Vaporum

It's just too annoying when they stick a puzzle in there that just relies on quick reflexes - I don't have them any more (pushing 50), so halfway through I got to one that I couldn't get past, and yes I tried all you are meant to try, ended up giving up and uninstalling. A pity, I wish they hadn't I really enjoyed it up to then.

This game is obviously inspired by quite a few titles but, sadly, rather than take and improve on some aspects, they tried to doubledown. The combat is ALL about dodging and learning patterns - fair enough. Problem is, there's an intentional hitch of delay with moving/turning/etc., meaning you are constantly hit early on, and each new enemy just means bunches of hits and dancing back and forth. It's as un-fun as often as it is fun, at least to me. It strikes the awkward 'balance' between real-time and turn-based that just fails at being fun. The devs WAY overused the "this room is obviously trapped and here's 4 enemies in a 3x3 arena suddenly" trope. You see it coming over and over, but bricks and such can't trigger anything early, you have no choice other than to step into the obvious trap and get swarmed. When you can and can't hit enemies is inconsistent with regards to corners, and the inverse is true. Sometimes you can be hit around corners with abilities that affect surrounding tiles, sometimes you can't. Enemies also sense you around corners and will use these abilities before you can even back up, forcing you to take a DoT hit. Status effects like stun seem useful.. until you realize enemies immediately swing the second it wears off and there's no way to tell when it's going to wear off precisely, so trying to take advantage of stuns just means you take hits. I love the look and feel, the setting and story all seem fine, the stats and skills and all are fairly unique and all, but the awkward desire to straddle real time and not-quite-real-time just really mucks up the combat. It feels too twitchy while also not letting you actually twitch, leaving a lot of hits to just feel unfair, or forcing you to do the Dark Souls-esque dodge-tinypoke-dodge-tinypoke-dodge-tinypoke which gets tedius. Speaking of which, way too many enemies just have too much health such that they're downright boring.

Stopped playing after the 5th time I cleared an area, got into a fight and tried to back peddle only for a mob to spawn behind me and trap me in a spitroast. This is not difficult combat, this is lazy BS combat by a dev who doesn't understand the difference between well-made combat mechanics and clever enemies and just spawning trash in behind you without warning. Never reviewed again before but felt so passionately irritated by this trash that I felt I had to warn others that this is the low level of "challenge" you can expect.

My two main gripes with Vaporum lie with the combat and the puzzle-design. -> The combat felt rather clunky and suffered from very bullet-spongy enemies, which also dont come in a huge variety. The pattern is usually: Open door, step through -> door closes & some enemies appear -> kill them, door opens again... -> The puzzles get old & tedious rather quickly, way too many consist of pushing/pulling crates around to clear a path or fill holes in the ground, some are very tightly timed, and some rely on you seeing very fine details that can be overlooked easily. (For background: Yes, I _have_ played Legend of Grimrock before and enjoyed it very much.)

I'm an old man. I started playing grid-based games on my ZX81 (3D Monster Maze) and have played every single one of them that was worth playing. Whilst I enjoyed the concepts initially, it was pretty much a cookie cutter reskin with some tweaks. Nothing really stood out, even the quite excellent graphics, so I just found myself feeling like the game was just lacking something. The microscopic movement delays made it feels like I wasn't quite in control of my character and it led to me feeling like combat was sluggish and stacked unfairly. I often felt unfairly boxed in by the enemies and the aoe attacks, whilst novel, just always seem to hit too often. The combat areas feel too tight and combined with the sluggish movement I just didn't get any joy from combat which ultimately why I enjoy these games as I love the mastery of the abilities with the movment. If I hadn't played Grimrock and Grimrock 2, I would have enjoyed this more.