Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest

OK this is going to sound weird, but all I can do is share my personal experience with the game. It's like the best tower defense game in recent history just without the towers or the defense. Uhm, OK hold on, but what does this supposed to mean? Well, for me at least the game scratches the same itch as a TD game. Every level feels like a puzzle where you try to figure out the best set of moves and the best skillls to bring/upgrade, just as how in a TD you'd try to figure out the best combination of towers for the current situation and which one of them you should upgrade. The game also has an almost identical progress system to what you can find in Defender's Quest (<- a really amazing TD game). You don't have to beat stages on hard difficulty right away, you can return to them any time you want and try to either clear the bonus objectives for addition rewards or try to beat stage on harder difficulty. Hitting the word limit, so yeah just pick up the damn game, it's great! :)

Great game! A bit like “Into The Breach” but with a story, more charming and fun. It’s surprisingly entertaining and captivating, considering how easy to understand and straightforward the combat system is and how – relatively – unimaginative the story is. It looks beautiful, runs smoothly and on “normal” difficulty it’s just hard enough to be challenging but not frustrating. The only two nitpicks I have is that I had two random crashes (though the game developers have fixed lots of bugs, so this could already be solved) and that it’s not possible to skip a whole dialogue.

Since the Grimrock games are among my all time favorites, this was a day one buy for me, and I was not disappointed. The art is stunning, and the tactics/puzzle combat is challenging and fun (if you are into that sort of gameplay). I also like the character progression system a lot - it's simple and straight forward, but still gives you a lot of possiblities to customize your characters. The story is conveyed as interludes between the fighting - it's not too deep but interesting enough to keep you engaged. The music deserves special mentions as well - besides your usual epic fantasy music there are some great rock tunes (mostly during boss fights), giving the whole thing a j-rpg feel. Given the small price and the small team behind it, this is really a well rounded, polished experience, that every fan of the genre should play.

-fun -reasonable length -simple but well designed core gameplay loop, both combat and customization -well done art -every combat character/npc/enemy is colourful and feels unique -difficulty is well scaled and ramps reasonably (normal) -varying scenario timers helped made every mission feel different -(btw my party was basically a ninja spearman being teleported around the field with an elf while my support poisoned everything) -music quite fitting -does an amazing job of making a horde feel like one. Not all missions have huge numbers of enemies, but the ones that do truly feel like a unstoppable army -dialogue to gameplay ratio feels heavy but nothing any weebs wouldnt be used to -story overall kinda meh, but that solo mission 3/4th through was quite well executed -simple, with many fun combinations, but more customization in a deeper, longer game experience with the same rpg system would be awesome -this may well deserve a 5, because i enjoyed almost everything about the game. I just don't believe in giving perfect scores -some people complained about lack of archer viability, you have to play an archer like Into The Breach

For some reason this title has escaped my attention for a long time but after good 40h of very decent entertainment I do not regret this purchase. What was so fun you ask? First of all, the game implements a very nice mix of turn based combat, skill card mechanics, buffs and very decent background story. Enemy selection and diversity is also surprisingly good. As the player you operate a small team of heroes that utilizing various skills needs to achieve primary and secondary goals. And what is really really nice, the range of goals is very, very diverse. Sometimes you need to level up and gain additional skills to get all the goals so don’t be frustrated if you need more that one tries. Battles are basically a chain of mini puzzles. Highly enjoyable. Interestingly, in mission’s enemy will frequently get reinforcements that will make your life more difficult and sometime make reaching some secondary goals just impossibly hard. It might look as the are infinite but, not they are all finite, just be patient or fast 😉. The only negative that I have on this game is the very last battle that is just RND heavy and puts you on a timer. Each round you delay the main goal you get drained of useful skills and burst damage and eventually you get overrun. I don’t like such concepts. Regardless, it is really great game 😊