Ah, Wanderlust: Rebirth. It's been too long since I played you, and I still have good memories...

But, every time I try to go back to playing Wanderlust: Rebirth (WR from now on), I end up remembering why I stopped playing it in the first place. Let me just get one thing out of the way: I do consider this game to be particularly good for what it is, a 2D top-down beat'em-up RPG. WR would be even better had the developpers not centered its gameplay on co-op with other players. And so I start explaining why I don't recommend WR...

First, as the entire game was developed with co-op in mind, there is actually content of the game that can't be accessed in solo gameplay. Yes: because everyone likes playing with randoms or, even better, can convince his friends to play a game only he seems to like.

The first point segues into the second: playing alone you get AI team-mates, but they are just a sliver short of being useful. The reason for this is that the AI teamsters tend to get killed incredibly easily by certain enemy types while not amounting to doing any real damage (or healing) to contribute, in a general way. They are also clearly not balanced to help you in the higher difficulties, meaning that it does end up as if they weren't really there. It even gets insulting when, as the Paladin, you can't even use your skills to bring them back to life, AS WOULD HAPPEN IF THEY WERE A REAL PLAYER INSTEAD. What's the point? Are the developpers telling us that only some classes work for playing solo?

Third, for a game with WANDERLUST as its name, you don't tend to wander much at all. Exploration is minimal, having most scenarios (or chapters, if I remember how the game calls it correctly,) being linear and driven by a quest that is very cliché. I'll admit that you DO wander through a somewhat varied diversity of caves and forests, and that perhaps the setting of the game has a worthy backstory that ends up either unseen by the player or forcefully fed at him depending on perspective and situation, but you would expect initially to have a little more freedom exploring a world full of annoying monsters for you to beat up.

Fourth, the enemies. Maybe if this point was a little more balanced in favour of the single player or by how many players there are in the game, the earlier three points wouldn't stand out as much. But come on! Some enemies are plain ludicrous in their balance. Blood slimes, even if "rare" in the campaign, are about the most annoying thing in the arena game mode if you can't finish them off quickly, or rather, quicker than they can leech off your useless AI budies' health into their own; blood slimes can also one-shot you, given the right conditions. And this is simply the enemy that pops to mind as the most unbalanced: poisoning spiders and the annoying elf casters also come to mind, if you really want a list of sorts.

Fifth... is definitely the grind. You would not believe how much you have to grind in this game... and you'll hate why, too: you need 3 of the previous tier of items to craft a next-tier item. And you also need tons of crappy small parts semi-randomly to craft things. And you need a "blueprint" of the item you're crafting. And the ingame currency as well, lots of it. And then this consumes space in your already limited and otherwise useless inventory. See where I'm getting at? You're not even grinding to become more powerful, oh no: you're grinding to raise a few numbers just a little, so that coming across an elf mage isn't immediately lethal at least. Leveling up is instead done by how well you scored on a chapter, which then gives you X of a total of Y skillpoints that the chapter can give. Meaning that playing alone is much harder in addition to the lackluster AI buddies, especially when you have to rely on them since most other things in the game are broken. Heck, the only way it could be worse was if you decided to actually play WITHOUT the AI buddies, which I believe you can, but why would you? It's better to have 3 meatshields and possibly a buff or two for 10 seconds than to die in those 10 seconds just because everthing was targetting you and you didn't kill the most dangerous things as fast as you could.

Also, that I know of, the multiplayer scene is practically dead. Maybe you can get into a game with a stranger, MAYBE. Timezones apply, of course. Be wary of desynchs, too: those can be quite annoying, with everyone stuck waiting for something that will never happen because the other person doesn't have the exact same data.

So, why did I bother making this review? Simple reasons. Primarily to warn you not to buy this game, but also to tell you that most of the things I listed are promised not to be issues with the sequel of this game, the (as of the time) yet unreleased Wanderlust Adventures. Seriously, DON'T BUY THIS GAME. You'd do the developpers more of a favour to buy the next game and extra copies if you care about them (thus creating a larger player base for an inherently better game by gifting the extra copies) than if you bought this game right now, or ever.

(Edit: the Steam store finally has the aforementioned Wanderlust Adventures here, http://store.steampowered.com/app/240620 , in case you were wondering.)

[Spoiler-Free Review]

Wanderlust: Rebirth should come with a disclaimer stating your experience with this game will largely be influenced by the number of people you play with. Although the game is entirely playable in an offline single player environment, I found playing in such a way severely hindered my enjoyment of the game.

Whether or not we care for them, the Action RPG genre has evolved a few staple conventions. When a game largely ignores these, it's noticeable.

Story and Scope: The story is extremely short (around an hour or two to complete the normal difficulty mode), it's unimaginative, and failed to captivate me in any meaningful way. Scenarios felt unimportant as resolution to any situation often devolves into fighting this, that, or the other thing. The world of Wanderlust is barebones, at times lonely, and devoid of life.

Character Development: Characters are one dimensional and expendable, protaganists are mechanical vessels who only strive for the next piece of bait dangled in front of them. Although they're with you from the very beginning, you never grow any attachment to your unnamed NPC comrades and NPC's in towns will rarely, if ever, acknowledge your presence, save for the odd, "Hello". You walk "through" towns not "into" them.

Interesting Gameplay Mechanics: Enter an area, fight, move on, rinse and repeat. Your out-of-battle experience is monotonous and boring. Collecting items and equipment becomes cumbersome as your in-game pouch for holding these things is much too small to quest for extended periods of time without micromanaging your belongings to make room for the next thing.

Exploration/Adventure: There is no sense of discovery because there's nothing to discover (except the odd coin in a breakable barrel or randomly appearing treasure chest). My first instinct when playing a game like this is to scour the areas for chests and barrels, secrets and treasures. There's no point in trying any of that here though, you'll quickly find you're just wasting your time. To top it all off, invisible walls are everywhere, preventing you from walking past even carpets in open hallways (with treasure chests placed on the other side to further remind you of what you can't do in Wanderlust).

Diverse Locales: Ransack location after location, each location serves only as a battleground. In fact, you begin to feel inconvenienced by the discovery of a new area because it just stands between you and the only enjoyable part of the game - the fights.

Intense Battles: You enter an area and fight anything that moves, rinse and repeat. melee enemies employ the same swarm-bumrush strategy upon encountering them (limiting your ability to move), ranged attacks are unobstructed by obstacles leading some battles to feel cheap.

Multiplayer: The best thing about the game. Multiplayer "Crawls" are enjoyable. Story mode levels progress in the same way as in single player, but at least you can develop actual strategies with your teammates. The connection between players is crucial to the formula that makes this mode a success. Without cooperation between actual players, the experience is too rigid.

Replayability: There's enough to keep you coming back for more if you want to improve your character's skills and/or equipment or want to go for achievements.

It's hard to recommend this game. The only redeeming quality besides it's graphical style, is it's multiplayer, but you can get that in many better developed packages. I'll continue playing it to collect equipment and achievements, but I'd encourage people to skip this one unless you've got a group of friends who don't already own something better (like Dungeon Defenders).

Update: A month later...

Thankfully the in-game population has grown a bit more since I wrote this, so finding people to play with isn't such a challenge anymore. I've been playing every day for basically three weeks and have come to the realization this game isn't so bad if you ignore it as a single player experience and only play in multiplayer modes. It's also a lot less like Zelda than the screenshots lead me to believe (part of my initial disappointment). In my experience it's actually a lot closer to Smash TV and Total Carnage (games of that ilk) - especially in Crawls.

I still wish things were a lot more polished, but even as it is, there is fun to be had with this game, it just isn't immediately apparent.

So this is a hack n' slash RPG with crappy graphics. That is kool. What they don't tell you is that you only get 50% of the exp for beating a level unless you manage to beat the level doing as little damage as possible to all the enemies so that you get very high combo numbers. (Yes it's true, I asked the developer) You don't get extra experience for beating a level again. Nor do you get experience for their challenge levels. You can only try to get more experience by getting the higher combo numbers and thus a better rating. There are all kinds of really powerful skills. You can max out maybe 2 of them and if you use them you don't get crap for experience. So, in short this game is based on repetition and ineffectiveness, while discouraging the use of the games advancement system. This is extremely irritating and a horrible idea. Also, it's just what the developers had in mind. The last boss is also a very annoying fight where you whittle away at him only to have him heal back while he can literally kill you in one shot. Avoid this piece of garbage.

This game, I'm going to be honest, this game is bad, BUT worth every penny spent.

I simply love this game, the fun that I have while playing this is genuine, it may not be the most perfect game, and its story may be super generic but this game is a gem among friends.
Screw it, I can't really explain this any better, and I could list the downsides but the only ones that you should know about are the ones that would be considered for not buying the game, the other ones can be taken in a comedic light.
1. the game is buggy, there's no real way around that, and yes sometimes its game breaking but it would only last until restarting the game.
2. the game is rather short, 10 levels and that being on 3 different levels of difficulty (which by the way is actually difficult)
3. The game has little guidance involved, sometimes you are left with figuring out some parts of the game that really should have been explained by the tutorial.
4. The game is impossible to 100% without playing with competent non AI players. (steam group for remedying this situation)
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Betterthanmybuttocks/

But honestly, the game is a fun time and if you can look for a coupon for this, there are plenty floating around. Get some friends involved, or make some new ones in the steam group mentioned before.

Story: 3/10 (Generic as hell)
Gameplay: 10/10 (Refreshing rare fighting style and general combat system.)
Presentation: 11/10
Soundtrack: 7/10 (Eh)
Replayability: 6/10 (Replaying is a chore)

I bought this game on a sale because I had read a few reviews on-line suggesting it would be a pretty decent action/RPG type of game, but after having sunk a considerable amount of time into it, I honestly cannot recommend it.

On the surface, the premise is pretty simple: You battle your way through 10 chapters of action as the story unfolds, and you earn Character Points to use in developing your fighter. You can replay chapters to try and earn 100% in them, but at times, it's not clear what this even entails, and from what I can tell, there's no way to review this information once play is underway. This is just one of many holes in the game, however.

On the good side, the graphics are charming and fairly well done, and there are some pretty decent musical tracks throughout the game, as well. You won't have problems picking out the enemies, and it's nearly always obvious when an item has been dropped to pick up. The gameplay itself is fairly straightforward, and there is the occasional side quest to keep you occupied. Combat is pretty much button mashing; there is some nuance when it comes to the block function, but aside from this, you'll basically be spamming your weapon strikes and/or special ability--at least in my experience.

I've managed to get 100% in the first 5 chapters on Normal mode, build up my stats significantly, and equip better items. Yet there is STILL no way for me to beat the final boss. The game has three difficulties: Normal, Hard, and Epic. The game is structured to basically force you to play through every chapter at every difficulty level to be able to complete it. Without doing so, you can't win.

This is my overall perception; a lot could be resolved if the game simply provided an instruction manual! Virtually every single nuance of the game requires you to experiment and figure it all out for yourself. The biggest offense here is the crafting system. You can occasionally pick up blueprints for better weapons and armor; I have about four of these right now. However, I cannot craft ANYTHING yet because of the sheer costs, and the crafting process itself is not explained anywhere in the game that I have found so far! Additionally, you don't just find the necessary items; that would be too easy. Nor are the items themselves even remotely easy to come by. I've had to replay the same chapter where I know I can find a particular element multiple times to earn enough of it. You ALSO have to have in your possession three of the type of item you want to create. Want to craft a new helmet? Well, you have to already have three other helmets in your possession. On top of that, you have to pay a staggering amount of money (tokens), earned primarily by completing chapters over and over again. The item I want costs almost 6600 tokens, which I have now. But I don't have three helmets, so I'm going to have to spend about 1600 tokens to buy two more helmets, spend a ton more time grinding for more coins, and then maybe I'll be able to craft the helmet I need. As someone who is used to grinding in video games, I find this to be absolutely LUDICROUS. Adding even further to this insult is that such items are EXTREMELY rare as far as loot drops from enemies; in fact, you'll virtually never get an item drop from an enemy unless it's the occasional orb that restores all of your energy. It seems that only certain enemies drop such items, and they apparently only do so in pre-determined places throughout the game. So you can't even effectively farm for what you want during your multiple replays of the game.

And this doesn't even go into the truly major problems of the game. The afore-mentioned block function actually requires focus points (the yellow energy bar) to use; even if you're not actually blocking an attack, that meter drains just from holding the button. Once it runs out, you can't defend again until you recover some points by resting. In the early chapters, this can be troublesome but isn't completely insurmountable. However, after you get past about Chapter 4, the enemy barrages and patterns make it to where it's virtually impossible to block every single attack and effectively retaliate. Every retaliation opens you up to another enemy, whether it's from one that's close in (you will likely get surrounded A LOT) or from a long-range monster throwing boulders at you. In later stages, where you begin dealing with mages that can quickly spam you with fire and lightning attacks, you can be dead before you even know what hit you. Some enemy barrages come so quickly and in such fierce numbers that getting surrounded is almost an inevitability. When you're trying to block and retaliate with special attacks, your focus meter will drain very quickly, and it only takes a few hits to kill you at that point. Additionally, some enemies have attacks they can just repeatedly spam, forcing multiple blocked hits and draining your focus points at an extremely high rate, meaning within seconds you can be forced to take the damage and likely die as a result. (This is especially true of the final boss, who has a multi-hitting attack that he sometimes just spams over and over again.) At this point, just trying to complete the game seems like nothing more than an unending slog.

There's also an extremely nagging control problem in the game. I'm not sure if this affects game pad users specifically, but there are maddening moments every time I play where my character just simply STOPS MOVING or simply will not move in a direction I press. I have to let go of the controls and then press again to get him to move at all, and this happens frequently right in the middle of combat. To be fair, I use profiling software with my Logitech controller, so it's possible there's some issue with this setup (which works in almost every other game I play, by the way) that I'm not aware of. But it's another issue that brings down this game. There's also an apparent sound bug that prevents Direct Music from initializing if you have an Asus sound card; make sure you disable GX in the DSP Mode settings of the driver software (my apologies to whomever posted that solution for my not having the link to the thread for this review).

In short, I find this game to be the worst combination of tedium and frustration, with really no sense of completion or even a feeling that at some point, you can actually complete the game. Yes, I have beaten the final boss on Normal mode, but you get the worst ending for doing so; you apparently can't get the "real" ending without beating him on Hard Mode, if not in Epic Mode, which brings me to my original point about forced replaying to actually win. Wanderlust: Rebirth is an unforgiving and at many times unfair game that only leaves me more exasperated after each play session as I discover some other roadblock to my progress when I know intrinsically what I need to do to win. I simply cannot do it thanks to game design that prevents me from even getting any better weapons or armor that would give me a chance in the final battle. I cannot say enough to avoid this game unless it's completely reworked and rebalanced.

A valiant effort by a small development team, however, don't expect to jump in this game and start playing multiplayer immedeately. To start off, the game forces you to do a terrible tutorial. Even though it does'nt last very long, its still incredibly painful. Secondly, as far as I could tell, everyone who was playing the game at the time, including myself, had extreme difficulty setting up multiplayer matches to play with friends. Games that emphasize co-op play should have match making capabilities that are really easy to use. The frustration this brought myself and a friend was substantial. I bought the game on sale for about $3.00, and I am not even sure if that's a fair price. The difficulties with the multiplayer alone are enough for me to not recommend this game.

I can't seem to find any public parties and I mostly play solo in games. My solo experience is that the AI party members prevent you from getting a good score since they rob you of hits and damage. If actualy party gameplay is like this as well, then you are constantly competing with party members to attempt to get a semi decent score sadly. If that's the case, I don't think I'd play with other people even if I could. Also, the AI is simple so naturally they die all the time and are barely a distraction for monsters. AI party members in the crawl die way too fast even on the early levels. They would need to have better AI or be significantly stronger to be actually be a viable helping hand in single player mode.

I like the look and feel of the game but the solo experience is not really good. I would really love to play Wanderlust Adventures pre-beta/beta and see if the solo experience is still like that. I really hope it's been tweaked to be more rewarding and entertaining. Having AI party members hold back your score/dying easily in harder difficulties is terrible honestly. I hope a Dev reads this when making Wanderlust Adventures. I have high hopes for WA and will definitely be a backer if that's what it takes for the game to get better and my feedback to reach the Devs.

Don't be fooled by the Zelda-esque graphics, behind the veil awaits a cumbersome and poorly designed game with interface design that is so horrible that it all together saps all energy needed to even start the game.

Wanderlust: Rebirth walks a disappointing line between success and catastrophe. Close to fantastic in concept it simultaneously fails to meet basic needs to a crippling point. The key mapping is the worst I've seen in a long time. I can appreciate the 1980s graphics, but no one wants 1980s menu options. On top of that, the clunky combat and unpolished gameplay seems like it skipped its beta stage. I hope the developers return to their drawing boards with the community's feedback to develop the next version of Wanderlust - I'm convinced there's gold at the heart of this mess of a game.

ENG:

A really interesting RPG game with multiplayer game and community support for the old retro gfx & sfx. A testimonial! :3

FIN:

Todella mielenkiintoinen rpg-peli, jossa moninpeli ja yhteisö peli tuki vanhalla retro gfx & sfx. Suositteluni! :3