Recent reviews by Joe Biden

Moderately disappointing bugs in the Simulacrum. (Spoilers)


You need to be particularly unlucky to encounter this one early on, but eventually you'll run into it. If certain enemies get the Dio's Best Friend buff, the enemies counter will not decrease when they are killed. Inevitably, this means the void will start to kill you after some time, and you will lose. There is no way to survive if even a single enemy breaks in this way. Of course I came into contact with this brutal bug on the 50th wave just before unlocking the second new character, just after encountering a run killing bug on wave 48 of my previous run. For reference, those two runs combined were about 2 hours combined and the reward was zilch since you only unlock the character after the 50th wave.

The other bug that I encountered was one that has existed in the game for some time now, but is inexplicably more common and by nature of the Simulacrum infinitely more punishing--being thrown out of the range of the only thing keeping you alive at a seemingly increasing velocity until you unavoidably die by the void's damage.

While the added content is generally fun, albeit increasing the luck factor by introducing extremely powerful items that can trivialize any run that isn't killed by bugs, I do not recommend purchasing Survivors of the Void until after the various issues with the Simulacrum and overpowered items are patched/nerfed.

That being said, with the potential for patches to yield a fantastic DLC, buying the added content while it is on sale for the future is probably fine.

If you are not a fan of inventory management, this game probably is not for you. It requires much planning into what you keep, what you use, and how you do so.

Second, you may want to wait a bit until updates rectify the following issues, which are the most prominent issues I have seen so far:

Game Resets

A variety of different things can cause the game to randomly wipe progress. While exiting the game through the menus mitigates most of this, there are occasions when the game does not save your progress regardless.

For that reason, I would advise all players, as much fun as the game can be, to take a break after an hour or so of playtime or after significant events because you may lose every bit of it for no reason. It is incredibly heartbreaking to play this game 5+ hours straight, close it, and open the game later to find you have lost every bit of that progress, especially with the roguelike nature of this game.

Also, if you ever need to uninstall and reinstall this game, I recommend opening it, saving it through the menus, exiting it, restarting your computer, and then uninstalling it--hoping that it saves. It usually resets a large portion of your progress from the day if you need to uninstall it.

Translation

The translation is pretty good, but there are some slight issues. Some of the menus will read in a way that indicates one thing, but it does the opposite. Mistranslations were the most problematic for me when waiting for a rescue. You can opt to play the game while waiting for rescue, and it will allow you to play bonus dungeons. However, it tells you that it will save your items as long as you store them. Unfortunately, this appears to be a mistranslation. I lost two hours of progress during this time because it did not save any of it.

No options to modify the controls

You are stuck with the default control layout, and it is not the world's most concise layout either. You will get used to it after about an hour or two of game time, or at least that was how it went for me, but it would be great to be able to change this later.

I expect, or at least hope that most of these issues will be rectified in the coming months.

EDIT: I changed my review after losing 37 hours of progress to the crashes. I will not be continuing this game because I have lost 37 hours of valuable time for basically NO reward. Therefore, I cannot encourage other players to play a game that may see them to the same fate.

EDIT 2: Edited for conciseness.