I’m a bit at a loss here. Miasma Chronicles, the big new IP from the makers of Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden, sounds like a proper return for developers Bearded Ladies. Their follow-up after Road To Eden, Corruption 2029, was relatively smaller in scope that focused on hard, tactical strategy gameplay without any of the RPG bits. With the indie devs self-publishing the title, it was understandable.
So Miasma Chronicles should see them return back to the glorious form they exhibit in Road To Eden, right? Right?
Presentation
If you love the desolate worlds Bearded Ladies have made that’s to be enjoyed from the overhead top-down perspective, then you’d love seeing the world of Miasma Chronicles. It’s gray, dying, and scatter among the ruins are glimmers of a future society like ours. But with a dash bit of Americana jingo-ism being thrown in. If you love the political commentary of Fallout, Horizon and even Death Stranding to some extent, you’ll find the worldbuilding charming and captivating.
And despite the monotonous colour palette seen in the first few hours, the game still conjures up some strong art direction, making the locations memorable in some form. The many fun signboards found in the dilapidated theme park Gator Zone, advertisements of a corporation from the future’s past, gore, bones and corpses left after a pack of monsters attack a settlement.
The world filled with those swirling miasma is beautiful to behold. Though the animations still do look a little rough around the edges. The janky movements of going out of cover, vaguely aim the weapon at the target, a tepid shooting animation plays then awkwardly shuffling back into cover is just as janky as the XCOM games.
Miasma Chronicles is set in “New America”, in particular the southern states of the USA. So the American English being spoken here have a very specific twang to them. I am not familiar enough with American culture to judge it, but it’s very clear that these folks speak with an accent. And when they don’t, then it’s intentional as a character trait.
Speaking of, the voice acting work is pretty decent. From nailing the accents, to the measured use of quips and banter. The main characters, the brotherly duo of Elvis and Diggs, have a strong brotherly bond between them, and you can feel it from their earnest encouragement, in-jokes (“tiger tough!”) and knowing when to back off when things get heated and serious. The cast of characters the duo meet and party up (so far) are also interesting folks to be around.
The music, while not really engrossing, is still good enough. It mixes the twang of country folks music from the south with some electronica beats when things get a bit sci-fi.
If you’re worried about gaming performance, a very particular problem with many high-profile games launching on PC terribly, Miasma Chronicles is not one of them. The game can easily be maxed out in graphical settings on an old 2019-spec gaming laptop (Intel i7 9th gen, Nvidia RTX 2060) and keep hold 60 fps. But that doesn’t mean there are no bugs- plenty of quality-of-life issues, major stuff like a flawed UI to the playtime counter displayed on each save game not reflecting proper playtime.
Gameplay
Unlike Corruption 2029, Miasma Chronicles is a return to form to the style of Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden. It’s an RPG with tactical strategy ala XCOM as its method of combat. Plus stealth elements where you can engage and disengage enemies by ambushing them.
In Miasma Chronicles, you follow the journey of young mechanic Elvis and his robot brother Diggs. Elvis wants to meet up with ol’ momma again after she disappeared one night and left him with Diggs and a special glove. What follows after that is an adventure of self-discovery, an investigation into the miasma that has wiped the world into ruin, and fighting the corrupt leaders that somehow have absolute power over the small remnants of humankind living in small towns.
Most of the time you get to explore the world, pick up items and talk to people similar to how a CRPG plays. Don’t expect an extensive dialogue system though, it’s all straightforward stuff – to its detriment at some point. Because of the simple dialogue tree, some quests where you get to pick either one of the multiple items as a reward doesn’t let you compare and see what those items are, which is a bad design choice if you ask me. The game assumes you know the items when being presented with such choices.
There is at least one fun thing when you go out exploring, and it’s the keypad puzzles. You come across these optional rooms a lot throughout the game, but the accompanying lore collectible will only give you clues on where to find the codes, rather than telling you outright. It’s fun puzzles that require you to look around the local environment for clues. And it can range from looking at the stained keypads to going into ancient bathrooms to count how many stalls are in there. It’s neat stuff.
At any given time, you have a party of up to three characters. Elvis and Diggs, plus one companion which you can change as you find other party members. You can find enemy squads patrolling an area where a combat encounter is set to happen but you are in control on when and where to engage the enemies. You can sneak around, get each party member into position by hiding them behind cover, and then ambush them.
It’s a familiar system seen in Road To Eden and Corruption 2029. Though I feel like it’s a bit looser than seen in Corruption 2029.
By loose, I mean that this aspect of gameplay doesn’t click as well as it should.
Here are my issues with the combat. On standard difficulty, I feel like enemies are way too tanky and hard to put down. You’ll always be outnumbered, that’s the whole appeal of this brand of combat. And you can even the odds by slowly picking enemies one by one by ambushing them and using silenced weapons.
But in the early part of the game, it’s hard to pull that off. Weapons are hard to come by and silenced weapons more so, so you’ll probably going to rely on the sniper girl Jade a lot during the early game. And even then, her relatively strong sniper rifle isn’t good enough to one-shot most of the normal enemies. The Scout, a grunt unit found commonly in the early game, can only die by a critical shot of Jade’s initial sniper rifle. Which has RNG so you can potentially miss your shot.
Halfway through the first chapter I gave up and crank down to Narrative difficulty. And the game just feels better immediately, thanks to enemies being less tanky. Their HP are significantly lowered, enough that Scouts can be one-shotted with said sniper rifle.
And the fact that all party members are back to full health after every encounter is a game-changer, for the better. Stocking up on medipods is expensive, and unlike JRPGs where you can find a place that restores all points, sometimes for free like at save points, this game doesn’t have that, which makes it even more difficult to survive.
I applauded the developers for making it hard but rewarding in Corruption 2029, but somehow in Miasma Chronicles, I don’t feel that way. It could be I’m a different person these days.
Granted I also picked the Full Tactical mode, where hit percentages are a thing (Light Tactical allows for more ways to get guaranteed hits). So that might have stacked the chips against me.
But there’s also another bone needs picking which is the UI.
The UI, right now at launch, is a bit of a mess. It took me a long while to get into the rhythm of the game’s combat because the UI is inconsistent and not showing me the right information.
You have your party’s essential meters on the top left side of the screen as well as on top of their heads during combat, but the top left one is missing some crucial info, like how much armour the units have. On top of that, the UI text and elements are so tiny. I need to squint to see some of the pop-up messages that are gone too quickly. There is a text log of important actions like who made a kill, but it’s also missing crucial info like if the unit is inflicted by a new status effect, or loss of its armour points.
Some of the UI prompts are vague. When you score a crit kill, it says “AP Restored” which I assumed it was full AP, the whole 2 points. It isn’t. It’s just 1 AP that’s restored, as seen in a smaller prompt that appeared.
So with only 1 AP then you can’t shoot again, since shooting uses 2 AP? No. Shooting, despite it showing it will swallow up 2 APs if you immediately do so, does not consume 2 AP. You can still use 1 AP for an action but if you shoot, that’s the end of the turn. So why not just say somewhere in the UI that shooting ends the turn for that unit rather than having this presented as vaguely as this?
The worse offender, which should be fixable in a post-launch patch, is the error text when you can’t shoot. It will only say there’s no target to shoot, even when the problem wasn’t that there’s no target in range, but your current equipped weapon has run out and needed to reload. It’s a minor gripe once you play over 10 hours and get the grips of the systems, but until then it was always a head-scratcher.
Hopefully, the UI can get another pass of fixes and quality-of-life improvements because it surely has made me enjoyed the combat less. The combat on standard difficulty is already as hard as it is, and the UI not being able to present to the player all the tools and chess pieces available to overcome the hardship makes it worse.
On that note, I find the tools you have to fight against the many enemies to be lackluster. The assault rifle being the polar opposite of the sniper rifle (assault rifle shots get more accurate in closer range, snipers work best at its maximum range) is neat. Shotguns having a fixed arc used for crowd control is great. The bouncer, which lets you do trick shots as the projectile can ricochet multiple times, is weak and too situational.
Once I settled for a setup I like I never really find good reasons to change it, other than when a weapon with a higher level arrives. Which is only occasionally. Level II weapons are rare finds in the first act, before they become mandatory in the second act as tougher threats emerge.
Even more lackluster are the miasma powers. Accessible to glove users like Elvis, lore-wise this is some magical force of nature that allows for miasma manipulation. And yet the powers you find early on are weaksauce. A Miasma Storm that can be used to grab and throw one enemy around feel too situational. An electric jolt that can spread to three enemies only tickles the HP bar by just a bit, while draining your kilowatt bar to empty.
The meta, so to speak, for the combat is to be able to thin out the numbers as quickly as possible, so utility abilities like this barely give you an advantage in battle. Maybe some tweaks in numbers could make it feel better.
Each character have a skill deck where you can pick skills, or refund them at any time. But it’s still a skill tree- some abilities requires a previous tree to unlock. It’s fine, it gives some room on how to spec each unit differently, with a few cool unique abilities that you’ll only start seeing by mid-game, 10 hours deep.
I’m not asking for Miasma Chronicles to be a power fantasy, no. My problem here is that the combat puzzles don’t feel satisfying to solve with the tools you are provided. In Corruption 2029, I know I failed because I didn’t consider all my options. In Miasma Chronicles, when I fail I just give up, I don’t feel like it’s my fault and more that the game is being unfair. That’s no good.
Still, I’m so grateful for Narrative difficulty, as this feels more balanced in my opinion. Your attacks are strong enough to face the onslaught of enemies. Your party doesn’t feel too squishy. Diggs got ripped to shreds easily in the first chapter when I have 3 armour points on him. When I bumped the difficulty down, he can properly tank and take three turns of punishment as I send him to the frontlines, as it should.
Miasma Chronicle’s combat still scratch that itch like an XCOM game, but if you’re going in, prepare for some tough battles. You have to be tough, tiger tough, to get through this on Standard difficulty and Full Tactical mode.
Content
Miasma Chronicles can stretch far into 20 hours, with plenty of side content to lead you astray from time to time.
The story itself is interesting. It uses many of the sci-fi post-apocalypse tropes, and also a “chosen one” bit. But the characters feel heartful, and warm and react accordingly to the situation at hand. There are some melodramatic moments but the game is clever enough to not stretch it out too long until it becomes cringe.
That and the worldbuilding is enough to make you go and fight the many battles ahead. Exploration is light, the meat of the game is the tactical combat. If you are okay with playing it slow, especially since stealth really helps out in making encounters easier, then expect to spend some time in New America.
Personal Enjoyment
I wanted to like Miasma Chronicles. And in some aspects I still do. I love the leading brothers, that at first glance might have suggested that this brotherhood journey has a Full Metal Alchemist kind of flavour (it’s not that). Them discovering their fate, the land beyond their hometown, is a journey I love going through.
The combat really left a bad taste in my mouth. It feels like getting your favourite KFC order (say, a snack plate) at your usual KFC joint only this time, they messed up your order and they had the gall to put a drumstick as one of the chicken pieces served. In the heat of the moment, when I keep facing impossible odds with its difficult combat with a terrible set of tools to overcome it, I’m disappointed.
But the more I played the game with the lower difficulty option the more I start to enjoy my romps through Kentucky Hills and the other regions beyond.
But also, I feel guilty. When I played Corruption 2029 I think highly of its difficulty when I reviewed it. And that may or may not be why we ended up here.
That’s not something I would say these days. Difficulty itself shouldn’t be the defining aspect of a video game. But whether the hardship is worth overcoming. Is it rewarding and intuitive to figure out the solution to the problem? If the game punishes you, do you learn the right lesson out of it or just get angry? These are the core aspects that make a relatively difficult game fun. With Miasma Chronicles, the Standard difficulty with Full Tactical mode just doesn’t quite click together. Lower it to Narrative difficulty and then it starts becoming fun. Combat is still challenging but feels surmountable if you’re not min-maxing to your fullest.
Verdict
Miasma Chronicles builds upon the success of Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden, but maybe have taken the wrong lessons from Corruption 2029. The world-building and story are interesting for those who enjoy a good post-apocalypse setting. But the combat system, despite its solid foundation and brilliant use of stealth, is hampered by its weak choice of arsenal and undercooked UI.
There’s still a decent game in there if you can brush off the shortcomings. If you don’t mind playing on an easier difficulty, Miasma Chronicles is a decent RPG-tactical-strategy romp.
Reviewed on PC. Review key provided by the publisher.
Miasma Chronicles
Miasma Chronicles builds upon the success of Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden, but maybe have taken the wrong lessons from Corruption 2029.
There's still a decent game in there if you can brush off the shortcomings. If you don't mind playing on an easier difficulty, Miasma Chronicles is a decent RPG-tactical-strategy romp.
- Presentation 8.5
- Gameplay 7.5
- Content 8.5
- Personal Enjoyment 7