The Council - Episode 1: The Mad Ones Reviews
Aside from the stilted voice acting and ugly visuals, The Council gets off to an excellent start with The Mad Ones. The over-arching plot is sufficiently intriguing, while the light RPG mechanics gives the narrative adventure genre the kick in the pants it has needed.
The Council - Episode 1: The Mad Ones perfectly sets the tone for the remaining episodes, crafting an enthralling narrative with a colorful cast of characters. The inclusion of the RPG elements helps dynamically influence conversations and how you perceive other characters. Using your skills instead of focusing on win or lose quick time events is a nice change of pace for the genre. Finding manuscripts/books while you are exploring yield free skill points during each quest, rewarding players that thoroughly search the environments, not to mention pieces of amber that extends the number of available effort points. Although there were slight visual irregularities, and minor hiccups on panning camera shots, The Council performs rather well but doesn't have added support for PlayStation 4 Pro or Xbox One X.
Occasionally rough around the edges, The Council's first episode is a surprisingly entertaining combination of Telltale's episodic adventure games and tabletop RPG elements.
The Council, just going by the first episode, is a very good attempt to evolve the choose-your-own adventure game style, going far beyond what Telltale have attempted.
The Mad Ones is one of the strongest openers in episodic gaming to date.
The Mad Ones raises a lot of questions and leaves us on a heck of a cliffhanger, but even without that, it sets up an exciting enough premise to leave me on tenterhooks for the next episode. I can't wait to see what else Big Bad Wolf has up its sleeve.
If the rest of the series plays out like The Council: Episode 1 – The Mad Ones, then adventure game fans are in for quite a ride. The storylines and mysteries are intriguing thus far. While there is simplicity in the puzzles, the RPG elements and deeper conversation system make the game more appealing than some other adventure titles. There's currently no timetable for future episodes of The Council, but adventure fans will enjoy this title.
Episode 1 of the Council AKA The Mad Ones sets out to subvert the status quo of narrative based adventures but stumbles on some of the basics.
The Council successfully innovates on what has frankly become a bit of a tired genre in my opinion, but more importantly, how they have innovated works well and is enjoyable and adds value.
A strong start for the latest in a long wave of episodic narrative adventure games, The Council sets its stall out from the beginning as something unique, inventive and deserving of your attention.
The first episode of The Council is a pleasant surprise. Big Bad Wolf has succeeded in inserting a snappy roleplaying system into a historical investigative-style narrative adventure, and the implications are surprisingly original, brilliant and ambitious. There are minor flows in the script and technical wise is quite clumsy, but it's a good opening episode indeed.
Review in Italian | Read full review
A very promising start to a series with an intriguing story, interesting setting, and a unique spin on choice-based narratives.
If Cyanide Studios can smooth out the creases and keep delivering the narrative goods, I could see The Council becoming the next big narrative-driven franchise. It's up to Episode Two to keep the momentum going.
If you can get past the slow start and some of the glaring technical problems of The Mad Ones, then you will find the most innovative episodic adventure games to come from a studio other than Telltale. I can see The Council becoming a standout title within its genre when it's finished, but as it stands The Mad Ones has enough problems to where everyone may not be on board just yet.
The Council is a good attempt to refresh the narrative adventure genre, that starts to feel a little bit too repetitive these days. Although it's not based on a popular intelectual property, it does offer a story full of mystery and some interesting characters.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The first episode of The Council shows some interesting ideas that could change the way future adventures will entertain fan of this particular genre. We hope that the guys at Big Bad Wolf could keep the freshness of these ideas during the whole season, and we can't wait to try the second chapter in the coming weeks.
Review in Italian | Read full review
This first episode takes its time to introduce the plot of the Council as well as the RPG mechanics. They suit very well to the narrative genre, allowing the player to follow its own path through the choices of the game.
Review in French | Read full review
Despite my frustrations with its shortcomings, I want to see where The Council leads me, and if it manages to deliver a narrative payoff in spite of itself.
The Council provides some much needed zing to a stale genre. It has many issues, but there is plenty here to keep you intrigued about the next episode.
More than enough new ideas have been thrown at The Council to make it stand out from the crowd, and, while flaws are clearly evident in the three hours that you will spend with this first episode, it makes for a promising start for what is left to come.