Sunday Gold Review (DaSkruff)
tl;dr: A game with fantastic artistic vision... and tedious gameplay.
Sunday Gold has fantastic art, fantastic music, and industry-best voice acting. The combat has a strongly cinematic feel to it, with comic book cut out frames and dramatic camera moves that really help sell the tone. The story is alright, having a setting players have seen before and a predictable narrative, but it has enough unique design and memorable villains to meet along the way that it still makes for a fun ride, even if you already know where it's going.
Unfortunately, since this is a game, the biggest thing holding this title back is the gameplay- and it's not just one element.
• You have action points that are required not only to do actions in battle, but actions in the field. Run out of points in the field? You have to 'end your turn' to replenish them, which initially when you enter an area has a 50% chance of initiating combat, that escalates up to a 100% chance, the longer you're in a given location. So say you end the combat with low action points- suddenly you're back to the map, without the ability to do anything, so you have to end your turn, which has a 50% chance of immediately spawning another fight... Your only option to be efficient, is to draw out every combat with extra turns towards the end specifically to have each character block so that you can finish combat with the ability to do anything back on the map. It makes reasonably forgettable fights take even longer for the duration of the game.
• Items are 90% useless, and you find a TON of them. I believe the basic painkilers heal something like 15-20% of your health... which enemies will knock out in one attack, so it's much better to use Sally's substantially better healing skill than a consumable item. Most items are like this- they don't have enough impact to ever justify using them instead of just attacking on that turn.
• Most of the skills in combat are useless. It feels a lot someone sat down and created a list of 'it'd be cool if you could...' but then never playtested them to find out if they were actually useful. Each character has about 10 skills (with a decent amount of overlap) of which, 1-2 are useful in combat. By the end of the game you get to a point where you're doing 300 damage on a basic attack on enemies, and if you apply bleed to them... Bleed will do 5 damage at the start of their turn. It really feels like there was no effort to test or balance the status effects.
• Each character has a minigame associated with them, that are 1.) kinda not really fun, and 2.) wear out their welcome by the end of the game. It's a nice idea, each character having a unique skill they bring to the table, but the amount of times you have to do them, without them ever changing gets real boring about halfway through the game. Additionally (and this may be because I played the game on an older system), Sally's strength game can either be extremely buggy, or just downright undoable. The arrow you're meant to control skipped around wildly for me, even on easy challenges, which eventually led to me switch the accessibility options for making the mini games easier on. Similarly, Frank's minigame would occasionally read a miss incorrectly when the icon was squarely inside the 'sweet spot.'
• A lot of the game exploration boils down to the worst kind of video game gameplay- hidden object puzzles, where you drag your mouse around looking for the interactable thing that you need to get that hidden security log. There is an ability to highlight interactive items on the screen but by default it costs 5(!) action points, of your 7 on that character. You can level the skill up in the tree, but why would you when you can level up skills that help you in combat instead?
• Your inventories are split between each character, which requires a lot of remembering who picked up a specific item, navigating through the poorly designed menus, selecting the item, selecting the trade option, selecting the recipient, exiting the inventory, selecting the correct character to use the item and then doing the action that costs action points... And you have to do this for every kind of item. Wrong person picked up a weapon they can't use? Got a gear item you want to use on a different character? Got a key item you need to give to a different person? Here or there, this may not have been terrible, but by the end of the game you're doing it constantly. Sure, it adds to the realism, but someone along the road should have asked "Is this adding to the game? Is it making it more fun? Or just tedious?"
That's not to say the gameplay is all bad. There are some fun puzzles, There's a lot of weapon variety with different parameters, and equipment with different options that can even effect your weapon types, giving you some freedom in customization of your characters builds. The exploration can be rewarding when it nets you some new variety of weapon/gear. There's a fun balancing system of damage type weaknesses and resistances in enemies that keeps you thinking about and promoting having a diverse team.
Overall, I'd still say it's a product still worth experiencing...
but could have been substantially better if more time had been taken to test and balance the gameplay elements, with anywhere near as much as love as went into every other aspect of the game.