Important to note that I'm still sort of having fun. It's similar enough to other games that I can probably wiggle through, but I am already reloading previous saves and attempting to scum, which generally goes against the spirit of games like these. But maybe Vagrus is different. Usually tutorials are exempt from fail states. But that is just a convention, there's no reason not to break it sometimes. It's just that these deaths force me to replay sections and thoroughly kill engagement. The writing is good enough, and the combat is clunky and annoying enough, that I kinda want to skip one to get back to the other. So what if my characters get crit to death again and again? Who cares? I hate to say, my investment in this phase is more or less zero, just let me through already. I was going to leave a much harsher review, specifically aimed at the type of person who would reply to Git Gud. Because reviews can't receive replies, these toxic little fanboys could only quietly seethe and rage and write their own reviews, turning this review section into a warzone like so many others. And I wouldn't have to read any of it, which is definitely a win for me. But then the devs would also have a marring 1/5 review on their score, and they don't deserve that. There's a lot of love here. So yeah, 3/5, maybe adjust the early game hell.
I don't want to bully Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars, it's a perfectly acceptable mid-tier entry. Yet the core conceit is that it's exclusively focused on vampires and the undead, where other comparable franchises like AoW, Disciples or Eador have vampires... and also other stuff. That trend describes Important Relics: Volkswagen Shores perfectly, actually. AoW and Eador have four tiers of units, IR:VW only has three tiers. Other games have up to a dozen races, this game has only three, four if you count humans. In the AoW overworld, you can upgrade units, customize them, summon new ones and cast spells, while in Infrared Rattles: Verifier Worgs you have cards which only allow limited customization and spellcasting. The only thing Intricate Ranges: Volatile Warbles has over similar titles is that it focuses rather strongly on battles which cannot be auto-resolved. There is some interesting stuff there, I dare say I enjoyed these battles more than in any other game in the genre. But those battles were never the appeal for me, I was always more of an auto-resolve guy. The story perfunctory, but not without charm. Very WC3ish with the cutscenes and the style of voice acting. People point at the price, but I'm pretty sure it's fair: AoW sold it's expansions for like 20$ at first. If you add the cost of making a completely new game, new graphics etc, 35-40$ is perfectly fair. I'd say this is 3.5 stars. I was going to give 4, but little annoyances in the interface knocked it down to 3. Recommended for fans of the genre who want a new variation on the same old stuff.
Into the Breach is a superb game and I realized today that I haven't even left a 5/5 review so here it is. Pros: + Varied, immersive and thoughtful gameplay + Lot of replay value, stuff to unlock, additional teams, pilots, weapons etc. + Different scenarios and events across different islands. Survive earthquakes, escort trains, defend missile launches, control freeze cannons, avoid acid lakes. Very solid. Cons: - Not everyone likes chess, so not everyone will like this.
I played the demo on Steam and left a negative review, because of elements of trail and error gameplay and a sense of hostility towards the player. The trial and error elements have improved, but the feeling of hostility remains. Legend of Keepers is essentially a series of mathmatical risk assessment problems strung together with a different mathmatical challenge where you try to line up your monsters in such a way that they either don't get instakilled before their turn, or they can take a turn before they get instakilled anyway. There's something unsatisfying about that. It's a feeling that you never beat the heroes: you just set your team up to survive and then eventually the heroes just sort of fall over. The heroes' hp and morale pools quickly become staggeringly huge as they level up. There's no further feedback as their hp bar goes down, they're just increasingly sturdy chunks of granite that you chip away at. There's an intern boss monster later on that epitomizes this. It's not a challenge or an obstacle to the heroes to overcome this monster and while he's comparatively beefy, he rarely lasts longer than two turns. His stats are notably inferior to any hero at this stage of the game. This supposed boss monster, with his own room and everything, is really just a barricade who occupies the heroes for two extra turns while you wait for the status effects to kill them. If you haven't stacked enough status effects before this room, he's basically wasted. I think a lot of this is on purpose, and I think that Legend of Keepers accomplishes most of the goals it sets out to achieve. Hence my high score. Also it's pretty fun. But yeah, there's something very ultimately nagging about how this sytem works.
I admire what Alder's Blood is going for and I hope to see more from this dev. To be clear, Alder's Blood does not offer the worst examples of randomness and timers I've seen. But to me, they are without a doubt the worst elements of Xcom-like turn based squad management games. Others have already completely destroyed this concept for me. Dealing with dice rolls and arbitrary time restrictions is not strategy! Timers and random chance are a fake way to create engagement, for those that have no better ideas on how to make their gameplay in depth or interesting. This is not to single out Alder's Blood, I understand that these are genre conventions. But games like Mechanicus and Hard West offer much more interesting alternatives to random damage. And titles like Sanctus Reach or Templar Battleforce generally spam more enemies at you instead of imposing timers (though I still dislike timed reinforcments, I do prefer this solution over other penalties or a simple fail state). My issues with the genre aside, Alder's Blood can have a frustrating interface. Enemy detection for instance requires constant mousing over instead of simply showing. Trying to select another hunter will sometimes cause the selected hunter to walk to his ally instead, depleting his stamina and paralyzing him for the next turn. Trying to activate objectives from afar causes your character to walk over, which is a problem if you're not sure if your character is adjacent to the objective or not. Especially combined with the aforementioned enemy detection issues, this can cause your hero to start walking, get exposed and get killed. Instead of activating the objective safely, as you thought he was going to do. Someone less frustrated by similar issues in previous games in the same genre would have enjoyed this game more. As it stands, 3/5 is all I can give this.
I want to be kind to this game, it's a genuine attempt to make something new, a seafaring version of FTL. There are a few mechanics to differentiate it from FTL and the graphics and setting set it apart well enough. My biggest gripe is probably that it does not benefit at all from the roguelike format and there is no reason to limit saves. Death is just a boring loss of progress that you have to farm back. The game is linear, there is no replay value, not in the roguelike sense of trying something different next run. You won't be playing this across multiple runs to experiment with different ships or new unlocks. The game also isn't short, it's not like you can knock out a full run in an hour or so (as is common for roguelikes). Why would you implement a tedious loss-of-progress system in a game that does not have the other mechanics to support it? It's a wierd decision, I think they just use it because FTL has it. So I want to be kind, I admire the attempt, it's not a straight clone. But I can't reasonably rate it more than 3/5.
Tell me, Technomancer. Is there any reason your final boss is a Dark Souls marathon boss, disconnected from everything that came before? I'm not mad, but it was pretty jarring.
Don't get me wrong, this is a fantastic game. But I have to knock off a point for things like getting killed while waiting for the teleporter to the next area to finish loading. Or worms constantly angering the gods while you're in the shop. That shit gets old really quick.
Why do people expect sequels to be the same game as the first, but with more stuff? Isn't it better to shake things up? Variety is the spice of life. Thea 2 is pretty great. Downright excellent at times. Above all I love that a company put this much effort into writing. It's even better than the first game, though there is less voice acting (and the original's voice acting was also superb). Once again, they strike an excellent balance between forcing you to read immense walls of text and zooming through the game without reading a single thing. Many challenges are similar-but-different, or they contain important hidden details, giving thoughtful readers opportunity to achieve better outcomes. But if you miss these clues, you can still get through the game just fine. Mechanically, there's been a few changes. You still fight different types of challenges which you can solve through strength, intelligence or magic. But resources and item crafting work quite differently. Buffing stats through items is harder, but still very valuable. Especially for children, buffing their stats is very valuable. Also you can potentially play without a town. I don't remember if that was a thing in the original, but it's nice. There's been occasional bugs and artifacting. Maybe a single crash, after 3 full playthroughs. No major grief here. Overall, excellent game and one of the standouts of last year.
