If you are looking for a fun tower defense, look no further. They execute the formula extremely well, and added a visual spectacle on top. This is everything I had hoped "Orcs Must Die 3" would be. Path manipulation is the name of the game, and nothing is more satisfying than pulling it off and seeing all the enemies funneled into your killbox and blown to smithereens! If thinks get to hectic for you, putting your fighter into "Ghost Mode" allows you to become completely invulnerable and focus on building and positioning your towers while collecting bonus ressources. To mix it up, enemies change their intended pathing - and more importantly, during the gameplay additional parts of the map will be added. This not only keeps things fresh and challenging, but also avoids overcrowding you with a large map right from the get go. I can't believe I am saying this, but this game is worth the full price. And if you see it on sale, do not hesitate! I haven't tried the coop yet, strictly rating the single player experience so far, but I'd just like to give extra points for adding a coop mode to begin with.
The game itself is pretty neat and expands on the original superhot - since that mostly felt like a tech demo, this was much needed attention. However, and mild spoilers for the ending ahead, after you beat the game, you need to leave it running for *several hours* in order to play again. There's a literal timer that only runs while the game opens, and the devs might have forgotten that electricity costs actual money. It's honestly such a bafflingly bad and consumer unfriendly decision that even with their justification of "it's art", it's impossible for me to understand. Someone with low technical skill will have to wait the full 8 hours it takes for the game to count down that timer. The devs response to criticism was "It used to be 24". You can apparently get by by editing the save file in your appdata, but as someone that *has* significant computer experience under their belt, I couldn't figure it out. Whatever enjoyment I had in the game is quickly countered by the fact that I just wanted to enjoy it again after a few *months*, only to be greeted by the 8 hour timer. Art is free to provoke, and provoke it did. It provoked a negative response from me, and I can only guess that is what they wanted.
This way my first time coming into contact with these series, and after my first session I nearly stopped playing. Oh, what I would have missed! The good: The game has great replayability, since there is 10 different endings total, you keep your favourite weapons, and you change the state of the world in between playthroughs, which in turn changes some missions. I really liked most of the characters and felt bad for every named NPC that I killed, with one exception. The combat system has several dozen different "styles" and allows you to create your own from your favourite parts of each. The combat in itself is pretty nice. Not overly complex, but very deadly on anything but easy. What really sold the game for me was however the options of choice during the storyline, siding with one of several faction, or none. Will you back the shogunate, the xenophobes, fight for yourself, or become the watchdog of the worlds cutest british ambassador? Very much "bang for the buck". I have over 30 hours under my belt and am still missing several endings, styles, weapons... the list goes on. The bad: It feels very overwhelming at first, and the game does a miserable job of actually telling you what to do. Most of what I wrote above I had to find out myself. Sometimes you find a combat move that is simply to good in a school, and end up spamming it forever. Certain attacks deal a lot of damage to your quickly while moving you close with minimal risk to yourself and are also guard-breaking, so there is really no reason not to. Any grab that has your character roll on the ground first is a prime candidate. The game is very grindy when it comes to schools and weapon creation (which is again horribly explained). The games "vitality" system has you eating more food than a village would consume in a year. I guess it's an anime-trope? Took me 30 hours of playtime to figure out there is a fast-travel system. Overall I highly recommend trying out this game. It surprised me, pleasantly.
The title really emphasizes how silly this game has become. Basically, you are forced to grind-grind-grind, not only for the characters to level up, but also for the chance to actually have them reap any benefits from leveling up (first you need to unlock several things, and then buy them for each individual character, usually putting you back to 0 cash before everyone has everything). That won't keep the enemy from sharply increasing in difficulty, though. That would be worthy of 3 stars due to the otherwise really involving narrative and pretty art style, so why 1 star? Because the RNG in the game is so off the charts it is possible to lose weeks of progress in 1 combat - before you take your first action. It's not gonna be your fault, it just happens that enemies have a tendency to focus fire one of your party members 'till he/she's dead. So now you have 3 characters at level 5 - who are not useful anymore until you train up a replacement, who you have to train up with a new party starting at level 1. This may sound bad already but trust me it's even worse with the enemies having high-damaging attacks targeting all your ranks from every rank and your later inability to manage threats due to incredibly high scaling resistances (you will practically only get weaker thorough the game). Going to dungeons is usually a zero sum game if you intend to keep using the characters, because they will randomly rack up debilitating quirks (such as taking more stress) or diseases (that prevent you from hitting your oponents). The gold cost to treat these things are insane and also scale up with level, so you usually have suicide parties to bring in the gold just so the higher level ones can keep on going until the RNG finally gets them. So I hope you enjoy hiring and firing level 1 heroes all the time. This is NOT meant as a "the game is too hard" kind of post - hard games are fine. But there is a difference between challenge and an exercise in futility against grind and RNG.
First off, I absolutely loved the idea from the beginning, a city-building game focused on survival rather than budget managing. So it was no surprise I loved this game. If that is what you are looking for, look no further! There's a small list of downsides to this game though which kept me from giving a perfect score: 1) Music is not remarkable (sometimes feels even a bit unfitting, but that's probably high standards talking) 2) Path-finding is a bit basic, you really need to plan your city tight or build double- or triple-roads next to each other for the citizens to actually use them. And when you display the path your workers take a to a building, selecting the construction tool disables the path again, and while your people love diagonal paths you cannot use the tool to make them, rather you have to make it in 3-square-intervals every time. You cannot control your workers paths directly, and they ignore roads even if they were the faster choice if they're not the direct route 3) In-Game AI might need some work. I've heard that people starve while carrying a load of apples because they can only eat at home. So far it hasn't happened to me, but sometime in-game warnings come far too late (you only get the "low amount in storage" warning when only 0-1 items are left in storage, which can at times devastate your colony) 4) Endgame needs some love. After you've built every building there is to build and achieved a robust and surviving colony, there's little left to do. I increased the number of people more and more and kept balancing the ressources needed, but that was all there was to the game at that point Overall, I had a lot of fun with the game until I reached a large, sustainable colony, and then succumbed to the "...now what?". Until then, it was lots of fun though, so by all means, check it out!
