Partial Control

Partial Control is a low poly/minimalist semi-turn based strategy game with a welcome level of depth and a novel, viable concept. The game plays autonomously, but you get occasional pauses where you can issue instructions to your character... who will follow those instructions then go on autopilot and (hopefully) succeed in whatever it's trying to do. The idea is that you're a cyborg on a ship full of cyborgs and you've all been hacked and are trying to kill each other. The game also features upgrade systems where you can improve your weapons, all together it's a good concept but the technical implementation is woefully poor. The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and hig…

Partial control is a weird yet fascinating indie game, in which you play as a character who can only decide on their move in very specific moments (hence the name). In this review I want to address a few specific things about the game, I might make a more full review later on or not. [b]Gameplay[/b] In Partial Control, each room is a puzzle. But, not necessarily a puzzle in the traditional sense, where there's a clear cut solution- but rather... some sort of a strange, adaptive puzzle, where you come in with an assumption and might have to change your decisions according to what happens, or if you end up failing and trying again. I think this form of freeform puzzles can be alluring and interesting. However, it does have some shortcomings in that you can get "stuck" (with no solution anywhere in sight or the number of tries you have in the post-campaign mode). This is not an issue that is exclusive to this game, however, it's also something you can see with games like Into the Breach for example (though it's less bad here imo). Additionally sometimes it's tough to be sure what something would do (do I want to make the missile large? or not? etc.) and what the result would be, si…

The game is alright, its definitely an interesting concept but it doesn't quite compel me personally to keep playing. Did have a funny moment where the game's default name for my cyborg was some crude polish slang- FJUT2. The story that gets introduced is okay, the dialogue is meh. Definitely more of a gameplay > story game, and im sure there is plenty of fun. It just doesn't grasp me enough to play for the amount of levels that there clearly are. If you like strategy puzzle games, definitely good to try out.

An interesting turn based puzzler for what it is. The story has some obnoxiously dumb elements to it, but it's not all that important. My biggest complaint is that for a puzzle-esque game, there seems to be some element of randomness in the AI. I've been told my bot will run around an object only for it to run into walls, and I could run the exact same solution several times and get different results every time because a robot would randomly miss or a shot would randomly pierce through a wall or not. It's hard to have a strategy puzzler when the outcomes are random. I don't know if it's worth the price tag but it was fun enough for what it is.

This game was tough in a couple ways. Sure it was a good puzzler but it much overstayed its welcome and became a bit of a slog towards the end where my desire to just finish it began to heavily outweigh my desire to play it. It's great to see the creator had so many ideas but it's important to know when to cut some. A good example being the teleporter or the multi-cloning device near the end of the game whose use was limited and mostly felt like something thrown in to test the waters without needing to fully commit. This being said, I did beat all the levels except the last one so it at least kept me engaged until that point. Overall the game was nice to spend time on and had a cool premise but could have been condensed into 30 or so levels instead of the 81 it ended up being. Edit: Beat the last level and I'll be honest, it felt good when i figured it out. Still recommended despite the earlier gripes.

The kind of a game I like to have in my collection for when I want something simple and unchallenging on an intellectual level. The gaming equivalent of a beer. Recco.