Recent reviews by rekenner

It just isn't a well made / balanced game. It's got the usual awful Amplitude Studios map generation, but the game's variance is cranked to 11, and balance between cultures per era are terrible. Unlike in ES2 or EL, you don't have the interesting faction mechanics to smooth some of that out to make the game interesting, you just feel ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over when the map generation sucks or the good cultures get taken in an era. It also seems to have fallen in to the Civ5/Civ6 busy-work model of adding game features, which EL/ES2 expansions also seemed to fall into, but the base game of this feels so bloated.

It also has the Amplitude Studios usual "this is a turn based game with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ dexterity elements, because the AI gets to take its turn before your turn, during your turn, and after your turn" element, which... like, cmon.

Overall, I think the game is great. I enjoyed the dialogue and the game's aesthetic, especially the music.
The combat mechanics are a touch weak, but I looked at this as a VN reaching to an Action Roguelike, so that didn't bother me. And the VN parts were great. I enjoyed all the romances and the game's plot. I like how different the characters feel, and the texting was a cool way to interact.
For whatever it's worth to The Discourse, I've had experience with a narcissistic, abusive, love bombing Ex. I hated Eric. I liked that you could push back on him and ignore him. He was a good villain. Highly recommend the game.

I want to like this game, but at the moment it's basically unplayable. The game's mechanics, what works with each other, etc, are not explained in the game at all, and it feels like the game comes down to getting offered the obscenely busted relics, not getting offered the relics that effectively don't have game text, hoping the relics actually work the way you want them to... and hoping you get the units that make it so you don't actually have to play the game, you just get to watch a pretty light show. And sometimes the pretty light show is fun! But at the moment, I don't think there's actually much of a game here.

It's a very good 2D Soulslike. Difficult / character action Metroidvania. Whatever.

The combat feels good, although it doesn't nail things entirely. The parry feels pretty good, although some enemy types feel a bit too reliant on you using it, which just slows things down. Some of the bosses just feel cheap/annoying. Still, it's good, overall. (There are two human boss fights - which are usually my favorite boss fights in character action games. But the ones in this tend towards just being very annoying? Lots of I-Frames, attacks without tells, etc. They were a couple of frustrating bits to otherwise great combat)

The exploration is fun - the platforming feels good, the in-game map is good. The travel abilities feel good, though a *touch* clunky in a couple cases. The bonfire locations are *just* spread out enough to feel "tense but fair". I wish the fast travel didn't cost so much to unlock, though that was added in the DLC. The travel shrines are a bit too far apart. Backtracking feels a little painful, but you can mostly delay doing too much of it until you can buy the ability to warp between bonfires.

The game really nails the Dark Souls, Everything is Weird and Vague style of lore. I don't deep dive into it - I'm not the reading item / ability lore bits type, at least for these games. But what I do experience of it is very good. It also has the .... Dark Souls, quests without questlog, you can fail quests without knowing you were even on them, etc. sorta thing going. Which.... I hate, but I know some people like.

The game is very Catholic - Spanish (as in, from Spain) devs, so that makes sense. So it's very... background culturally Catholic. It's an interesting change from experiencing media that's culturally Christian, as influencing culture.

And the game looks amazing and sounds amazing. Great soundtrack. (And it's even on Spotify!). So, yeah. Highly recommend, blemishes and all. Great game.

I've been playing a lot of Gloomhaven via Tabletop Simulator this year. So, hearing that there was a major update not too long ago, I decided to try this version. In short: It's very incomplete and not fun!

It is in Early Access. So, things like the game only having randomly generated dungeons and incomplete implementations of major aspects of the game make sense... but it also just means the game isn't very fun to play, at current.

The dungeons all feel incredibly boring. They've been almost entirely small 1-2 room affairs with minimal traps/obstacles with you being packed in with a bunch of enemies. Combats feel less like an interesting tactical puzzle and more like just mashing numbers at each other. All but the most basic enhancements aren't implemented yet, which makes a lot of classes less interesting. Somehow, you can't even add Jump to cards (although with dungeon layouts as they are, this is a lot less relevant).

The UI is just.... bad. The environments are noisy, important things are somewhat hard to see, enemy designs are very hard to distinguish from each other, targeting indicators are bright red on bright orange... it's a mess. The game really needs a final zoom out into a top-down, board game mode, it feels like, where things are more clearly laid out. Even if you want to play this game solo, just... play it in Tabletop Simulator. It's still the vastly superior experience.

Combat in this game is a poorly designed mess - you get to ignore 90% of combat mechanics, the game cheats harder and harder to be a "challenge". You either stun-lock enemies until they die or they cheat and one-shot you. You can change difficulty levels on the fly to make the game easier, but that just means combat becomes mash buttons. Unfortunately, these problems don't become obvious until fairly late in the game.

For the campaign, at least, this isn't a tactics game. It's a puzzle game where things are thrown at you at random.

This game really needs a way to grind that isn't "run through the same floors you've already run through, repeatedly".

I'm about 20ish hours of play time into the game, and my party has developed to the point where if I get to act with enough of my monsters before they get oneshot, I can then effectively hold down accept to end the remainder of the fight. But if the enemy team goes first and oneshots enough of my party, I lose the fight. Now, I'm about 10 levels below the enemy teams, but there's no way for me to level up except go back a floor or two and run it a handful of times.

So, the combat isn't super exciting at this point - it's very coinflippy - and grinding isn't particularly fun.

Meh?

An incredibly deep, incredibly frustrating at times, incredibly fun... RTS + Deck Building? game.

Would be better if it understood good roguelike design.