Recent reviews by Zukuu

+ Amazing visual artstyle
- Dungeons feel lifeless
o Combat is a bit shallow and never evolves. You have a 3-4hit combo, a charge attack, a jump attack and a parry you can unlock (which is bonkers strong).
- Sadly, combat is also super easy and you can only play on easy or normal.
- Story is super boring and they try so to get you "invested" into the mystery, but there is no depth to it and nothing interesting about it. Just presenting a shadow council and naming the characters Q and V and whatnot doesn't make it compelling. And to show you some of the backstroy they make you walk SLOWLY to the left in a parallel universe flashback and watch some unskippable cutscenes. Terrible
-- Terrible writing
-- You collect so much literal JUNK you can sell... for 1-3g. Most stuff costs THOUSANDS, it's not even worht to pick it up.
-- There is a crafting system but even if you are very thoughou, by the time you have enough to craft your first greatsword upgrade about 3/4 through the game, you can just buy a strictly better weapon with money. utterly useless lmao.
--- The most annoying grating side-kick character put in a game. It's just awful.


I have no clue how this has such a high rating. Are people that easily swayed by some pretty graphics?

Buggy. Awful gameplay. Limited co-op progression. Abandoned.
Overall trash at every price point.

Stay away.

A decent first try to branch out the Persona formula with plenty of potential left for improvements.

This game isn’t just bad—it’s infuriating. I made it to the end of Act 2 before aborting it. It’s shallow, repetitive, and riddled with baffling design decisions.

No one can tell me this went through any sort of playtest or player feedback.

• Re-selecting Units Every Map: Why am I forced to rebuild my setup from scratch every single time? It’s tedious, unnecessary. It's not like you need to adapt your strategy every map or something. Why doesn't it remember your previous choices and just let you alter it if you want to?
  
  
• Tiny Limits: Speaking of selecting your setup, you have so little points to build your army, that by the time you select the 3 basic types (1 mana giver, 1 damage, 1 blockade) and 2 spells your budget is basically full already. Why do tower evolutions cost additional army points again? So you just skip them and you do just fine. Even on hard, you just use the same basic strategy and can bruteforce every level first try.
  
  
• Zero Clarity: You have missions where you have to use towers you have never seen before and don't know what they do. Can't hover over them to read their effect, range, damage etc. so you are just thrown into it and have to play around stuff you have no knowledge about. You can already select your units to upgrade them, so why not just show me their stats as well?!
  
  
• Cryptic Objectives: For special missions you have unexplained obscure objectives like "charge your crystal" - what does that even mean? How does it work?! Where can I see how much it is charged vs how much it is corrupted?

• Element System: Every unit belongs to an element which has a very minor special effect (10% slow - - amazing) and can combo of each other to create elemental effects. Except, it's completely irrelevant. It's not worth it to play around it, you just use the best units regardless of the element and then select the spells that meet that elemental requirement the units have. There is no real strategy involved, because it's not worth it to use bad units to have access to a spell.
  
  
• Evolving is trash: Evolving a unit doesn't feel worth it either e.g. a tank unit has 700 hp and costs 80 energy. Upgrading it costs an additional 100 mana gives it 1100 hp - but it doesn't heal it, so why would you ever do that when you can just sell the unit (or wait until it dies) and then replace it or build a new one further along the line?! And remember, that ♥♥♥♥ costs army points.
  
  
• Passive Skill Tree: The passive upgrade tree is a joke. By the time I aborted I had whooping 2 passive points. Not that it matters much, because you and can choose between a mighty 10% less cost for a specific element... amazing. Good thing I'm forced to choose again every single map, wouldn't want to miss it...
  It's both insulting and a chore. And let's be honest, there is a talent that gives you 10% increased mana generation and it's basically the only worthwhile and impactful thing on the entire skill tree, so it's what you pick by default. The rest doesn't really matter. almost like the devs were scared to actually have it any impact.

It’s repetitive, unbalanced, and flat-out boring. Play literally any other tower defense game instead. You’ll thank me later.

The game is fun and engaging at first, but the longer you play the more it becomes apparent how formulaic, uninspired and truly shallow everything is. From god-awful dialogue, to fighting the same enemy for literally ten thousands of times again and again and again to the most shallow companions the genre has ever seen. Most companions have a SINGLE DEFINING TRAIT and will talk to you about ONLY THAT every conversation. Talking about what happens around you? Nope, better talk about my pet gryphon for the 20th time (no exaggeration). Then you get a quest to talk to him in another location and 3 loading screens later he talks to you about his gryphon. That's it. That was the entire side-quest. Guess what you will do the next time you go to you awful home base to talk to him? Yep, you get a quest to talk to him in ANOTHER LOCATION about his gryphon with an additional 3 loading screens... Jesus. Even if you stay at camp, it's gryphon, gryphon daddy, gryphon litter. Almost every companion is like that. It's truly awful and dull and you will check out out of 90% of the companion stories.

Otherwise you have awful dialogue without any RPG elements. Even your protagonist basically says the same thing regardless of what you pick. You have no meaningful impact on 99% of stuff happening and the few choices there are, are clearly indicated as to not engage you too much. The game also either treats you like a 12 year old child and talks down to you, or puts you into the big boy pants and lets you talk your companions squabbling like THEY are 12 year olds. It's honestly unbelievable that this comes from the same company that prided itself with good writing and dialogue in the past.

The game is just one-dimensional, even during combat. Every companion has 5 skills and a talent tree with enough points to max out 3 trees... but why? EVERY SKILL PUTS ALL SKILLS ON CD. So why bother using anything but the one-skill you skilled and just spam that whenever it's off CD? Companions themselves are so inconsequential in combat, they can't fight any trash mob by themselves in any meaningful way. The 'combo' system has no depth or impact and might as well not be in the game. Apart from buffing YOU they are basically useless. You have a skill tree, but once you reach level 30, your build is basically never changing and you will be doing the same sequence of abilities over and over again in every combat against the same enemies that don't have any strategic variety. I played the entire game on 'nightmare' and you can't change that difficulty mode afterwards, so do not make the same mistake and start on one lower. The HP Sponge just prolongs the awful arena fights without providing any meaningful challenge. I was basically invincible, but every enemy took way too long to kill.

Some talents are also buggy or not tested or hilariously awful. I've dealt up to 3x 9999 damage with my charged attacks, so why would I ever care about afflictions witch do not scale and are a flat amount of damage (50 per stack, with a max stack of 3 LMAO). You have like 3.000HP and a talent that converts your Rage spent to HP. An ability costs 50-100 and it's not like you can spam these. That's literally one of your 'special last skills', for which you need level 40 out of 50 to unlock. Other talents require you to have certain armor equip and stop working until you deskill it and reskill the talent and it happens frequently enough to be annoying. Same for your ultimate ability, which resets to default occasionally.

Puzzles are literally 'use your interface and push a button'. That's it. See a torch? Use your wheel to automatically ignite it. Then you also have the very difficult puzzles of 'find a battery around the corner and put it in here'... It's insulting even for pre-schoolers, how does this make it into a mature game at all?!

Speaking of mature, none of the mature themes and topics of past Dragon Age made it into the game. You have some slight glimpse into it some mature themes at some minor points, but overall, it's babies first fantasy adventure.

You will maybe enjoy the first 10h, after that it becomes more and more of a trainwreck for the most part. If you do struggle through it, you will be rewarded with a decent last segment, that showed a way better direction, but it's ultimately not worth sticking with it.

Very fun and I hope we see more in the future with a focus to make it less puzzley and more strategic.

• Into The Breach-style: You always know what enemies will do and everything is full visible, so you can make informed choices
  
• Infinite rewinds within a turn makes it a lot less frustrating
  
• Some fun characters
  
• A story you can play through
  
• Level Up and skill customization

• Most maps are more akin to puzzles than actual strategy
  
• Most maps are incredible short (1-3 rounds)
  
• Even on hard it's very easy due to the points above

It's basically an isometric Terraria in a very vanilla flavor. It has some fun ideas and works very well, but not all systems come together nicely. With some very much needed QOL and re-balance it has potential to be a great game. As it is, it's fun in multiplayer and worth a playthrough.

THIS IS A STRICT MUILTIPLAYER GAME

While you can play solo, it just feels clunky and awful. You select a hero and every card or relic you get or upgrade belongs to him, but you have two "companions" who have a randomized fixed deck and they upgrade their cards by themselves and they have their own mana and choose 2 cards for you to play for them. Wtf is this?

I have to ask the devs, why not just let me play a solo hero and give me more mana instead?

TL;DR: Either play this with 2 friends or don't bother. As solo experience it's a clear thumbs down.

It's basically Factorio lite & light.
It has clear objectives that guide you through the entire game. There is a small story attached to it and some NPCs you can interact with. You don't really need to build and design huge complex automation factories, but rather multiple smaller factories that help you with your task. e.g.

Red Rock -> Red Ore -> Red Ingot
+
White Rock -> White Ore -> White Ingot
=
Blood Box, which you need 99 for to accomplish your goal and then selectively for some tools here and there, so you can build it far away and then grab it from a chest if you need to, and don't need to transport it back to your base, which I actually kinda liked, because you never really have to "redesign" your entire base.

Apart from the building, the game IS a bit clunky. To progress you need to "outlast" some waves of enemies in a small area (doesn't attack or destroy your base), which isn't rally exciting or difficult. Just a bit tedious, but those are relatively short.

Apart from that, you also need to "put lightbulbs" down everywhere, because you will die in the darkness and your machines don't work in darkness either. Machines don't consume any energy, just the light, so that's one major aspect to solve throughout the game with different fuel types to increase the amount you can place. The actual placement is very, very annoying tho, since the range you can space them is super small,

Overall you can expect around 20h to beat everything and I can fully recommend it, because it does scratch that Factorio itch a bit.

It has good ideas and parts but all added together just doesn't make for an engaging fun gameplay loop.

The upgrades get expensive way to fast and require ridiculous amounts of grinding.
You can't just play with a single character you like, no, the game forces you to play different chacters by introducing a max HP penalty.
Apart from a few range characters, there is also no way to really avoid damage. The game throws so many enemies at you with so much hp (on hard) that you will bleed HP left and right. Playing a range character is basically the only way to really enjoy the game and even then you have DARK GREY AREA EFFECTS ON A DARK PURPLE FLOOR so you get hit anyway. It's not really fun to have just kite every enemy and therefore the gameplay is also "not fun" for the most part.

The family is so also so, so boring and one-dimensional and if I have to see that awkward 3 seconds of the house before showing the interior one more time I swear to god I'm gonna throw up.