Recent reviews by DarkSoulsMom420

A sprawling open-world RPG that's evocative of BECMI edition D&D until dawn in somebody's basement. Like early D&D the mechanics are relatively simple but satisfying. Your characters have four stats ( Str / Dex / Int / End) and two skill trees (Combat and Magic). When they level up, you can add one point to a stat, and two skill points which cannot both be used on the same skill. Paper doll inventory and you find better stuff over time but it's not the treadmill of gear upgrades many RPGs are built around. My characters at level 16 are using the same weapons as when they were Level 6.

Combat is pretty simple but with enough room for tactics to make it interesting. Fighter types have access to "Battle Disciplines," special moves that can be used every few rounds on a cooldown timer. Mage and Priest spell lists are short and simple with a mix of elemental attacks, summoning spells, buffs / debuffs, and healing. Combat does feel a little grindy and repetitive after a while but it's a satisfying grind.

This game is big and there's rarely a shortage of things to do. You will probably be overwhelmed by how many threads you are given to follow. I started keeping notes in a text editor because the game expects you to remember a lot of information. There's a Quest Tracker with a clunky interface, and there's a Journal you can copy specific conversations or item descriptions into, but there's no references of monster types or the kind of Avernum-pedia like you would expect in a contemporary RPG. There's an Event Log but it doesn't really like you scroll back or search past a few lines back. The worldbuilding is really cool and full of detail. Most of the quests are on the order of "find this item" or "kill these monsters" but the setting is so big and creative that there is always something new to discover while running errands and murdering critters.

This is a game where you will want to save often. There's no indication of the difficulty of a monster until you get into combat with it and there are plenty of monsters that can kill off your whole party in a single round. Sometimes there is incongruity between the monsters in a dungeon vs the boss monster at the end of the dungeon. You might be able to one-shot all of the regular monsters but you'll need to come back a few character levels later before you stand a chance fighting the boss of the dungeon. Save frequently.

The presentation is mostly okay though honestly it can be a little tough to parse what's going on. An in-game zoom/scale feature would go a long way to fixing this and save a lot of squinting. There is a nice keyboard interface in combat where each monster and each spell / battle discipline is indexed with a letter, so you can quickly type "mgb" to cast mage spell G targeting monster B. Or "ad" to attack monster D. The only thing is the pathing is sometimes glitchy and characters will take an unexpected route when trying to engage with a monster. This doesn't happen super often but it's a good idea to manually position your characters when a fight gets complicated and don't count on the targeting to behave as desired.

Overall this is a great game! If you like retro / old-school RPGs and can get past the slightly clunky interface, there's a cool well designed setting which is ikelly to satisfy.

Really bland presentation and way too much meaningless micro.

In the tutorial you learn how to sleep and eat and are tasked to dig out a bunker beneath your living room, which is accomplished with about two mouse clicks and takes about two hours of game time (30 sec irl). Now you need a ladder to climb into your bunker. No problem you can... craft a ladder from planks? Okay I'll check out the crafting bench, which I can't use because I need to find some supplies first to clean the crafting bench. Nope, not interested.

A shame because the basic concept of a 2.5D Fallout Shelter / Sims mashup sounds kind of fun, but this is not fun.

This game rocks and it's a crime it isn't getting more attention! It's a perfectly sized mini roguelike that can be played in an hour or two that's suitably crunchy and tactical without taking tens of hours to learn. Think DoomRL in terms of size and scope.

You are a vampire returning to the hotel owned by Fane, the boss vampire who originally turned your PC into a vampire. There's nine main levels plus multiple side branches — kind of like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup compressed into a 90 minute experience. You can transform back and forth between vampire and human over the course of the run, and there's a cool "faction" system where humans will mostly leave you alone when you are human, other vamps are friendly when you are in vamp mode.

As a human, there's an upgradable sword and revolver and a magic system with up to four spells available at a time. In vampire mode you lose the finesse to use weapons and cast spells, but you have a powerful natural claw attack, and regenerate health from enemies that bleed. There's also demon blood which gives vampires spell like abilities which cost HP instead of mana.

Art style is fun and atmospheric and awesome chiptune soundtrack. There's a lot I like about this game!

26 hours so far in 3 days, this game is pretty good. Not for everybody but if crunchy detailed simulation of tabletop RPG is your thing, this game is something special. The character generator is truly bonkers in the amount of flexibility it allows. There's about 20 different Classes, most with 3-4 sub-archetypes. Want to give a Barbarian some cleric spells and a pet smilodon? Done. Maybe a Monk / Alchemist who doses themselves with performance enhancing mutagens before combat? This is not every Class in all of Pathfinder but it's about twice as much as what's in the 1E Core Rulebook.

Of course with great power comes... a learning curve. Kingmaker has beautiful presentation and a tutorial prologue that is both entertaining and informative, but once the training wheels come off there is no denying this is a game with a lot of numbers and details to keep track of. Combat defaults to realtime-with-pause, but there's a button to turn on true turn based combat a la tabletop Pathfinder, which is the place to be. Combat feels more tactical and a little bigger in scope than other isometric RPGs — party formation, weapon/spell ranges, it just feels a lot like good tabletop combat. Pathfinder is based on DnD (3.5E SRD) and everything works similarly in terms of combat, spellcasting, character progression, etc..

It's isometric perspective with a fixed camera. This isn't my favorite thing but I can respect it as a design decision since the maps are so beautifully detailed and lit. There's enough hinting/feedback in the UI that it's usually pretty easy to keep track of the action even when characters are visually obscured. Mostly it's fine.

Story is extremely tropey yet charming and well-written. Voice acting is mostly pretty good, writing has some clever / funny moments, it's apparent there is a rich library of lore the game can draw upon.

It's a little glitchy which isn't surprising with a game of this size. Nothing too serious, one time an event triggered at the wrong time and I had to restore from a quicksave. SAVE OFTEN though because this game is pretty tough. If you are looking for a casual story-driven RPG this might feel like Too Much Game, but if you are prepared to spend some time thinking about character builds and like a challenge, this is great.

(note: randomly received for free from a buddy who got the key in a bundle and wasn't going to use it)

Before you read any further, ask yourself if you enjoy RPGs with lots of logistics. Do you want to spend ten minutes between every combat, looking at lists of weapon stats and managing ammo loadouts for six characters? Wasteland originates from the 1980s school of rpg design, directly descended from tabletop wargaming, where crunch and detail are part of the attraction. The combat is pretty similar to XCOM: your squaddies have a set amount of Action Points each turn to move and fight on an isometric grid, some weapons are faster than others, there's cover and overwatch and combat gadgets like auto-turrets and healing darts. Normal difficulty is a good place to start just because of how much there is to learn through trial and error. Outside of combat there's also weapon & item mods, item crafting, and a bunch of systems like cybernetics and toaster repair which I haven't messed with. I don't want to overhype the difficulty because the complexity is introduced gradually, BUT if you're not sure how you feel about turn-based tactical combat a la XCOM, be aware that's a lot of the game. I mostly love the combat.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic western in the icy hills of Colorado. The first Wasteland game in the late 1980s was the main inspiration of Fallout (which was planned as a Wasteland sequel but they couldn't get the rights. The Wasteland-verse is simultaneously weirder & sillier than Fallout (psycho clown dentists and a Ronald Reagan AI) while also being more sophisticated and horrific. The creators have described Wasteland's tone as "Terminator meets Daffy Duck," it took me a little while to get my head around the vibe but it has grown on me.

The main storyline is about aiding a King Lear / Logan Roy type called "The Patriarch" who has proclaimed himself Governor of Colorado. He wants your help in solving interpersonal conflicts with each of his three adult kids. I like how the game presents things in an open enough way that you can decide to be altruistic or cynical or greedy and the game gives you space to do that. There are moral choices with heavy implications, there's not always a way to be "heroic" in everyone's eyes. One of the most surprising moments was after I made a difficult choice which I knew would lead to people getting killed. I made the decision I did based on the larger political situation and maintaining stability in the region. I wasn't super proud of my choice, but when I explained my actions to an NPC via a dialogue, their response was "no actually you are a monster and that thing you did is a massive war crime." They had a point! I love that this is an rpg where the writing and storytelling are like a dense novel. I find myself thinking about situations from my characters' point of view when I'm away from the game.

Downsides? Nothing major, there is definitely some jank in the UI but no stability problems or crashes. It gets kind of old moving your party across city maps by clicking and watching the group gradually march across (if you have played a Baldurs' Gate style game you are familiar with this). The wacky 1980s retro humor is hit or miss but is pretty easy to ignore. Graphics are 7/10 overall, some of the animations and textures look a little cheap, but armor and gear show up in a cool amount of detail on the 3D in-game model, a little bit like The Sims meets Mad Max.

I'm writing this with 50 hours of playtime and am about 2/3 through the main storyline I think, lots of content without feeling oversaturated by a gratuitous open world. Overall this game has been a nice surprise, I would love for more people to play it so I could talk about it more.

175 hours in the first game, I'm 70 hours into TW:WH2 and there's tons of content (several playable factions, large areas of the map) I've barely seen. This game is HUGE, and it's very good.

PRO:
- 30+ years of Warhammer Fantasy lore brought to life with excellent attention to detail.
- Surprisingly good AI, even on Normal the AI will go after your weaknesses and force you to adapt creatively
- Engine improvements from the first game, better camera, smoother transition between the regular view and "global" view
- Integration with the first game via the Mortal Empires campaign is amazing.

CAVEATS:
- This game takes a lot of disk space (the two games combined are at least 150GB) and it wants a beefy machine. I'm on an M1 Macbook with 16GB RAM and a fast SSD and it runs pretty well on medium-high settings, I wouldn't try to run it with less memory or from an hdd.
- There is a learning curve. If you are a Total War vet maybe you can jump in pretty easily, but you have to keep track of troop composition, spellcasters, strategy on the world map, a civ-style economy with diplomacy and resource trading, items & followers, quest chains, special per-faction mechanics like Bretonnian chivalry and Dwarf grudges.
- It can swallow up a lot of free time but it stays pretty fresh! It's a good game!

If you've ever played a deckbuilder like Ascension, Dominion or Thunderstone, you'll feel right at home here. This is a really well designed game with multiple builds possible for each of the four characters (Ironclad is a warrior archetype, Silent is rogueish, Watcher is a monk with different stances, and Reject is a robot who manipulates elemental orbs). They all play pretty differently and there's a lot of depth here. StS is tough but fair, beating the boss on Floor 50 with every character is an attainable goal but a particular run is very rarely a sure thing. I'm nearly 100 hours in and have barely scratched the surface of the postgame. This game is terrific.

Loop Hero takes elements from a bunch of good tabletop games: Carcasonne, Dominion (the card game), Can't Stop, and worker placement games like Caverna. It shuffles these parts together into, I guess it's a deckbuilding idle game playable in short blocks with a big "push your luck" aspect in calculating how far to push the run.

It's gritty old school D&D style fantasy to the bone: vampires, skeletons, giant spiders, rat wolves, etc. I love use of orange in the color palette that makes the vampire houses and blood groves look like something on a 1970s black light poster. Sound design is excellent, the game understands that lots of cool "payoff" sounds clustered together can be a lot of fun.

There's two aspects of Loop Hero that bother me a little bit. These aren't even criticisms so much as thoughts on game design and implementation which have come up while playing Loop Hero. The first is what I call the upgradable town problem. This is when you get to keep some gold or items after a run and eventually the game gets easier as you are able to buy upgrades. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but it can reduce feeling of accomplishment (if a game is design so that eventually anyone can fumble through it) or feel like cheap content gating to extend needed playtime. Loop Hero feels a little bit like this sometimes but I'm not sure if it's a problem in this case? Partly because of the idle game influences, partly because Loop Hero is still a pretty hard game even when you have most of the cards and town upgrades unlocked. After the first Act, you need to start min-maxing pretty hard in your deckbuilding and upgrade item loadout to succeed.

My other point of critique is about Game Maker. I love Game Maker, Game Maker Studio 2 is a fantastic and powerful programming environment. There's a short list of things GM isn't very good at though, and at the top of that list is user interfaces. GM doesn't have an internal concept of buttons or menu boxes etc It's not hard to make a button, but if you want floating tooltips or scrolling list boxes, that takes a lot of extra work in Game Maker. This is mostly noticable here because a big part of idle/strategy/rpg games is menus and spreadhseets and icon bars and those aren't things Game Maker shines at. HOWEVER GM is generally accessible in a way that those other featureful engines like Unity or Godot, are not, the knowledge barrier is a lot lower. There's elements of Loop Hero which ARE a little confusing because of the slightly fugly UI, but it's never a major problem, and it's exciting seeing this kind of strategy/RPG built in GM.

Pros:

+ The best single-player simulation of an epic tabletop RPG campaign I've ever had experienced.
+ If you play tabletop games, this game can teach you a lot about being a good GM and how to put together a campaign.
+ Smart, thoughtful writing in a fantasy world which asks serious questions about colonialism
+ Very good implementation of real-time with pause (RTWP) combat, surprised how much I like it.
+ Large, interesting game world. I'm 125 hours in (playing with the full White March expansion) and still going strong with a while to go in the main story. This game is BIG.
+ White March expansions are excellent DLC and very worth playing the complete version.
+ Monks

NEUTRAL:
+/- The original combat system works well and has some interesting strategic choices, it's just not explained very well in-game, it took me a while to figure how different stats affected the character build. You compare an attack roll to one of four defenses, Fortitude, Deflection, Reflex and Will so it kind of combines the DnD ideas of armor class and saving throw into one mechanic. Fortunately it's cheap to respec your characters any time at an inn so you can experiment with different builds.
+/- Hand-painted maps look gorgeous but fixed isometric view is a little crowded and confusing during big fights with lots of spells.
+/- The expansion does have some balance/pacing problems, there will probably be a while where parts of the game feel like easy mode depending on what order you do the quests. The High Level Content Scaling option helps and I recommend turning it on if you like a little challenge in combat.

Cons:
- Can't save when party members are unconscious, sometimes this means 30+ minutes of extra combat before everybody is safe. Less of a problem when you get Revive scrolls and priest magic.
- Voice acting is mostly okay but party members repeating the same banter gets to be a problem. After 50 hours hearing the same stuff gets olllldd.

Conclusion: Should you play this? If you like big party-based western RPGs then yeah this is pretty incredible. At its best the writing is genuinely compelling and memorable and even when the writing is a little generic it still feels like a good dnd campaign. Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape:Torment never really grabbed me but this is a beautiful evolution and refinement of that idea.

A charming roguelike that could be a great choice for kids or strategy game newbies but equally satisfying for roguelike veterans looking for something without a million details to keep track of. Sproggiwood fits all of these roles wonderfully.

The UI clearly shows this is a mobile port, but keyboard controls are in place and work with no complaints (4-way movement, number keys for skills, space bar to confirm is mostly all that's needed). The graphics are clear and nice to look at, very clean design but lots of personality.

The first dungeons are pretty small and quick, with several floors and a boss monster at the bottom. There are rewards for beating levels multiple times with multiple classes (Farmer, Warrior, Archer, Thief, Wizard, etc.) and a simple upgradable town.

This is a cute lil game but even on Normal difficulty it gets tough after the first few dungeons. This is a great bit of game design, both in gameplay and art style. If any of this sounds like your jam, Sproggiwood is worth a look.