About This Game Start practicing your evil laugh! As the world's greatest criminal mastermind, choose a lair, hire a minion, and steal the world's largest ball of aluminum foil! (Or, destroy the world. FINE.)"Diabolical" is a 130,000-word interactive novel by Nick Aires, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based--without graphics or sound effects--and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.Famous, feared, or filthy rich—why not all three? You've got the money and the motives to build an evil empire worthy of the most ruthless villain the world has ever seen. Crush the good guys and terrorize the populace! Stamp a big red "FAIL" on your enemies' foreheads! Plunder your way to world domination – or sit back and pet your kitty while your henchmen do it for you.Will you be a high-tech daredevil, a ruthless military soldier, or an apparition terrifying to behold? What calling card will you leave at the scene of your crimes? Whatever your choices, the results will be diabolical. Play a villainous story of scheming, grandstanding, and laughing evilly. Interview and hire the best possible (or best available) minion. Decide when to use trickery, when to use force, and when to hide behind henchmen. Choose the ultimate, guaranteed-to-be-infamous nickname. Play as male or female, with straight, gay, and bisexual romance options. Destroy the world! 7aa9394dea Title: DiabolicalGenre: Indie, RPGDeveloper:Choice of GamesPublisher:Choice of GamesRelease Date: 6 Nov, 2015 Diabolical Cheat Do I like Diabolical? Yes, absolutely, but it's not a game that I could ever recommend. The writing is good, entertaining, and occasionally funny, but all too often the game railroads you into different choices. You'll be given a list of options, but the response will almost always be "He isn't really listening" or "You thought I was serious?" What feel like major decisions are quickly made irrelevant by randomly changing circumstances, and you never get the chance to truly direct your villain. The character decides their own overarching goal or plan, and you pick the specifics, which seems to me to be the opposite of what one would want from a game like this. Diabolical can be fun, but it doesn't offer nearly as much choice as you would want from a text-based game.. I enjoyed this game overall, but was let down by the linear story (despite it being a choose your own adventure story) and the fact that despite the story not taking itself seriously, all the silly choices seemed to be destined to fail. It would ahve benefitted from being able to replay the last section rather than the whole game if you want to get a slightly different ending. Failing your last mission after all that investment..... not a good feeling. For the price though, definately give it a look.. Wasnt good as I expected. There werent much options to choose. All ended up in the same way. I am dissapointed. Good luck to you in your next game.. I almost don't want to recommend this, but I have to admit I had fun. The main problem I have is the number of choices overall. They are few and far between, or you'd pick something and it'd be like: "that's not your real answer, instead you do this."Pros:-Loved the humor, wasn't expecting so many jokes and it's just well written. Went really well with my character. Your evil, but the fun kind of evil. -I really liked the writer's style. Paints the picture really well, very impressive, felt like the villain I wanted to play. -Planning points was a really interesting and unique idea. You earn them in game and spend them when you feel you need to. These unlock secret options to make your next decision succeed. -Interesting world, very good world building. Things were introduced as needed, no long history lessons. -There's different heroes, villains, vigilantes, and organizations. Sometimes I found this too much and other times it worked really well.-Favorite part of the game was chosing a sidekick. Interesting options and consequences. The sidekick acts more like your go to heavy hitter rather than an actual sidekick. -Quite a few love interests. Heroes, villains, and vigilantes. There's quite a bit of flirting, but you're not sure if you can trust them. The flirting kinda acts to build up the suspense, is this person gonna kiss me or kill me? -You can focus on 2 of 3 different styles of solving problems: ingenuity, combat, or terror. Using all 3 doesn't work out too well. -Eager to play again, check out the things I missed. Cons:-You don't have alot of options when designing your character. Tech, combat, or apparition that's it. -Picking your lair doesn't matter, the story just makes genetic references to it. -Story jumps from 1st heist, to origin, to having a base of operations with anything your can imagine and an army of minions. Didn't see the need for this, it felt like a large part of your story was missing. -Not sure how I feel about the final fight, it's a bit too heroic for my villainous taste. Final Thoughts:-Better to get it on sale. If you wanted a more serious tone, than you probably won't like it. But if you're willing to keep an open mind and looking for some laughs it's worth playing. The story hits it's stride mid game.. Disclaimer: I played this through with steam "offline" on a road trip, so my "time played" appears lower than it is. Frustrating, I thought it would save the achievements at least...Don't get me wrong, I love Choice of Games. But more importantly, I ADORE villainy. Anything where you can be a villain is an automatic buy for me; I am a total sucker for the gimmick. That being said...This game is well-written and quite endearing, and it's certainly very funny. In that sense, I almost feel like it's not taking your character seriously. (That's not necessarily bad, by any means.) The story is short in comparison to many of their other works, and it just doesn't have the same replayability value. Maybe I was pursuing the wrong routes, but I felt like they were all much the same.Disappointing, but at least I got to be a villain. I'm still a sucker for the gimmick.. As much as I love "choose your own adventure" games, I wouldn't recommend this one. Why? Because while you'd think your choices would matter like in other similar games, they really don't. Most choices you face lead to the same exact results and I don't mean it as in the long run. Let's say you have the choice between killing or not killing someone. First run through you'll go with one choice and next one pick the opposite choices figuring the story would be entirely different but no. If you choose to spare the person the game will let you but most of the time when you choose to kill the person, you'll either fail or be interrupted, effectively making the game painfully linear.You can't choose your own adventure, it's already been chosen for you.. If you know the other Choice games, well, you won't be surprised. This one is a lot more lighthearted than some of the other ones I played, even if you go relatively evil and kill a lot. There are some surprising twists, but the whole game has a little bit too much "deus ex machinas" for my taste.But anyway, if you want to be the villain in a cartoony way, this is definitely your game. Not regretted it.
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