Overall the game is great if it's one of the first hack and slash from the top-down perspective games that you play, but it will quickly feel boring once the initial novelty wears off, if you've played newer games of the same category. The pet traveling to sell our junk items is great because that way it never feels like you inventory is too small, enchanting, gems and many other elements that should help you are down to random chance, though it's mostly favorable, the classes are fun and you can ignore lots of skills completely and focus on those you like using in the quite extensive skills trees. However, like Diablo, Torchlight fails to be engaging in its story: kill the seer's master that has fallen under the influence of the corrupting ember and its master (said master is the final boss and the defintion of a damage sponge) and the side quests are just: kill monster X, fetch Y ember, fetch item Z through a portal an NPC will open for you - the frame story works, but it's not very imaginative and you're only given a piece of main quest dialog every few floors. Overall the game is incredibly easy on Normal (only in the final floors did I really need health potions) and Easy feels like having god mode enable for an entire playthrough (in the worst way possible XD). I never figured out how the fish minigame works, though you can get mods for fish to spawn among normal loot if you want to transform your pet. Torchlight has a central hub you go to for side quests, shops, storage, enchantments and other services and the game. It isn't an open world game, but it has an inviting, colorful and cheerful vibe. After the final boss you unlock Shadow Valut - an inifinte dungeon and new NPCs for side quests. All in all, I'd recommend it for children, teens and players that haven't yet experienced better and more refined games in the same genre (e.g. Grim Dawn).
I checked out the game and I can tell it'll be amusing and sort of cute. It's basically medieval characters battling via doodles of anthro animal armies instead of actual combat among themselves and the acted out movie of a knight approaching a nun for an ink battle with a sword and then just sitting next to her is both funny and adorable. So your hero's doodle is the boss and you can either push the foe's off the battlespace or kill them via your army. The hero draws animal soldiers and can't move on their own, but can move one field left or right via being pushed, or use a unique skill (such as attacking animals in their immediate vicinity or healing, for example). Attacking with your animals or hero involves selecting an attack skill and then having to either click to stop a moving arrow on how much damage you'll deal or waiting for value to be randomly picked. I would have preferred that each unit deals a fixed amount of damage, but it's a nice randomness element to make the game less static. Some units have special abilities such as a rabbit being able to paralyze their opponents by exposing their rears - another parody element, though I didn't see a mooning rabbit ingame - or a spearman being able to attack multiple enemies on adjacent fields. Some random hazards, such as fire, will appear on the battlefield after a few turns, so you can't be completely static. I suspect there will be more parody elements in the full version of the game, so I wouldn't recommend it to children, but teens or adults are fine. There are unlockable animals in the demo as well, but the campaign they promise will have more features, e.g. creating your own hero sounds awesome, in the demo, you are limited to one of 2 for test battles, so you can get a feel for the game. By the looks of it, the campaign will have a story and you'll be able to challenge others Ink Masters and experience other features listed in the demo. In short: I look forward to the full game. :)
I'm disappointed. :( It feels like the werewolf stuff is there just for spice (you transform maybe 4 times in the entire game) and you don't really connect with your "pack" - they just tell you about what tribe they belong to (you only get this information once and you can never review it and the game expects you to somehow memorize all that information) and even that is shallow (you get more information about each tribe from the text that appears if you leave the mouse over a word than from each member of a tribe). You do make friends with humans, but you need to leave them behind because they aren't supposed to know about werewolves. "Important" decisions like picking your tribe have no impact and are just a line of flavor text, the whole werewolf lore is shallowly explored (even the explanation given by highlighted words is scarce at best). A lot of the later chapters are rushed, e.g. you finish your initiation, and poof, you're in the middle of peace talks over people cutting down an old forest - the cutting being the central theme and it could easily work without werewolves. I get that it's an important issue nowadays, but the protest over the cutting is too narrow a frame story to showcase the werewolf aspects in all their glory. Not every werewolf has to be an ecoterrorist. The characters that should be important aren't developed at all - you can connect to a guy during the prologue, but later he's distant because you supposedly can't connect over the protagonist being born as a human and him as a wolf. For the shaman path, I excepted a lot more interaction with various spirits, but all I got was chasing a deer and battling a giant bear. O.o A place had the protagonist relive a flashback of her ancestors and their spirit patron, but that was it. Achievements feel like replay bait for a weak story. It's a good attempt and it's great to see a WTA game completed for PC after Heart of Gaia was canceled in development, but HOTF could be so much more. :(
It works on my potato just fine, so it's certainly not demanding. I like the music a lot and having your character formed fluidly while making choices is a new approach in a visual novel. And a character sheet is used to track the character's info, attributes and relationships with others including the forest, probably like in the pen and paper version of Werewolf the Apocalypse (I'm speculating since I haven't played any pen and paper games). What's set in stone in the demo is that she's female and probably a werewolf with dormant wolf nature. You can pick different, but related goals: e.g. why does the forest "call" to the protagonist or what her family history is. The artwork works, but it's weird. The background art is of calm, dark colors mostly and the foreground characters are brighter, like old brown photographs with a bit of a painting-like touch. Hard to describe without an image. I suppose it works, but I prefer the background's tone a lot. Be warned that the protagonist will dream of a severed head early on and some horror will be present later as well in vision/dream of a past event. The vibe so far is rather mystical, but the horror part doesn't feel graphic due to the artwork's style, it's the text that gives the unsettling undertone. Your choices aren't timed in any way and whenever you pause the game you see how far through a chapter you are, but it is plainly stated that Unity will collect some data from your play sessions like how long they last or what hardware you use. If you go to Options and "Unity analytics personal data management" a website will open with more details. A playthrough is short, probably under an hour and just enough to have the first chapter end and tell you under what moon phase the character was born and what her role in werewolf society would be. Not the typical "slash the enemy" approach for me, but I'll be rather curious about the full game.
Initially, it's fun and it flows nicely and the minigame with "match the current card with a card that's +/-1 its value" is a fresh, interesting spin. However, all the game really does is make you do the same card minigame over and over with more matches in later chapters lined up, so they're just artificially longer. Apart from your eyes glazing over from the numbers after a time and just hovering over the cards with the mouse because you're so sick of just seeing number change randomly, how the next number comes up is very much a game of mere chance for both you and your opponent. XD It's funny having a duel and seeing how the chance game of numbers clearly happens to favor you or your opponent and you're forced to let the thing runs its course and restart because you didn't happen to get the right numbers. The equipment changing is nice, but the stats you can increase when leveling up feel largely meaningless. The music is pleasant and suits the mood of the scenes, the artwork is fantastic and the story is most intriguing given you play as a noble lady turned bandit, but it becomes boring fast due to the numbers being up to mere chance. I'd rather watch a video of the game than play it as it is and I do think it would be a lot better as a normal visual novel or if it had combat without the card minigame that's so painfully overused for literally every encounter.
I played for slightly over an hour (1 hour and 15 minutes), but all I could focous on were things that annoyed me: - I hate how I have to scroll through crafting option with keys after pressing C. Give me a nice menu or something under a key I can easily go through and I can navigate fast and with ease. - Why is every new item I get placed under a hotkey?! I can organize that by myself. I would have preffered it if it had been placed in my inventory and I could use it just by clicking on it and disable it by right clicking. - For some reason I hate the nose of a female character. XD - I got assulted by what looked like zombies in a Classic mode world and I'm just "WTH?! How, why, what did I ever do to you?!" I would prefer more control or at least knowing or warning, like "enemies spawning" or just some kind of notification. - I find the way the 2D is handled disoriatating. I would find a 3D enviroment easier to navigate in. - I keept going "WTF?!" at the hitboxes of trees when I wanted to use the axe on them. XD - By what logic are a pickaxe or an axe more effective as mining tool against enemies than a sword? With a sword you can only attack in front of you and with a tool you attack in a 360° circle. Logic not found. - From what I saw there isn't an experiance bar, so even killing moster doesn't feel progressing or purpouseful. - Even with a small Jouney world it just feel empthy and pointless. What am I doing and why? I'm not really seeing a point. While I find Journey mode to be less overwhelming (with wings, an attack pet and god mode) I'm not really enjoying even that. I don't know if my problem is how disorienting I find the 2D enviroment, that nearly nothing in the game feels really fluid and intuative or if it's the feeling that it's devoid of interaction except enemies or if it's the lack of direction on what to do - the "guide" seems to just give me random, unrelaed advice, more like trivia spamming than what I should actually do next.
