here I just quit after a while. Man, that was so bad.

The Fourth scene…I’m not sure if I understood everything. First a police Osprey clone comes and torches the poppy seed field which is made to make opium. Then the plane comes to the farm and robots start to jump off. Now the main character, black woman, holds a bat and tries to kill all police robots. Robots say something along “do not resist”, “resistance is futile”, “surrender peacefully” and she and her relative say “you are working for oppressors” and similar lines. This sounds like from b-action movies, but it wasn’t funny. Then I used my special power shouting “you are weak” to incapacitate robots and finish them with the bat. Then my relative threw me charged ball and I took down Osprey with it. Then there was a boss or two. Maybe before. Then I pressed Alt+F4, because my IQ started to lower and deleted it.

These woke/antifa fantasies are just bad. Some people nowadays just want to see the world burn. Or just be angry at the world. Why I find them bad? I’ve seen enough drugs, alcohol and other substances misuse. These people also have a culture of writing shit on buildings and bridges and then I have to look at it next 10-20 years.

And in addition this game contains violence, but tries to lighten it up and make cute. I think it is not justified. Not in this setting. Or maybe it is a trauma and PTSD of the main character who then sees enemies as robots and have cute weapons as a way to deal with it. In any case the game mechanic is not fun.

Ragnar said the game is apolitical. I don’t agree. There were always games where player were fighting authorities like Mirror’s Edge, Watchdogs or Wolfenstein. But back then it was mostly a fantasy. Maybe some Chinese cities reached this level of surveillance. This game is directly related to many current topics in a society.

Ragnar also want to create a discussion with this game, so here it is.

About the first 3 scenes - they were fine, even a little funny. I don’t even mind playing for a girl boss who is also a passive-aggressive bitch and have to have the last word. Other NPCs seems to be fine too, although in trailers they look like a bunch of losers. The guy is brains, main character is doer, not sure who is supposed to be muscle and funny ones.

I don’t know what would I do better - take Johnny Silverhand from Cyberpunk 2077. He is also anti many topics as this game and he is just great. Senua from Hellblade is solid too. Perhaps this game should be a book or maybe there will be better games about this in the future.

Just clicked through the 17 hours gameplay and while I appreciate it tries to deal with social matters and traumas, it looks like you could cut 50% of content and it could be actually good. Maybe….I’d say this game is too depressing to be successful.

Dustborn Demo

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