Overall: Face paced action with good visuals and tight controls. Lacks customization and depth and the UI is pretty bad. Game play: The action is fast and skills/attacks are simple and easy to understand. This is both a benefit and a detriment. It's easy to pick up and play, but once you master the upgrade system it becomes very easy to 'break' and each battle becomes repetitious. Mostly comes down to stacking dashes and just constantly dashing, stopping, attacking twice, and dashing again. Some skills, like the thunderbolt dash, are so broken they make all other types nearly useless by comparison. The bosses are a good combination of bullet sponge and evasion. They take a little while to burn down, but not frustratingly long and are visually distinct enough to recognize and dodge attacks. Visuals: Colorful and unobtrusive environments. Looks good and detailed, but doesn’t make it hard to see enemies. Once combat begins, however, the particle effects can make it nearly impossible to see when enemies are attacking so you end up just dashing constantly. Presentation: The UI is pretty bad and intuitive. There are weapon cores, skill cores, passive cores, etc and the way the UI displays them makes it hard to understand what does what. There’s very limited descriptions for some skills. I still don’t know what ‘shatter’ does for one of the characters and there’s no where to check. There seems to be an issue with localization as well. Things like how there’s a main weapon normal attack stat and main weapon skill attack stat, but then also skill attack which is actually the same as main weapon skill attack. There’s enough dialogue with bad grammar and spelling errors that it actually becomes noticeable. Story: It’s a roguelite, so there’s not much here. Each character has motivation, but nothing particularly interesting or memorable. It’s a game more focused on the game play and that’s totally fine. Not a detriment to the score, but it might not be for everyone.
Not really much to say. It's the original Doom II with some small enhancements. These mainly come in the form of a cheats menu (no more idkfa), map improvements and a level select. I gave it 4 stars because Bethesda just had to add an option for Bethesda.net. Fortunately you don't have to make an account to play (unlike Doom Eternal).
Not really much to say. It's the original doom with some small enhancements. These mainly come in the form of a cheats menu (no more idkfa), map improvements and a level select. I gave it 4 stars because Bethesda just had to add an option for Bethesda.net. Fortunately you don't have to make an account to play (unlike Doom Eternal).
Overall the game is short, but good. Not great, but not bad either. I enjoyed my time with it, but since the harder difficulties remove your progressive, permanent, upgrades (rather than making the game harder in other ways) and there are no other unlocks (like weapons) I find little reason to continue playing. Story: Barebones, but sufficient for a roguelite. You are a single fighter pilot lost in a nebula trying to save planets from Deadeyes while searching for a way home. The planets don't have any distinct personalities and the dialogue repeats very quickly. The prologue is well done, but doesn't seem to lead to anything. Gameplay: Collect resources, power up planetary shields, fight enemy ships, repeat. The shooting looks impactful, but the choice of weapons is somewhat boring. There are a few good weapons, but I found myself passing on most of them. Passing on weapons increases your max ammo so there's at least value in that because running out of ammo is a real threat. Upgrades are, individually, not very strong, but with enough of them you can become a power house. This is a positive as it makes all decisions important while not railroading players into a specifc build. The biggest issue is the combat is short and intense, but not very interesting. Strafe and shoot. Once battle ends you spend 3x as long gathering resources. It's a slower pace that sort of works, but I found myself getting slightly bored on successive playthroughs. There's only 1 boss, but it's a great fight. A fitting climax. Visuals: Nice pixel art, buit lacks any character. What is there works well and looks nice. The models flow and look great, but there are very few models so there's nothing terribly memorable. Sound: Good use of a minimal soundtrack. Music swells when combat begins and dies again while travelling and resource hunting. The gun fire has punch. Worth it for fans of space shooters, but fans of roguelites might find the difficulty and progression lacking.
It's a wonderful game full of inspiration and hope without being too preachy. The story is pretty simple, but wholesome. You are Alba, a carefree nature loving girl who is tasked with saving a nature preserve on her grandparent's tiny little island. You must photograph the local wild life, clean up the rubbish, tend to sick animals, repair bridges (she's also a master carpenter!) and stop the construction of a luxury hotel that will destroy the wildlife preserve all while uncovering a dastardly plot. The gameplay is very simple, but refreshing. No health bars, no enemies (except the obvious one) and no time limits. Grab your camera, snap some pics, pick up garbage, etc. This is not a criticism against the game, mind you. It knows exactly what it wants to be and does it very well. The visuals are bright and colorful and look great. They'll age well, too. The semi-blocky character models add uniqe charm and character without being distracting. The sound is lacking with the music playing only occasionally. This was done, I believe, to provide the player a method of hearing the various animal calls, but those are usually lost due to distance and being overlayed with other animal sounds. I think the only negative critic I have of the game is that it missed an opportunity to be educational. With all the animals Alba photographs and adds to her scrap book they could have provided some real world information on them (habitat, diet, size, etc). It's not a game for everyone, but it was a lovely experience even in my 30s.
It's just a demo, but I have to insist that it at least starts correctly. I downloaded, installed and got a 'missing dll file' error. I corrected this, multiple times and then got a generic 'failed to start' error. It looks promising so I'll update my rating when the devs fix this.
I was really looking forward to a tactical RPG experience, but what I got is a roguelike that is more interested in having the player grind over and over again while it kills you repeatedly. It's not a terrible game, but it's rather shallow. The story is basically 2 lines of dialogue. A tyrant took over and you need to kill them. There's some fun dialogues between characters, but they're far and few between. The visuals are pretty good, though. The pixel art is beautiful and flowing, but the stage maps are lacking any personality. They're all flat, square grids with some trees or rocks. Nothing really unique or interesting to look at. The mechanics is where the devs chose to focus their efforts. Enemies will all move and telegraph attacks at the start of the turn and you take all your actions to interupt, move or defeat the enemies before they attack. If your'e targeted and move you leave behind a 'shade', a shadow of your character that can still take damage. In the early stages your mostly evenly matched with the enemies, so performing well enough to take no damage a turn is really satisfying, but the game very quickly scales up the battles where you're outnumbered and enemies have area effects so avoiding the damage becomes nearly impossible. Also you can damage yourself by striking your own shades. On paper, this is a great idea. In execution, it proves frustrating. The devs seemed to have realized this because the game provides a 'guardians', buffs that prevent your characters from dying, but these are limited PER RUN and you can run out very quickly. And once you lose one charcter, the run is essentially a loss. See the trick is each enemy on the field will revive after each turn a set number of times. If you're facing 5 opponenents and they have 7 respawns, You're facing 5 enemies until you exhaust the 7 respawns. Once you die, you start all over. No restarting battles. If you're looking for something engaging, you won't find it here.
For fans of turn based tactical RPGs, this game fills the niche nicely. The visuals are colorful and maps are hand drawn and look great, but this comes with the disadvantage of not being able to rotate the camera in battles. There are some nice additions to the game like custom difficulty settings and scalable spell/movement speeds. Little touches for quality of life and most can be changed during the game. Shows the devs really put thought into it. The story is pretty bland, but servicable. If you're a fan of FFT then you'll find a shallow narrative that doesn't come close to the depth of Tactics. You get a pretty standard adventure story, but with a protagonist that is older, wiser and cooler than her predecessors. This is rather refreshing, but because of this there's never really a sense of tension or danger as she's too smart and savvy. Again, servicable, but not memorable. There are dozens of classes to choose from to create your party of choice. Mastering a class gets your character a permanent stat boost so there's incentive to stick with one, but this also creates an issue where you want to switch classes and so you might need to grind a bit to make the new class functional. In normal difficulty, all classes are viable, but in harder difficulties most fall short as they simply don't have the damage to break through all the excessive healing. This brings up the other issue is that there are way too many AoE and mass heals. Nearly half the classes have some kind of healing and every class can use items so fights aren't so much harder as they are longer. It's not deal break since you can play on normal difficulty, but it's a bit dissapointing. Combat is mostly fine, but the lack of LoS makes the maps feel very flat. Hiding behind a giant rock won't avoid arrows or bullets which is lame. The DLC ruins the balance of the game. It adds a bunch of changes and makes the AoE and healing even more excessive without adding much to the game. You can skip it.
I really tried to understand this game. I spent tens of hours with different factions and found it to be a shallow 'tactical' experience. For starters, the game looks great. The pixel graphics and color palette are beautiful and I'm amazed at the attention to detail with the dozens of different units. The interface is clean and easy to read and I didn't see any bugs. There are several factions and city types with mostly similar units, but with some varying abilities (all factions have a basic ranged, melee, mounted and 'large' type of unit). Now the problems. When you enter combat you CAN pick the type of units to deploy, but after some time you'll just get annoyed that there are so many units and start with whatever the game picks. Once battle begins you have no control. Units will move towards the enemy and target whatever. You can select a few and direct them in a direction, but they still just do whatever. You can cast spells, but once your mana runs out you just sit and watch as pixels smash into each other. On the higher difficulties you have to get lucky and hope your opponents keep each other busy while you build up or they swoop in and crush you. This is because unit production is restricted to a weekly total. Once you reach the limit, you can't hire more. If your army isn't strong enough to fight the npcs, you have to sit and wait for the next week. Cities are built up in mostly the same way and you always build everything. Units are always on the same tier and you can only build one building a day regardless of your income. The maps are random so you MIGHT get a node that lets you hire more units, but usually not. Finally, the army size is limitless. You can only start with x amount of units, but the reserves are endless. It comes down to who has the bigger army. If not you, you lose. tldr; There are no tactics and your production is very limited. Enemies crush you easily on higher difficulties and lower difficitulties are too easy. It's mindless.
Including the autosave. The error told me to check the Steam library to start a previous version of the game, but there's only one version available. It's for the best because the game is terribly repetative and boring. Each battle consists of 10-15 enemies to pad the game time. Enemies tend to group up, but there are no AoE abilities so you just focus fire on 1-2 enemies at a time. There aren't any special attacks so you just single target over and over again. And again... all my save files are corrupt now. Fantastic.
