The system seems usable, but requires constant consultation of charts to use. Now due to color coding these charts are realtively quick and easy to read but you still always need to check a chart. I'll take Champions for crunch-heavy systems or Fate for crunch-light. This sits in an unhappy middle ground. Also the art is the most over-sexualized I have seen in a decade. I hope everyone in your gaming group is comfortable with every female character having two barely-covered beach balls strapped to their chest, yikes. Seriously, this is approaching pornographic in nature. After trying it some more the rules are overly complex. I like champions, I like that complexity, but that has a complex character building system, that then plays fairly simply, meaning it is front-loaded. This is the opposite. The character building is pretty easy but the gameplay is far more complicated and complex than it needs to be this makes character generation easier but leads to slowdown in play. I cannot recomend this at all, the gameplay is distinctly sub-par and I cannot emphasize enough how over-sexulaized almost every art contianing a female is. I get that skimpy costumes is a bit of a tradition in supers games, but this is taken to such and extreem that is REALLY uncomfortable.

This game does have some pros:

The setting is fun and an interesting take on superheroics, I quite liked this aspect of the book.

The rules are simple and easy add-ons to the basic fate rules. if you know fate rules most things are a direct extension of that so it cuts down on learning time. Or it would except...

Cons:

The rules only work for about 90% of what I want them to do. There are a lot of pretty basic interactions that there are just not addressed. For one example each power gains special effects when they succeed with style. Now that is fun and evocative, but how does it work with powers that don’t have rolls? You can also spend a FP to activate them so maybe they only have that activation method, but that leaves them significantly weaker than those that you can roll well on.

In addition the terminology is muddled the word “Power” can refer to a number of concepts that are mechanical distinct. You build your power out of powers. Either the first concept should have been powerset or the latter one effects.

The Book feels almost incomplete, the listing of power effects is pretty good, but the list of power themes afterwards is incredibly short. Sure you can just say that players should come up with their own, but not enough guidelines are given since there are only 7 of them and 4 of those are energy-projectors of one flavor or another.

There are some effects like the charged shot collateral damage effect that states it “Eradicates a barrier” What happens if you use it on a stationary character? Auto-kill? Standard attack with no benefits? Completely unharmed since they aren’t an obstacle? Some guidance on these interactions would have been great.

All of these issues are things that have actually caused issues in our gaming group, not just nitpicking.

There are also issues that haven’t come up but are still pretty serious. The fact that the base energy blast power does nearly nothing by itself is a good example of this. It is generally assumed that you have the gear to use your skills so being able to make a basic ranged attack with shoot is basically the same as having shoot, but being able to add in special effects. In comparison the Natural Weapons power grants +2 to fight rolls at the basic level, which means it is actually worth taking, even without enhancements.

I could go on for pages unfortunately. I really like the concept of trying to keep things as simple as possible for ease of play, but this errs a bit too much towards simplicity and doesn’t hold up well to creative players. The only way to really make it work is to sometimes just ignore the rules, which is not why I buy a game book.

This book is exactly what I was looking for in a FATE supers book. I had tried several others but found them lacking in one way or another, but this book is a great setting-neutral rules set. It has managed to combine the "Build your powers your own way" philosophy of Champions-like systems with the Narrative simplicty of FATE in perfect measure. If is a tiny barely more rules crunch than fate (mostly just having a ton of refresh to spend on powers), and there is a long list of powers that can look intimidating at first, but in use it manages to keep the simplicty in action that has made FATE great. If you are looking for a FATE Supers rule set I cannot recomned this book highly enough. There is only one thing that is less than perfect and it is the Art. It isn't bad, but the black and white art is lackluster and very generic, so average and mediocre that I almost wish they hadn't bothered with art in the first place. That being said I was buying this book for a good, playable rule set and that is exactly what this book delivered!

I really like the shadowrun setting and eagerly devour everything from this product line but I was kinda dissapointed with this book. It backed away from doing anything new and interesting, the biggest plot point in this book is basically a rehash of Chicago's plot. Chicago's plot wasn't bad per se, but it has been part of the setting for a decade now and I was hoping for something new. They flirted with big changes in the UCAS section, but then backed off. rreally the only significant developments could be made in a bullet point list with maybe a page of explanation split between all of them. So while this book promises big changes to the SR world, the actuall changes are pretty minor.

More Matirx options, and advanced rules. This book is well-written and useful, that's all I can ask for.

I really liked Scion 1st Edition so I was really excited by a second edition to clean up some of the glaring flaws 1e had. Unfortunately this book doesn't really do that. it bolts a scion framework onto the Storypath system, which doesn't really work well. (You are mythically fast, well too bad this system uses Stamina to dodge!) It also changes the setting which was the part of Scion I loved so much into a world that I have trouble beiving in. I can (for a game) accept that the gods are real and grant power tot heir progeny, I can accept that the forces of evil rise up to attack mortals, but I really just can't belive that everyone on earth is aware of the truth of the exsistance of the old gods...and it didn't change any of human history. The setting completely losses me at that. I know that they wanted the modern setting to be close enough to our world to be relatable, but it ends up being more suspension of disbelief in human actions than I can muster.

All in all a not very good mechanical system paired with a setting that isn't logically consistant ends up with a product I just can't recomend.

This book is not a good rules set to build your own superhero world for using the FATE system. That is what I was hoping for when I bought it and it was a bit of a disappointment on that front. The rules are pretty heavily interconnected with the setting. That means if you are in fact looking for a rules set to play in the Wearing the Cape universe this book is wonderful. I loved the art throughout the book, quite well done.

The rules are a bit convoluted for a FATE game and there are some power balance issues surrounding power classifications, for example Atlas types don’t cost any more than Ajax types and are just better, but that seems to be baked into the setting, so I can’t really fault it there, I just wish there were some other balancing method that gave someone with a more limiting concept something back. I can’t help noticing that everytime I encountered the Atlas type rules they were just better than the other types (physique adding to both attack and armor unlike the projection type rules), so it seems like it was written around the main character of the book series.

So if you are looking to play a game set in this universe this book will definitely get you there, if not I’d advise steering clear.