34
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514
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Recent reviews by LiterateGoat

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Showing 1-10 of 34 entries
4 people found this review helpful
8.7 hrs on record (6.7 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
Minimum GFX settings, maximum GFX settings, it doesn't matter when everything has to go through the game's servers. Every time the demons appear, there's a lag spike. Every time the demons attack, lag spike. Half the time I swing my weapon, you guessed it, lag spike.
Ranged weapons aren't worth anything because I'm firing at mirages, the instant I pull the trigger my target teleports a half-second forward in time. For a game so dependent on combat both for progression and for collecting crafting materials, your main opponent being lag is simply no good.
Loading screens take forever. Loading screens between Realms are worse, and have a high chance of making you wait for nothing as a connection error kicks you back to character select.
I also got a connection error while changing my follower's equipment, which somehow cloned the follower. Now I have an extra patrolling my house.

It does have a lot of good elements and some very good ideas, but it's impossible to recommend until the experience becomes a lot more stable.
Posted February 25.
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6 people found this review helpful
59.1 hrs on record (34.7 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
They've been calling it "Pokemon with Guns", and while that's not wholly inaccurate, it doesn't quite capture the essence of what's going on here. There's also the automation (slavery) where you can assign creatures to your base to perform assorted tasks, and potentially overwork them to the point of injury.

It's more of a survival crafting game than a monster catching game, though the balance is pretty close to 50-50.

It's got an incredibly strong start, but around level 30 you run into two very big pain points:

1. Ore. Ore is heavy and in extremely high demand all the time, because ore makes ingots, and everything above basic wood and stone gear demands ingots. Even if you build a secondary base whose entire purpose is to have spare creatures slaving away in the mines, that still won't be enough AND it'll be a pain to carry back to your main base.

2. Capture Chance. Once you start looking at creatures above level 10, the basic blue Palsphere suffers a severe drop in effectiveness. Creatures above level 25 can be immune to them entirely. And Palspheres above the basic blue grade require ingots to make so... see above. Capturing more powerful creatures quickly becomes an endurance game where you reduce a 5000+ health creature to less than 20, then sling 40-50 expensive high-grade Palspheres at it (each of which costs 2-3 ingots to make).

What the game needs is a mechanic that cumulatively increases your capture chance if you keep hitting the same monster with consecutive spheres.
And to reduce the weight of ore.

There are a number of weird controversies surrounding the game. Is it an asset flip? Was it designed by AI? Will Nintendo sue for plagiarism?

While it definitely wasn't AI and doesn't actually infringe on Nintendo, it may be true that a lot of the landscape assets are store-bought. But it really shouldn't matter, because the world is still fairly well-designed. I keep having to stop and just look around at where I am, taking in the scenery.

And the creatures themselves are definitely original, and EXTREMELY well-animated.
Posted January 24.
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4 people found this review helpful
32.2 hrs on record (3.1 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
An absolute grind-fest that doesn't hold the player's hand, but really ought to.

It tells you what your next goal is, but doesn't mention how to get there.
"Build a Tower Heart", it says. Okay, where? What makes a "good" building spot? All the build engine will tell you is where you CAN'T build.
"Upgrade the Tower Heart", it says. That requires copper ingots and leather. Okay, copper ingots are annoying but I know how to do that. Leather, though... the rough hides I've been collecting say they can be processed in a Tannery. Well how do I build a Tannery? What do you mean I have to hunt a level 20 boss halfway across the map while still wearing bone armor and using copper weapons if I'm lucky!?

Blood types. Blood quality? How do I refill my blood without changing my type or reducing its quality?

Weapons have durability!? You might have mentioned that.

All in all, it feels like a modernized RuneScape with a dark theme. Obviously that's not a compliment.

Edit: Ten hours later, it hasn't gotten any better.
I've learned how to make servants. This isn't helpful, because not only does it involve escorting an NPC all the way back to home base, this NPC has barely any health left and can be killed by enemies. Oh, and you can't use any of your faster travel forms. Or any spells. AND you may meet a patrolling boss on the road (or THREE! Leave me alone, Tristan! Stop being everywhere!)
I have to upgrade my Castle Heart again. This time it requires glass. Glass is made in the forge, but the recipe is locked. Probably gated behind another boss I'm under-geared for.
SPEAKING of boss gating, there's a bandit boss that unlocks iron smelting and a new armor set. But all the iron is in another zone. And the new armor set is made in a new crafting station that's gated behind another boss, in the next zone. And that crafting station is made with a new material that's gated behind ANOTHER boss.

On the plus side, I've explored enough of the map to have access to the teleport network.
Oh wait, any material more advanced than wood, stone, and herbs is flagged "cannot be teleported" and locks you out of the teleport network.
I'm trying to move my castle into the new zone to be closer to more relevant resources, but transporting a building's worth of loot cross-country is a chore, even with a stolen horse.
Posted August 22, 2023. Last edited August 25, 2023.
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3 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
6.7 hrs on record
A walking simulator with horror elements and confusing pseudo-psychological nonsense.

Don't get me wrong, the story is really good--once you start understanding it. Unfortunately by the time the plot becomes clear, your character's perception of it becomes unreliable.
Movement is painfully slow, and there are sections which slow you even further, which makes the map feel three times as large as it really is.
The purpose of Synchrozine is unclear: it's obvious you need to use it after an interrogation because you get an audible warning, but other than that the sync meter doesn't provide any useful information.
And most damning of all, it's not clear when the main plot will lock you out of all the subplots until it happens, which means the ending sequence can have flashes of "memories" of sub-cases you haven't actually resolved.
Posted July 24, 2023.
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3 people found this review helpful
17.8 hrs on record (13.3 hrs at review time)
On the surface, it's a very good VS-like with its own original visual style. The weapons are solid, Engravings allow you to customize each weapon differently for each run, and managing the colored Blessings allow you to choose how your weapon evolves. Each weapon has four available evolutions from your first run, with two more unlockable later on.
The novelty of discovery drives replayability, as you test at least 20 weapon evolutions before unlocking anything. And the evolutions are crazy-powerful, the right one can wipe out every enemy on the screen for several minutes until the enemies get stronger.
Some of the bosses can seem a bit unfair, like the first boss spawning a giant flaming rock on top of you with no warning. Your weapon shots can cover too much screen space, making it impossible to see whether you're walking into a lava lake or have a miniboss standing on your head. But these are almost expected of VS-likes.

There are permanent meta-upgrades to drive your growth, additional weapons and characters to unlock, more maps, all the hallmarks of a VS-like.

But as you get into it, things start to break down. You'll notice that each map is a fairly small repeating tile, there's no randomness, which makes all the landscapes very samey. Each map is exponentially harder than the one before, which requires grinding the meta-upgrades. You'd think unlocks would help as well. THIS CAN BE A MISTAKE. Adding a bad weapon (champagne cannon) to your weapon pool weakens you overall, and while you can disable bad evolutions (up to 2 per weapon but only after unlocking the 4th and 5th colors), I don't think you can disable weapons entirely.

There are a lot of choices you can make that are either unclear or actively detrimental to you, and there's no way to know in advance. Some of the weapons are simply terrible (fireflies). Some of the engravings will cripple your weapon or change it unexpectedly (scattering on rusty scythe). Some of the evolutions are significant downgrades and the loss of power or area coverage could kill you immediately (blue marsh pets). And the descriptions of some evolutions make it seem like they should do things that they don't appear to be doing (yellow, mostly).
You can mix drinks from looted ingredients to "change the rules of a run" but doing so basically makes it so that run doesn't count for progression--fortunately they tell you that in advance.

I still recommend it, but with caveats. It nails the power fantasy and sheer spectacle, but can be obtuse at times.
If you want to play VS but are disgusted by stolen sprites, this is a very strong alternative. Perhaps not the best on the market, but it's more than fair for its price tag.
Posted April 30, 2023.
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1 person found this review helpful
286.2 hrs on record (46.0 hrs at review time)
Summary: symmetric-asymmetric multiplayer co-op horde exploration with destructible terrain.

Four dwarven miners, four classes, four movement tools that are intended to be used in tandem.
BUGS. Mostly space ants with big teeth, Hoxxes is a mean place.
Many biomes and mission types, which reshuffle constantly to keep the variety up.
Tons and TONS of character customization at no charge.
Season pass? Battle pass? Whatever you call it, it COMES WITH IT, FREE.

Forget Diggy Diggy Hole, it's time to Rock and Stone to the Bone!
Posted February 25, 2022. Last edited February 25, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
7.0 hrs on record
Excellent story, *fantastic* and believably organic dialogue. I never felt the need to tell Galerius I was busy. Player choices clearly have weight, even taking the time loop into account.
The only time I was truly frustrated was when getting back to the time portal from beyond the White Hall, there's so little room to dodge, and the loadscreen right before you leave practically guarantees you'll take a hit.
I also tried to distract Sentius with the election, so I could ask Sentia about Sentilla without him around... didn't work. He just APPEARED for his part in that conversation anyway.
I hope that's sufficiently cryptic so as not to be spoilery.
Posted November 5, 2021.
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3 people found this review helpful
40.2 hrs on record (10.7 hrs at review time)
Start the game as a Level 15 wizard.
End the game as either a corpse or a god.
There is no in-between.

With a campaign map similar to FTL, the ability to modify your spells in inventory and fine-tune them on-the-fly, and destructible buildings, Fictorum really sells the archmage fantasy.
Posted April 22, 2021.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
26.3 hrs on record
It's like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, complete with equipment-swapping. But with time travel, which feels more like "Light world / Dark world" than "Past / Future".
The orb weapons are all excellent, there are no "worthless" or "must-use" weapons, all of them have a style or purpose.
Posted December 6, 2020.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
12.6 hrs on record (7.8 hrs at review time)
A professional-grade, high-energy roguelike with fantastic score and excellent voice acting, that also tells a contemporary story about an obscure character from Greek myth.
Posted November 26, 2020.
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Showing 1-10 of 34 entries