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?
One of the first lines in the game is your handler saying you need to use their callsign of 'Houston'. This was obvious a setup to a gag - the line 'Houston we have a problem'. This happened within three screens, or 5 minutes of gameplay. I don't care if a joke's bad or predictable, I care if it's lazy. You can't have emotional payoff without buildup. Well, you can, you'd use a throwaway gag for that. I THINK that's what they TRIED to go for here. It did not land with me at all. First time I've ever been upset by a joke delivery. Like, not the CONTENT. The *actual joke delivery*. This was the laziest joke I've ever seen, in decades of gaming. ------------------------------------- That exemplifies this entire game for me. I get sick of hearing my handler. My god I hope that was the dev, because I hate the idea that someone did that job and primarily calls themselves a Voice Actor. It just feels like a little kid is trying to make you laugh. Sure I can laugh to be polite but I won't be telling anyone else that joke, which is kind of the point of a joke, yes? So I try to turn the voices off. I go to the menu and do that. Nope, that stupid-voiced chuckleburger is still audible. I almost uninstalled it on the spot. I played again later and found the voices missing. I needed to reboot the game for the sliders to work. So far I have played this 'game' (it feels more like an ineffective psyop than a game) 17 minutes and I haven't cared for any of them. Should I give the game a chance? No, the game should give ME a chance, to not be annoyed by its self-congratulatory wankery. -------------- The game works, hence the first star. It looks pretty and the music is decent, hence the second star. But man that dialogue - not the audio, the actual writing - just really sticks in my craw. Whoeve wrote the dialojue for this 'game' has probably graduated from middle school now I hope they were able to put this behind them and move on to greater things.
This game exemplifies the concept of a game not being great, but being good. They claim it has 'rock-solid 6DOF' movement, because actually writing out the VERY obscure gaming term '6 Directions of Freedom' is apprently too much work for them. What this means in real terms is the ship works like a jetpack: forward, backward, up, down, roll left, and roll right. That's your '6 directions'. That part is true for sure. 'Rock-solid'? Not so much. Unless they specifically mean a styrofoam rock sitting on top of water - because this game contains more 'floating' than most Mardi Gras could ever dream of. If the controls were any less responsive, they'd be considered legally comatose. It feels like you're in the ocean, not space. I understand the concept of inertia. That's not the problem. See Overload (has a demo here on GOG) for a 6DOF game that understands inertia, unlike this glorified tech demo sold as a game. Also, the controls are impleneted in a weird way. If you're a key rebinder like me, you're gonna have a bad time. The keybind categories are so badly organised that you're forced to scroll up and down the very large list. These examples aren't technically correct, but they're vibe-accurate: Want to change how to roll left? That's down the bottom of the list for some reason. Want to change the Fire Missiles button? All the way back up the top. Want to change the mouse sensitivty? It's in the middle, for some reason. The story has not just failed to catch my interest, but I actively hate the main character. Either my teen character sounds like man, or my adult character has the speech patterns and vocab of a fifth-grader. According to the game itself the character is adult. Not sure why they sound like they've never heard of *anything* before then. They're supposed to be amnesiac but they just sound so irrevocably *stupid*. ALL the time. Graphics and sounds are amazing for a game of this calibre, but it's also overpriced for what it is.
What numbers can be added together to make 4? The only answer is apparently 2+2. 3+1 isn't the answer they want, so it's 'wrong'. As is 1+3. 'wrong' and also 4+0 and 0+4. 'wrong'. ==================================== The framework is EXCELLENT. Gfx/Sfx are perfect, they give you all the info you need without being too distracting. But the 'puzzles' are about as flexible as a frozen rock, which means they soon devolve into 'try to guess what the game actually wants' and not 'How do I solve this puzzle?' There are way too many leaps being made for a game called Murder MYSTERY Machine. At one point I had to move forward by *accusing someone I had no evidence against*. As a prototype this is excellent. Even for what it is, it's reasonably priced. I hate to say it but this might be the perfect game for people who can't think outside the lines, which is kind of the opposite of what a MYSTERY should be.
Nothing wrong with the action, that's fine. Excellent in fact. This is probably my favourite soundtrack of all time. You don't often hear truly experimental music that can also bop in games, and even moreso in FPSs. The art direction is fantastic. Every area feels unique, and the different enemies belong in their respective places - no simple palette swapped sprites here! ===================================== But a lot of the design aspects of this game are just cruel. There's one thing that stops me from returning to this game: The upgrade system. People will say you don't have to engage with it. This is true in the exact same way that you could watch Lord of the Rings and fast forward the action scenes: It's obviously not designed to be engaged with like that. This game has what I call the Unholy Trinity of Upgrades. On their own these aren't an issue. When they're all present, you'll probably have a bad time. 1 - Requires a resource to be used (Upgrade Points) 2 - Hides the resource in secret areas 3 - Makes the secret areas unreasonably unfair to find. This means that the action ends up accounting for a very small percentage of gametime for anyone who wants to be able to actually finish the game. Point 1 is no problem, except here the weapons and spells use the same resource pool, and the devs are VERY stingy when it comes to handing out the points - and this is if you collect every single one of them including all the secret ones! Point 2 is fine, and there are a few Upgrade Points that can't be missed. But they're called 1UPs. Yes seriously. If you're over 30 you think that means you just picked up a free life. And you're wrong. Nope. Upgrade point. Point 3 is the real kicker. Some of these secrets have no visual indicator, so you'll kill the enemies in an area and then spam Use on the walls. Wallspamming will be a LOT more of your gameplay than shooting enemies will. Or you can be weak at endgame. Your call.
This is a re-release of a game which is no longer available. It costs more than the original base game, but costs roughly the same as the complete edition and contains all the same content (as far as I can tell). This edition is the only way to buy it nowadays, but it can be found in many storefronts (not just my beloved GoG.) The more modern version is more optimised, good to see. Let's discuss the game itself now. ------------------------------------------------- Sin Slayers Reign of the 8th (hereafter just called Sin Slayers) is a turn-based combat game with an emphasis on mission exploration and crafting. The set up is simple: We're in some kind of Limbo state/reality and we need to destroy boss monsters which personify the Seven Deadly Sins. That's it. That's the entire game. The seven sin realms are where the rogue-lite comes into it - your characters will never permanently die (How can they? You're outside the divine framework etc) and the realms change every time you return. There are only a few things guaranteed to appear: The Sin Boss Monster and a fountain so you can heal. You then travel around the local area, revealing the squares underneath the fog of war. What will the newly-revealed square have on it? Could be anything. A merchant. An enemy. A trap. Enemies. An extra fountain. An area quest. Nothing special at all. The area Boss. Another hero to join the party. Again - it could be ANYTHING. And that's where the true game is - how do you approach THAT aspect of it? You can return to your HQ at any time, with no meaningful losses. ====================================== About that price: For every dollar (AUD) that I spend on a game, I expect 1 hour of play. This game costs $30 AUD, so I'd need to get thirty hours out of it for to consider it 'good value'. I currently have over 10 hours and I'm not even close to getting bored with it. I can see I've barely scratched the surface. I consider it GREAT value.
