More often than not, though, combat comes off as a distraction – so it’s a good thing you never really have to fight.At the same time, Tides’ battles include some interesting ideas. Even when I was prepared, my little band of four would themselves surrounded with, say, seven cultists.

When I later finally had to jump into a real fight after a poorly chosen response, I realized I barely knew what to do with all the combat skills I'd amassed from leveling. So every time I'd move, I'd have to wait for all of them to move as well, thus forcing the incident to go on far longer than it needed to. I only had one companion at the time, and there were maybe seven of the other guys. The problems revealed themselves in an early 'crisis' (Tides' fancy name for a battle), in which I had to sneak past a gaggle of humanoid insects while distracting them with musical objects. Most of the time, though, it's just kind of tedious. Tides of Numenera delights in piling several enemies on the Last Castoff and his or her buds at once, and they hit hard, making it uncommonly tough to survive even with the use of ciphers or taking advantage of an option to kill the leader and cause their followers to go running. The problem lies in the number of enemies it tosses at you. Not because I'm opposed to hacking up a few digital bad dudes with digital swords – far from it – but because I usually found the combat comparatively dull.

“I can't say I found the thought of the latter particularly appealing. More importantly, it preserves Planescape: Torment's weird philosophical tone and aesthetic, filling the screen with everything from quasi-medieval markets to entire cities crafted out of meat. It's too bad that the combat falls short when it's actually necessary, but the surrounding world usually presents enough memorable wonders to make up for it.Īs a spiritual successor to 1999's Planescape: Torment, one of the finest (and strangest) RPGs ever made, Torment: Tides of Numenera embraces its predecessor's isometric design with its use of the capable Pillars of Eternity engine. It's a strange concept in the context of most roleplaying games, and Torment: Tides of Numenera delivers a satisfyingly strange world to complement it. 'Reading,' the Nigerian poet Ben Okri said once, 'is an act of civilization.' Torment: Tides of Numenera embraces this idea, pairing a whole fantasy novel’s worth of quality quest text with a design foundation that champions chatting with enemies rather than running them through with swords.

Torment tides of numenera trainer