Sigh. Another game that thinks it's an unpaid job, which doesn't respect your time. The gamepad support is some of the best I've ever seen. But as usual in modern gaming, the game is full of anti-fun design choices. This is basically X-Com but if took place in Waterworld. You start off with a squad of 4 people, but you can only take in 2 permanent team members. You can hire a mercenary if you want, which is a waste of money. That's the whole vibe of the game: Good ideas, but also here's a stupid arbitrary limit which makes them pointless. You can create a squad but you'll have to play a few missions first. You can explore the map but you won't often find anything worth keeping. You can go straight to the exit, but you need the xp from the encounters, but also they don't give you enough xp ANYWAY so the RNG is allowed to double-slap you. You can sell your unwanted items but you have no way of knowing if a shop will even spawn on that level. I was playing this game about 5 minutes ago. I opened a door and three giant mechs with a LOT of health came out and wiped the floor with me. How was I supposed to avoid that? I've engaged in as much combat as I can, so the answer can't be 'get more xp'. I couldn't rely on shops appearing, and the ones that did NEVER carried anything useful. How do I have any control over that? As usual with modern games, they didn't bother tweaking the RNG enough to ensure *fun*. You know, the very purpose of a game. - One star because it runs as intended. Two stars because the sound/gfx are excellent, really top notch. I wanted to give a third star for the gamepad support, but the cruelness of the RNG implementation made me take that point away. Traditionally in one of my reviews I'd give the game the two stars I think it deserves and leave it there. But the dev(s?) took a fair bit of player feedback and made a lot of changes they didn't want to. You just need to read the patch notes, they don't beat around the bush about their intentions with the original design. So, the third star is for that. I don't care for their design choices but their attitude should be rewarded.
I don't know if I'm just having a rough go with games at the moment but all they do is irritate me nowadays. Even older ones I used to enjoy, like this one. Maybe it's because I care about my time more now, I don't know. Void Scrappers is such a weird game. Not mechanically. Mechanically it's perfectly solid. 'Vampire-Survivor-like set in space'. The gamepad support is PERFECTION. No mouse cursor left onscreen. You can rebind any button. Responsive. The characters are all different enough to justify existing, which is super important in a Survivor-like. The combat (the actual game) makes sense, the UI is fine, the skills are fine, it doesn't make any huge mistakes with any of that. Where it falls down is in the replayability. Which is also super important in a Survivor-like. It's just too tough, and in unfair ways. The dev will no doubt say something along the lines of 'I've made changes to make it easier'. And they are correct - they have. Let me explain why those changes were ineffective due to inherent design flaws in the base game itself. The dev doesn't understand the concept of rewarding the players' time. Perfect example, you can't complete a run. It's not possible. You finish a run by dying to the enemy. No 'congrats you did it' screen. No sitting back and feeling a sense of victory. None of that. Just enemies that get harder and harder until you cannot possibly overcome them. This means that literally every single run is a failed run. How these other reviews consider this 'relaxing' - being forced to die with no hope of actual success - is well beyond my ken, I'm afraid. What do you call a game that doesn't reward the player? It's not a game, is it? This isn't a game. It's an app. It gets worse. You collect credits so you can increase your power. With most other survivor-likes, you can max out a single trait (earn extra XP, do extra damage, stuff like that) after a few runs, even if they're failed. On this app, you could play for literally hours on end and still not be able to max *anything* out. One star because it runs as intended. Another because the gfx/sound are excellent. I want to give a third star because the gamepad support is so good, but frankly the game itself is just too time-cruel for me to justify another star.
I'd love to score this higher. It has PERFECT gamepad support. If you read my other reviews you'll soon see that's something I care about very much. I have high standards for gamepad support. DSD passes every single personal gamepad test I have. That's incredibly rare for me. I hurts my soul to not score this higher, it really does. Unlike most other devs, the makers of DSD remove the mouse cursor when you're on gamepad. The fact that this is even worth mentioning is, frankly, something most devs should be very ashamed of. Because it's their fault. The art is great, it looks hand-drawn in all the right ways. The enemy design is solid as hell, and the UI is intuitive - quite the achievement considering how complex the game is. The skills aren't overly creative but they are solid, and they make sense. I've been playing this game for a while now. I'm at the third level of ship unlocks. There's been a major lack of appropriate loot. Plenty of loot, not much of it any good. It barely even qualifies as vendor trash. This includes the vendors themselves. The rare times when a weapon DOES appear in one of the vendors, it's never been a new one. Always one I was already carrying. In 10+ hours of gameplay. What are the odds? I got to level 3, I was exploring a spacesub. Every single encounter wiped the floor with me, and they can't be reliably avoided. The game has soft-locked me because it refuse to give me any good weapons. I can't work with that. Plenty of other games out there that understand they're a game, and not an accidental gambling sim. One star because it launches. Another because the art and sound are so enjoyable. And a final star because it gave me value for money - but only because I got it on sale. I'd love to give it another star just for the excellent gamepad support, but that Level 3 difficulty spike combined with the crappy RNG implementation (LET PLAYERS ALWAYS BUY A WEAPON AT OR JUST BELOW LEVEL) makes me not want to bother with this 'game' ever again. Damn shame, but that's what happens when devs think their right to be clever or cruel is more important than the players' right to have fun in a game.
Because this one hasn't been a pleasant experience. No gamepad support - which I prefer over half-baked gamepad support, so that's a plus. The first thing you'll when you load the game is a message from the devs. This is good. The message is a bunch of webcode that doesn't work, which tries its hardest to point to a webpage which is CLEARLY a dead link. This is bad. I am able to rebind my keys. This is good. When I start the game, large writing greets me telling me the keys to press. The keys are not correct, because I just rebound them. This is bad. Not only is it WRONG, this writing cannot be removed from the screen. This is bad. At this point I stop playing the game even though I'm pretty sure it's the perfect game for me. It runs and works as intended, so it earns a star for that.
One day I will find a game that actually has good gamepad support. This is not that day. The mouse cursor will often randomly appear. Navigating the menus is a nightmare on gamepad. Just to top it all off, my gamepad randomly stops working. No other game does that. It doesn't even work properly on mouse. The ATTACK will just stop working sometimes. This game is the notable only for being the one that made me finally realise that GOG reviews are as utterly pointless as most other game reviews. He said, in a GOG game review. A lot of potential there but this is at prototype stage, not even demo or early access, let alone release stage. Loved the graphics but that was about it.
In a world full of games, this is the ONLY game I can rely on for limited time sessions. Doesn't need internet. Doesn't try to keep you playing by using psychological trickery. No Battlepass crap. No crappy jumping puzzles (or even good ones). Small maps that feel like arenas (ideal for Survivor-likes). Basically this is the only modern shooter (that I've played) that lets you choose how to waste your time (most modern games just waste your time - which is different). It's small/short - but the price reflects that.
After *literal* years of looking, I FINALLY find an ARPG with a controller setup that I like. And the experience is immediately ruined by an invincible ghost with a damage aura that chases you. This is not a serious game, it is a game for clowns. This game is an ARPG which *punishes you for looting*. I cannot stress enough how annoying that invincible ghost is. I'm aware it's part of the Gauntlet brand. I have no problem with *the idea*, just the implementation here. It's too powerful and it moves too quickly, no matter the difficulty level. What could've been a good chill game becomes just another game in the long line of failures trotted out by modern gaming that confuses 'unneeded stress' for 'actual balance'. The two stars are because it runs (one star) and has decent gfx/sound (another star). I wanted to add one star because of the controls but I took it off because the lazily-implemented ghost drove me away.
PLEASE NOTE: I am reviewing the Remaster release. I am not reviewing the game itself. But if I did, it would be one lone sentence: 'Aside from a few minor balance quibbles, this game holds up just as well as the day it was released - if not moreso (due to how trash/slop modern gaming generally is)'. =============================== This was almost everything I want from a remaster, and nothing I don't. The only thing missing was the ability to rebind the function keys. I like to have F6 as quicksave, and F9 as quickload. You need F1-F5 because that's used to swap between the 5 different psionic tiers (i.e. magic spell ranks), So why couldn't I use F6? I suspect it's hardbound and the remaster devs have no control over that. But I could use Shift+F6 tp quicksave. The game allowed THAT. But not F6. That's the only thing that stops this from being a perfect remaster in my eyes.
I can't stand the crappiness of so called Boomer Shooters. Not ONE of them has delivered on their promise and this game is no different. It's a lot like Project Warlock: A decent game is hiding in there somewhere, beneath layers and layers of frankly terrible design choices. And I have very little patience for Devs that ignore GoG while pandering to Steam. I don't own this game on Steam. I own it on GoG. Yet I had to go to Steam to get answers from the Dev about the ridiculous upgrade system. ====================== You play the first map, you collect the gold from the map. Let's say you earned 5000 gold. You notice an upgrade is 10,000 gold, so you play the first map again and earn another 5000 gold. You get to the victory screen and your total is now 5000 gold. What? You should have 10,000 gold. =================== You only get to collect each gold spawn ONCE. After that it's not counted no matter how many times you pick it up. The confusion appears when you replay a map. How are you supposed to know which gold you've picked up already? You get no tools to help with this. There is no good reason for that gold to respawn on the map if you can't collect it. MAYBE if you're a completionist, but there are far better way to pander to that crowd - ways that don't screw over all the other types of gamer. Either it goes towards your total gold count or it doesn't. It doesn't. Why does any of this matter? Because this is a game that forces you to buy the secondary fire for all your weapons. Either you engage with the ridiculous gold system or you cripple yourself. I'll never play more than I have now because of this crap. Like, what OTHER stupid arbitrary limits will I run into? It works, that's one star. The gfx/sound are decent, that's another star. All other good things (like the fun combat) are offset by the many short-sighted design choices (like the map design), so the game stays stuck at two stars for me.
How Warcraft became more popular than this game, I will never understand. This is the strategy game I wanted to play my whole life and didn't even know. ---------------------------------------------------------- Usually, in strategy games, you have your warriors and your workers. Your warriors fights and your workers build and harvest. Dragonshard ignores this, and is a better game for it. The game has no worker class, and only two resources for your warriors to collect: Gold and Dragonshards. Maps have two areas: The surface and the underground, which are excactly what they sound like. Dragonshards are harvested on the surface. A little Gold is found from killing enemies, but the most gold can be found underground. You can't build your main base where you want. There is a site on the various maps where it already exists. Same is true of expansion bases. The more buldings you have of a certain type, the higher a rank that unit will be. Example: To open the level 5 chests, you'll need a level 5 rogue, which means you need to build 4 Taverns in the same city block. Or perhaps you'd prefer unit diversity and don't care about chests. Maybe you want low level archers, clerics, paladins, and sorcerors instead. That's an option, not a bad one either. Older gamers may find the first campaign a little easy, but it's also got a lot of replayability (side missions, mission challenges etc). ====================================== I didn't give it 5 stars because it's a perfect game that everyone will enjoy. I don't think that. I gave it 5 stars because it's perfect for me - not one single pain point for me. Not ONE. Do you have any idea how rare that is for a grumpy loser like me?
