Recent reviews by You-fools

A one of a kind rule discovery word puzzle game, flawed in some ways and brilliant in others.

I absolutely adore the puzzle design and mechanics of Lingo, the way it organizes and presents information and themes for sections is one of a kind. The amount of eureka moments and tough to crack puzzles has made it one of my favourite puzzle games I've played in years.

It's most fun aspect by far are the puzzle boxes and how you discover the rules surrounding them. Some brilliant puzzles stuck in my head for long enough that in an epiphany hours after closing the game an answer or idea dawned on me that caused me to scramble to the computer, boot up the game and shove the correct answer in. Not many puzzle games have hooked me so well that the rules and certain boxes snap into my head after not touching it for a while.

The labyrinth design of the map and confusing navigational choices really pulls away from what I feel makes this game unique. Its use of space is interesting but once you're into the rhythm of solving boxes and searching for places to go the navigation gets exhausting and damages the experience in my opinion. There are some moments where it clicks and it is cool but they are interspersed with frustrating mazes that need to be mapped and memorized for you to get to the thing that actually progresses the game.

I still absolutely recommend this game for anyone interested in quirky, difficult puzzle games and those who love problem solving and rule discovery. Just be ready to get stuck trying to go places almost as often as you get stuck on a great puzzle or set of rooms.

It's taken some time to adjust but I believe that Rivals 2 is in most ways an upgrade to Rivals 1. The new mechanics keep the game fresh while still holding on to Rivals unique pace and game feel.

For someone new to the series Rivals of Aether II is a platform fighter taking heavy inspiration from Super Smash Brothers Melee, porting across lots of its unique mechanics and timings as well as taking inspiration from its character and stage design.

Rivals of Aether II introduces several new mechanics and tweaks the windows and timings for several things that make melee so challenging and in many ways unapproachable. In this way they allow the skill floor to be lower and less technically proficient players still make use of the harder techs while not disrupting the skill ceiling of the game.

As a party game RoA2 is great fun but it seriously lacks variety. There's only so much you can goof around with in the game as lots of it is still in development. As a competitive game RoA2 is precise, deep and rewarding to learn. The competitive aspect of the game seems to be the core focus of the dev team while the casual side is being worked on in the background.

Overall its a great game that's held back as of now by the lack of content, if you're interested but see the game as a bit empty right now check back with it in a year or two and it'll likely be much closer to what you're looking for.

Of course it needs some work and the cast is still quite lacking but of what's here the game is brilliant and I'm excited for new additions to the cast and changes to make the game just that more crunchy and fun.

Also the main menu design needs some work, It's being addressed but as of now it's in a weird middle ground of functioning fine about 60% of the time.

A slick, refined and consistently fun auto battler roguelike. It's been an absolute pleasure playing this game in EA and I'm super proud of the devs for getting it to this point.

While a few roguelike autobattlers are available on steam now Tales & Tactics stands above the rest for its unique modes of play and wonderfully diverse runs.

Your challenger selection has strong influence on how you tailor your runs, which unit traits you go for and how your final board will look. Every unit has key strengths and want specific things from items and team compositions to shine. Traits differ wildly and rarely give direct stat buffs, instead giving unique bonus effects that give you more to build around.

There are 9 base challengers each with unique targeted win conditions and strengths in teambuilding, as well as 6 more community coded characters with unique perks and the Challenger Draft feature, drawing on the pool of all challenger perks to allow you to create your own at the beginning of a run. With such a large variety of approaches that are impactful from your first combat to the end of a run the replayability of Tales & Tactics is a massive step above other games in the genre.

T&T also features a Slay the Spire like ascension system in the Challenge Climb, allowing for more difficult runs without disrupting the core game experience. Most of these challenge climb effects are interesting beyond just straight nerfs to your runs or buffs to the enemies, adding more effects for you to build around and consider in preparing for combats and adding or removing certain aspects of runs that create even more variance and replayability.

T&T also has a Super Auto Pets like PvP mode in which you pick from a preset starting lineup and PvP exclusive challengers to play the base game with a completely new approach.

I've loved pretty much every roguelike autobattler I've played and would recommend most of them to people but if I had to pick one Tales & Tactics is the obvious choice, nothing else in the genre matches its level of refinement, has its level of replayability and variance in modes, run feel and build viability.

Esports Godfather is a management/deckbuilding strategy game in which you play as the coach of a MOBA team. The game covers athlete selection, skills training, character specialization, long term deckbuilding and strategy devising, short term deckbuilding and strategy devising and deep strategic card play within the setting of a macro MOBA game.

You have a team of 5 athletes who you interact with in small written conversations and events that give you sets of choices that influence your athletes' development. Each athlete has their own set of personal cards, a training ability, a game ability, hero mastery level and a set of statistics.

-Personal cards are drawn during matches and have general effects such as starting small skirmishes, improving stat scaling or farming speed, harassing enemies, drawing cards, providing energy, etc.

-Training abilities grant boosts to specific forms of stat training, such as gaining more from medals earned by achieving feats in matches, or boosting specific slots in an athlete's training schedule.

-Game abilities vary widely across providing valuable card draw, energy generation, boosting unit scaling, adding new unique cards to your deck or hand, improving specific playstyles and roles, etc.

-Hero mastery improves an athlete's stats and improves the hero's cards allowing you to get more out of picking them for that specific athlete than other hero options.

-Athlete's statistics provide a baseline for their competency during matches, making them more likely to harass enemies and dodge enemy harassment, farm gold faster, scale their stats off gold more, be more likely to hit enemies and dodge enemies during fights, etc.

The main meat of the gameplay places you in control over a MOBA team's macro decisions and how you prioritize your team composition within a game to win. The micro actions and consequences are determined by the heroes, state of the game, which side (blue or red) your team is playing on, your athletes stats and the current metagame.

Matches consist of a draft and play phase: In which you pick and ban heroes, then play the card game. The game plays out in rounds in which you and your opponent generate energy (called strategy points), draw cards and your and your opponent's athletes automatically play out the game. Once either side reaches 8 strategy points the round pauses and they get to play cards. The game has scheduled teamfights with specified roles on each side always showing up (if they're alive) on specific rounds. These scheduled teamfights change with every update, their frequency, heroes involved, rewards for winning and round in which they happen are all randomized resulting in constantly fresh objectives that you're able to play and strategize around in and outside of the game phase.

Heroes come with their own set of cards, abilties and attributes which determine how they are best played. Heroes tend to have counters and synergies that allow you to mix and match their placement to build a strong team that takes advantage of your athlete's unique set of stats, abilities and hero mastery level.



I absolutely adore Esports Godfather. It's the sort of game I've been wanting to play for years of my life. It feels like I've come across a game designed exactly for me. I can see this not being for everyone, but it includes incredible depth and a breadth of interactions that makes it a joy to study. The constant meta changes mean that the best possible team and set of athletes is always changing, learning what makes your team tick, which heroes best pair with your athlete's skillsets and how to convert that into a game winning composition is an absolute joy and cements this game as one of my favourites of all time.

- This game is filled to the brim with depth, it genuinely feels like a MOBA with how deep these interactions go.
- The meat of the gameplay is brilliant, the level of tactical and strategic decision making within the draft phase and matches is second to none within the deckbuilding genre.
- This game's flow is horrendously smooth. Games usually have downtime between decisions and action, there is no such point in Esports Godfather.
- There is a great balance between the impact of micro and macro within the game. Your influence within matches is only on the macro scale, so the time between games is spent honing your athletes to turn micro interactions to your favour, enabling your macro strategy to more definitively win games.
- Constant meta changes mean you never really settle into a specific strategy (with a couple exceptions)
- Every hero is distinct and provides their own unique value.
- Hero design is overall great in both visuals and gameplay.
Management aspects are handled well in balance with the gameplay, all important information is accessible outside of matches that enable you to make the most of your current toolset if you care to do that.

- The UI is VERY cluttered, all information presented is useful and is there for a good reason but dear lord does it make picking up and understanding the game for the first time difficult.
- No hero changes means some consistently overpowered heroes become staples of the opening draft no matter what the current meta is.
- Lots of relevant information is extremely well hidden, to look at basic hero information between matches you have to click on the tiny Info button in the bottom left corner, then on an even smaller Archive button to view the current hero list.
- The option to open the pause menu and close the game are well hidden, buttons and UI design create an extremely addicting cycle that is quite predatory in how it traps you.
- AI athlete art is kinda off-putting. I recognize that creating a massive set of portraits for athletes absolutely sucks when you're a smaller dev team that have already designed, modeled and animated 54 heroes.
- The game is way too easy on lower difficulties, your athletes far outpace anyone else and as such can win off micro interactions alone. It's only as you crank the difficulty that the game's intricacies start to become worth caring about.
- The AI can sometimes be pretty crap, being unable to properly play around their own drafts and not picking synergistic heroes. They make cool plays almost as often as they make atrocious blunders that hand you victory on a silver platter.
- Poor translation. The development team are not native english speakers and as such the game has quite a few poor translations and spelling errors. It doesn't detract from the main game but if you're trying to interact with every aspect of the game it's noticable.

The literal perfect game for me. I can't bring across how much this hooked and consumed me upon picking it up. It's been 1 week since I picked this game up on writing this review, 7 days. Look at my hours at the time of review. The only thing to ever hit me harder than this was depression. Though I'd account maybe 12 hours of this play time was actually spent writing up a huge guide and spreadsheet of information for the game so don't go too crazy. ~50 hours of genuine gameplay at the time of review. I've "won" the hardest difficulty and am now attempting to hold my top spot in the top league while hunting for the rest of the achievements. I still want to keep playing this game afterwards, perhaps try out a new set of athletes with a completely new set of cards to build, draft and play around.

If you're interested check out my spreadsheet covering every hero currently in the game with my opinions and rating on how good they are as well as an evaluation of their matchups and interactions. LINK HERE[docs.google.com]

Throwing out a positive review for a game I've spent many hours on years ago. It's just as good as it was then and I'm super glad to see it added to the platform.

An incredibly fun, active, hectic, creative and all around solid ability based shooter. Absolute blast to play casually. If you're looking for a fun FPS that gives you an interesting variety of tools and a wonderfully reactive environment to play in this is for you.

Most negative reviews are to do with the quality of ranked play which just isn't this game's strong suit. Once you start really taking this game seriously you forget how goofy it is and start getting frustrated when things are too hard to follow. Don't fall into this trap, if you try out things and focus on enjoyment over success this is one of the best FPS games I've ever played.

There are creative solutions to most scenarios (except for THOSE spots on Monaco) and environment manipulation can completely change the way engagements play out. There's nothing like this game in this pvp format.

Never in my life have I wanted to look into the inner workings of a game more than with Kādomon: Hyper Auto Battlers. This game is one of the most bizarrely programmed concoctions I've ever experienced.

To start, the premise of the game, its feel, the amount of content and presentation quality is brilliant. Kādomon does an incredible job in its visuals, sound design and clarity*. When things are all working together this is a great game and one I'd absolutely recommend.

*when everything is functioning correctly.

But in its current state I can't. So much of the game is completely non-functional, I have no idea how but nearly every item with the "GAINED" or "APPLIED" keywords straight up do not work. Incredibly cool synergies like stacking the "FAST" buff have great synergy with items like Goggles (GAINED "FAST" gain 1 "STRENGTH") and can open up powerful and interesting builds based around unique approaches to applying "FAST". However Goggles does literally nothing, I've never seen it proc ever. What check is being run here? Is there even a check? How does this not work??

The ordering of effects and attacks is bizarre and not properly explained. Allies that are tied in their attack speed will attack on the same "turn" so to speak and if the first attack kills an enemy the second is wasted, however if an enemy and an ally are tied in attack speed they attack on separate "turns". So if both front units are tied in attack and can both kill each-other it arbitrarily decides a winner, (though I'm not even sure this is true, every time I've been in a scenario like this the outcome has been different).

One of the key debuffs "DECAY" which essentially functions as a poison reads: "After attack deal 1 damage per stack and reduce stacks by 1". I've had runs in which I afflict a boss with over 150 decay, they then attack 6 times in a row with less than 50 health and wipe my team killing my run despite the fact they should've died 6 times over from decay, how does this thing not just activate? It functions earlier in the boss fight, I find it's a very reliable way of chipping bosses down. Decay is capable of dealing lethal damage on units in regular fights so why isn't it killing the boss as it should? What's going wrong?

Simultaneous effects happen in an arbitrary order. Things that are proc'd by the same input, IE: Being hurt apply their positive and negative effects separately, sometimes their positive effects happen separately, sometimes they happen at the same time. The same applies to the negative effects, their order can be stacked or separate within different instances in the same battle, it's completely baffling how this system works.

For the sake of an effect, when your units gain experience on the bar shown after combats they have a lower experience number at the start of the effect (I assume for visuals). This is completely confusing as it also displays negative experience numbers for evolutions and at the start of the next experience bar. Entering a combat with a unit on 0/120 or 60/120 experience, then ending the combat and seeing -1/120 or 59/120 is bizarre, I don't see why this is in game at all.

The items Carrot on a Stick and Bottled Storm are identical, sharing the exact same effect text, that being: MOVED gain 1 attack. I've also never seen these items proc.

In game settings for audio don't apply until you open the settings menu. This is awful in my case as I have the game sounds to the minimum possible, so on launching the game I get my ears blasted out.

In terms of actual gameplay complaints I don't have many, the game is really solid, great fun and has some incredible variety in builds and playstyles. I'd love to see more options for starting mons as the current 3 have gotten boring shockingly fast, perhaps choosing from a set to start your run would be pretty interesting.

The default speed for combats is way too fast. So much of the game is processed in rapid fire ticks at the basic speed that paying attention to things that happen and in what order is extremely difficult. For some bizarre reason the slow combat option changes the gameplay actively by decreasing the attack speed of all units, buffing super and energy based compositions by just choosing to view the combat slower than the default. Granted it's a small thing but why in the world is it a thing at all?

Right now the boss of the second area is really lame, so many of the most interesting team compositions rely on buffs to match the pace of elites and the final boss. Unless you have a ridiculously absurd combo the second boss will just kill most compositions that were already capable of winning an entire run because they make use of buffs.

The final thing (but surely not the last I'll find) that has bothered me is the item Toxic Lamp reads: AFTER ENEMY SUPER Deal 2 "DECAY" to them. This seems like it applies 2 decay to whoever just used their super, in reality it applies 2 decay to the holder of the toxic lamp. Why is this written this way? Is it just doing the complete wrong thing? This is the only case of the word THEM appearing within one of these item descriptions I can find, every other thing that applies a buff or debuff to the user simply says GAIN "X". "Them" implies the subject of the sentence, meaning the enemy who just supered. If this is the correct reading how in the world is it working like this? Why was it implemented before it was remotely tested?

So much of this game absolutely baffles me, I absolutely cannot recommend with how dysfunctional it is. However with time, scouring and lots and lots of bug fixes I think this game is a massive thumbs up. I still love it even with its wall of flaws, but don't get it right now if you're looking for a fully functional and comprehensive experience.

A wonderfully put together, flowy and extremely fun beat-em-up/platform fighter/roguelike mashup. Weapons all have their unique charms and create huge variety in your approach.

The design and consistency of some aspects are lacking, but it almost never gets in the way of game enjoyment.

Overall I'd recommend this game to those who enjoy the genres as with a bit of acclimating time you'll enjoy what this game uniquely has to offer, huge hats off to the developers for their consistent updates, communication and the 1.0 release!

After a bit more gameplay I'm really dissatisfied with the decisions around the final boss. A forced second phase once you've completed the main story would be much more interesting if paired with the Perrenial Tactics skull instead of being a requirement to win runs. The final boss attacks and moves with armour much too frequently to be an interesting fight. The Warlock is unique change up to a run that feels controllable and dodgeable, whereas the final boss is so relentless and has so few openings to safely attack that it boils down to a race of trading hits in which you desperately hope to win. The second phase makes this trading near impossible even with a build that deals substantial damage. I still thoroughly enjoy the majority of the game but I'd love to see changes made to the final boss to make it a more engaging and back and forth fight instead of a bullet hell. Another huge problem with the boss design is that the stage is just inaccessible, the side platforms are too high and too far apart for you to effectively move between them to apply pressure. With the boss constantly teleporting back and forth throwing out attacks that essentially hit a quarter of the screen you spend the majority of the fight chasing the boss and hoping to move through their onslaught and land a couple hits before they teleport away. Because they cancel your knockback and armour for their attacks it's surprisingly inconsistent relying on the boss' gimmick of knocking them off the stage to deal damage.

Still wonderful game, well worth trying, please polish the final boss because it goes against the majority of what makes the game fun.

I played a character who started with a cube that when placed created a new cube in my hand that gained random units' effects, stats, cost and a new name. This unit shares the effects of the previously placed cube.

I then acquired a perk that when playing a uniquely named cube I refunded 80% of its cost and it gained extra health.

You can see how absurd this can get. I would open a combat and play my starting cube, I would then play my newly named cube gaining a new effect, play my newly named cube gaining a new effect, play my newly named cube gaining a new effect. This spiraled into pure insanity when spawning a single cube created a line of 30 of them forwards towards the enemy. The entire screen flashed red as a massive 80 damage blast struck everything on the field, killing my leader instantly and losing the run at the final boss.

Brilliant stuff.

Risk of Rain was already a brilliant and innovative game, but RoRR is a step up in every way. There's no good reason to go back to the original game at all, this simply has more, plays better, looks better, sounds better and feels better.

There's not much more to say, Risk of Rain is truly one of the sickest indie projects out there and is well worth giving a try. Recommend 100%