Vambrace: Cold Soul

No tooltips, miniscule interface, confusing map....

I went in wanted to love this, I love the art, and the whole aesthetic of it, it's neat, I didn't get far to know if the story is as neat but I assume it's competent. The major flaw to me is how the menu works, doing a simple thing like changing the order of your team is a major hassle, especially compared to Darkest Dungeon, the game is made for controllers so don't even think it's better on K+M. During combat, hovering over skills doesn't say what they do, so you're blindingly clicking without knowing full well what type of attack it is. It's the little things, the little things pile up to an unwieldy menu system, and guess what's the most important part of a turn-based RPG? Menus, it's what you're gonna keep using the ENTIRE GAME, so if it's a 30 hours game, that's at least 25 hours of menus, and if they are a hassle to get through or do simple things, then it's a failure of an RPG. I'm sure the game is good once you get used to that clunkiness, but it's too clunky for me, as much as I loved the art and style of the game, it's not enough to make me want to keep going.

There are many good things to like about this game, counterbalanced by an eerily-similar amount of almost artificial shortcomings, as if someone tried to hit a perfect 50% rating. It's a shame, because a large portion of these are easily fixable. This game has the potential to get patched to a solid 4/5 with some easy fixes, but having read reviews with similar complaints from 2019, I don't count on this ever happening, sadly. The art is overall good, although the animations are clunky. The non-animated dialogue portraits are done well, and there's plenty of them to cover all sorts of outfits and emotions, which is a nice touch. The story is not Earth-shattering, but the writing is a breath of fresh air after having played so many recent games that shy away from vocabulary. Now, onto the bad things. The user interface is so bizarre, that I'm inclined to call it broken. Some buttons are clickable, some aren't, some let you select them with your mouse cursor, but you need to press them with a keyboard button. Certain things are displayed as mirror images for no reason, for instance, the character bio screen displays your second skill's hotkey as Ǝ instead of E. Overworld maps could really use some words below the icons, it's basic accessibility. Combat is shallow and grindy, and you're expected to do a large amount of "dungeon" crawling before you're allowed to save, only in between these runs. This artificial limitation adds nothing to the game, you're already limited to overwriting your one save slot in case this was an attempt to prevent save scumming or something. At least let me quit the game and continue later where I left off. Another black mark is the automatic "phone home" to Unity analytics when the game starts, without providing an option to opt out. There is no online functionality in the game whatsoever, so feel free to block the game's network access in your firewall.

I'm giving 5 stars to help offset bomb reviews from challenged people. It's a shame I haven't bought this sooner to play during breaks from other activities. The game is well written, tutorials are clear and concise. Help is easily found (press escape and click the big question mark icon...). Took me very little effort to get into the groove of things. Hotkeys are all listed and there isn't much to be confused about. It's not true that you have to keep moving your characters back and forth in the party order, as the character with highest stats is picked automatically when searching for loot, etc. There is some rng and punishment but that's the part of the fun in such games, and it gives you plenty of time to learn the ropes. Graphics are stellar, animations are simple but nice, nothing that made me cringe or feel like they were lazy with them. Music fits into the rest of the game neatly and even voice acting surprised me with quality (though there isn't a lot of it), Gameplay is repetitive but that's true for all roguelikes. All in all, the game does what it says in the description, and does it well. For 5-10$ it's a steal. The artbook in the extras is already worth this much. I honestly don't know why so many indie games have such bad reviews, I guess people these days are too spoiled to see how lucky they are to have so many cheap and competent games available. Back in my day if you didn't know how to play a game with 72 hotkeys, the devs would tell you to read the 20 page book manual or get off their lawn. Fine print: Don't buy if reading sentences causes you mental discomfort.

Somehow fun game as it seems but with several flaws.There is a reason for all things in the game, so only three save slots, guess first is for assesment, second and third are meant to focus on missed content/choices. The game mechanics is really simple. Every character from each class have same attributes, just different pictures, there are two variants to each class, so for an example fencer is always same except second skill. Look for characters with highest stats in field you need and thats it. No development, no levels, just fixed stats, except main character. Everyone is cheap and can be really easy replaced. In theory, perks scaling from 1 to 5 on each, but you can go over 5 and that's starting to be naughty, so with proper approach every attempt to open a chest is critical success, every merchant encounter have vast inventory and so on. Character with highest score for the action is automatically selected so no need to switch to front. The main hard limit here is a weight of stuff you can carry. Materials weight is visible on contrary no weight information about remedies and so on. As for combat, there is no tactics except beat the crap out of the other party as fast as it gets. The main character can be placed everywhere, but shes only character who cannot be killed, therefore you wont loose equiped item and dont need to get bothered with recruiting. As major flaw I see there is no way how to skip intro/tutorials, the skip tutorial option only cut the chapter 0 where you find the main character, the rest of tutorials and cutscenes you have to suffer over and over again. Dont even try to "escape/ctrl+c" the intro when main character start climbing, there is no escape of this..., but on the bright side you can alt tab and do something else while the game continues in the background. Unfortunatelly there is no escape for the rest, such as open journal for the firts time and so on.