Tron: Identity Review (xXMarT1naXx)
As a huge fan of Tron, I was disappointed at first when the new Tron game turned out to be a visual novel. But I decided to eventually bite the bullet and take the risk. And... it wasn't exactly worth it. Let's dig in.
Visually, it looks good. It's definitely not a stunning game by any means but the artstyle holds it up and the 2D portraits look very good. The environments are well crafted and it definitely captures the spirit of Tron: Legacy's artstyle.
The soundtrack is... serviceable. It's mostly synthy ambient music and it works within the confines of the game as subtle background music. It's quite relaxing actually.
So from a visual and sound side, it's alright. But what about the gameplay and story? That's when the issues start creeping in.
The UI is pretty abysmal. The giant dialogue box on the bottom of the screen is distracting and keeps diverting your attention from the meticulously crafted 3D environments and it doesn't work particularly well. It also doesn't scale with UI settings so changing the UI scale just makes the text on it bigger or smaller.
The gameplay is mostly standard visual novel stuff and that works well. You pick dialogue options and progress the story that way. During the downtime, you either get the option to pick which part of the building you want to visit next. Occassionally you also get to do the defrag minigames, which are frankly awful. They drag a lot and come up wayy too often.
As for the story... the game's biggest flaw is that the story builds up to something big but it literally ends before it can do anything with it. Basically a bunch of talking but nothing ever happens. The story actually starts out very engaging. There's this mystery brewing, more and more actors join in... and then it starts falling apart. A lot of poorly executed red herrings, very cheesy plot twist that never gets elaborated or expanded upon and dialogues that lead nowhere and repeat themselves.
Despites the solid worldbuilding, the main story just doesn't work on it's own and this feels like 1/5 of an episodic game rather than a full standalone title. It has it's moments, especially in the first half, but as a whole it's an incomplete story that leads nowhere and it's definitely not worth the 15 euros.