Recent reviews by Armani

A phenomenal game, probably my favorite online Co-Op game since Deep Rock Galactic.

Its still relatively new, and a little buggy, but honestly this has been a absolutely fantastic time.

Just a heads up, have a few positives and minus's I wanted to list out below but the overall summary is the game is good. Great even. I'm sneaking this review in after clearing 4 normal runs, and a challenge game so while I'm by no means an expert, I have some practice.

Pros:

1. The amazing amount of variety. Right out the gate, I want to call out some folks in reviews who are complaining about the game having too much "bloat". This game is an auto-battler, a game which the entire premise is making the best situation out of a lot of randomness (even the simplest auto-battlers have random hero rolls and random items). That's not to say that balance isn't important, but for the most part this game feels good in the same way I think Slay the Spire has good balance - there are lots of ways you can build your run, and everything kinda works but a few methods are notably quite strong without a lot of help.

But then again, who really cares if its not perfectly balanced? Its a single-player game, its purely for your own entertainment. I want to play a auto-battler where every run is wildly different from the last and this game delivers - if anything, I hope the developer. goes all in on the content. The more content in the game the more mileage you get.

2. The control you have over each run. This game is a little different from a popular autobattlers like TFT, Underlords, Tales & Tactics, etc. in the sense that it steps away from overall archetype matching. Your runs are mostly focusing closely on heroes who have synergistic abilities. Your not going to get a situation where you buy 3 demons to get the demon buff - instead you might get a tanky hero who turns her health into damage, back her up with a healer, and then have a ranged archer apply debuffs on the enemy. The items you equip these people will match their purpose, the tank obviously gets health and health stacking items, the healer might get items focused on mana regen or attack speed, etc. Pick a party origin that turns max health into damage and well look there you have a fighting team.

Except, that really only works against big targets. What happens in the next room when your surrounded by deadly spiders?

3. Some cool quality of life improvements. Keep thinking about that line above, what would you do? Well, for one, you can shuffle items around freely - which is helpful if you wanted to put health on your healer so they don't die in the first salvo. More than that, you can manipulate the fight to control who attacks who and where units are placed. You might have chosen origins to buffer against this situation, or relics that summon a lot of distractions to flood your enemies attention and buy you precious time. You might have heroes on the bench you can plop in to fight while surrounded, giving them gear and leveling them up instantly. You could spend those upgrades instead really pumping up one hero, hoping they can eliminate the enemy by sheer force as their teammates die around them.

I love how the game steps away from archetypes and symbol matching to become a game of making a functional fighting force out of a variety of random bits and bobs. You can re-roll perks, you can forge items that precisely do specific things, and then freely rearrange your gear to fit a changing scenario. Its great, its a lot of fun, and its always a nice treat unlocking more content to add to the experience. Hell even your health bar is a spendable resource for re-rolls and item tweaking.

Alrighty, that's a lot of good. Let's talk bad.

Cons:

4, Content. This one is wild, especially considering that I haven't unlocked everything myself yet and even more when you consider people actually complain (stupidly) about their already being too much content. But having played a friends copy with everything unlocked for two runs, and then buying (and playing) my own copy for 2 runs there was a lot of overlap - especially on the heroes. I would adore if there were more heroes. I would praise this game to the high heavens if there were significantly more heroes. You spend most of your time in the actual game fiddling with your heroes, the place where variety is felt most would be right there.

Even setting that aside, maybe play with some other systems. Explore the battle area by physically changing the map - split it into segments, allow place-able traps, add elevation or cover, etc. Lots of auto-battlers have synergy buffs, maybe consider a similar system in the form of allegiance tokens built into heroes so you could have multiple different versions of the wolf guy. Etc. I just want more variety. Explore random events during combat - I really, really like the 2 on 2 and 1 on 1 fights that pop up in events for example.

5.The art. This one is purely me, but I find some of the character models quite pretty and some rather ugly. The units overall lean in the ugly direction on average, I feel like maybe a second pass at some of the uglier heroes would be helpful. TBH, it just feels a little bad when the demons I'm fighting look better than some of my heroes.

6. Run variety. This one I'm sure is being worked on, but currently, if your playing the standard game your going to be seeing a lot of the same enemies and 3-level structure every run. The final boss is a dragon, etc. If you were excited to do run after run right out the gate, treat this more like 1.0 Slay the Spire than 2.3 Slay the Spire.

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TL;DR - Great game, I highly recommend. I hope the developer keeps adding more to this little gem they've got on their hands.

Pokemon but Ash Ketchum is unsupervised.

TL;DR - A great RPG, with a strong story (for the first half) and great game-play (for the first two thirds). I'd give it a solid 85/100, and I'm a tough grader.

My only critique? I really should have quit playing immediately at the big story break (if you play the game, you know where I mean) and imagined the rest of the story myself.

For whatever reason, the ending of this game is truly a confused, horrendously written mess, which really puts a bad feeling on what is otherwise a emotional and well written tale. You primarily play as Alphen, a Dahnan slave unable to feel pain and trapped behind a mysterious mask. And that theme of slavery and fighting for liberation is the pure lifeblood of the story. It pushes everything forward, it genuinely makes you pause at times.

You genuinely feel like a liberator.

And then, once you basically accomplish your liberation, the entire story just falls directly off a cliff. Even the game play starts to drag - dungeons get stuffed full of damage sponge enemies inflating how long fights take. The writing gets so bad you genuinely will hammer the skip button so you can hear as little of it as possible. Characters you grew to love because of their introspection and beliefs become one-dimensional caricatures of themselves.

Trust me, the first two thirds of the game are excellent. Liberate Dahna, kill the Lords, then uninstall the game.

As I write this, this game is in Early Access, and if I had to say is about 60% along to being the game I think everyone hopes it will be. I like it. If your looking for an auto-battler that is both single-player and doesn't try to coax your wallet out to buy a seasons pass or other junk then this is it.

For everyone else though, take a minute and hear me out.

The game right now is a great - if somewhat simple - auto-battler. It has about two dozen archetypes, and a modest pool of units (each with anywhere from 1 to 2 traits from the aforementioned archetypes). Each run, you start with a single unit and some starting perks, and basically try to make it all the way to the end. Right now, if you were to buy it, you could quite literally play a full run from start to finish, and see most of what this game has to offer.

And that's the problem.

There is variety, but at first a lot of it is hidden behind unlocks you need to complete runs to have available. And - 10 hours in - I've unlocked them all. And the game now doesn't honestly feel like it has any variety. I see the same units in every run. Three runs in, and I could tell you precisely what perks you can get for specific conversation paths with the same small pool of NPC characters. Every story segment in the Slay the Spire like quest path has the exact same pattern to it. You do some battles, you do some shopping, you find some chests, you build a team.

The bones are there. Its fundamentally pretty good - its even nicely balanced. But it desperately needs significantly more random variety. If it had triple the archetypes, triple the units, and like 5 times the perks I'd be delighted to do run after run, enjoying the random combinations of nonsense that pop into the queue. Honestly, it doesn't even have to be balanced - its a single player game, who actually cares? Make some archetypes that genuinely suck without very specific perks. Make an archetype that gets significantly worse the more of it you have. Put perks into the game that bend the engine till it nearly breaks - like swapping your health and attack or having one unit life-link to everything its adjacent to at the start of the fight. Make it mathematically impossible to have the same experience twice.

Be creative. Because right now this game is 60% of the way to being amazing, and I don't want to see it peter out.

Activision-Blizzard has been saying they're getting review bombed on Steam in their marketing and PR.

Just 9% of 153,000+ Steam reviews are positive.

That's not getting review bombed, that's you legitimately having serious systemic issues with the game. If only 9% of the people who left a review - 1 in 10! - are showing up to stand up for you, you definitely messed up.

Maybe actually listen.

If you have one friend to play this with, this is easily one of the very best co-op games on the market.

Fast, scaling, frenetic fun. The soundtrack is absolutely incredible, and more importantly the movement and gun-play are fantastic.

As it is, right now, this is worth the asking price. Solo its a great game, but this game with a friend? A masterpiece.

Wanted to take a quick break from playing this to share 2 thoughts.

1. Kratos is a horrible father.
2. I did not have the courage to type that while looking at a static image of him.

Okay, so I'm recommending this because the content and writing is fairly good -- but I have a serious concern that I want to make sure folks understand before they buy this.

This game apparently represents the first season of the story-line. When I bought this game, that was NOT made clear anywhere - and it certainly wasn't reflected in either the description of the game or in the updates or notes as the game has been developed.

The major characters and stories you explore in this game are, for the most part, incomplete in serious ways. The family your staying with ends up on a teaser arc. The non-superficial stories at the high school are almost entirely unresolved - characters your starting to romance kinda are just left in limbo. Your friendship with your mate Sean and his family? Completely unexplored.

I'm not saying the game is bad, because the storytelling on display is actually rather good. My issue is twofold:

A) I bought the game in Early Access, assuming it would eventually be completed. All the descriptions and discussion surrounding the game suggested this was its own stand alone game and story. If I had known I would have to buy multiple seasons of the game to get the complete story, I would have gotten something else.

B) The game does offer a lot of story for money, but if its going to be a seasonal game they really should have either made that very clear from the start or actually resolved relationships and story arcs in the first game. You can always have those people reintroduce themselves and their standing relationships in the next game. Leaving things on a cliffhanger is both in bad taste and - especially since it was a surprise - feels exploitative.

I don't honestly expect to pay for the second season at this point, because while I did enjoy the story I dislike how the game feels like it was chopped up near the end to pad the story into a second game to the detriment of the story in the first game.

If your considering this game, I would instead advise you to consider buying other games on steam such as Corruption of Champions 2, Treasure of Nadia, or After the Inferno for examples of games that provide complete story arcs and extreme amounts of content for your dollar. Corruption of Champions 2 happens to be one of my favorite games on steam, and I strongly recommend that one in particular.

A genuine hidden gem.

This is one of the better RTS games of the last decade with a few really interesting innovations. There's a few things I genuinely love and a few that I think need more work, I'll list them below:

The Good:

1. The main course - the unit selection. There's 3 factions, and before each match you get to select 7 units from that faction to form the core of your army (from about 17 available per faction). Immediately, before the match has even started, you start having to make meaningful strategic choices. Do you select cheap troopers to swarm your enemy or the hulking shields to tank for your harder hitting troops? Do you take a medical unit that can't fight but can sustain your armies in larger engagements? How much anti-air do you need if you plan to close out the match asap with a rush?
Its fantastic. You make real, meaningful choices before you even go.

2. The commander abilities. There 3 different commanders for each faction. These commanders contribute 2 unique powers - but they have a limited amount of power they can deploy per game. Use it up early to get an advantage? Or save it for the larger late-game fights? Sacrifice cheap troops to bait out a use? Or do you invest in healing and shields to survive a commanders onslaught? Even more meaningful choices are always welcome.

3. Streamlined building and production. There isn't a ton of base building in this game. You have a pretty simple economy system, some supply buildings, and some basic production buildings - infantry barracks, vehicle factories, and air hangers. The game lives and dies in its armies, which are the main focus of the game. Simplifying the base building cuts down on the time needed to get to the good part, and made the game more interesting and dynamic. You can lose an entire base in a minute after a bad push, and then reclaim that ground and rebuild that base in the next minute.

4. Tech progression. Tech goes up pretty cleanly - so all factions at level 1 have access to basic infantry, level 2 they get basic vehicles and advanced infantry, level 3 basic aircraft and advanced vehicles, and level 4 gives elite units and advanced aircraft. Depending on load outs and how aggressive people play, you may not make it to the higher tech levels. As the game progresses, the units you use and the units you fight are constantly shifting - as initial infantry assaults will slowly include light, then heavy vehicles and by endgame you'll be contending with war mechs and heavy aircraft.

5. The visuals are honestly pretty good. The art style is clean, and there's a lot of love in the unit models. My main critique is that all the love went into units and none went into buildings or the map. The units are beautifully animated, but most buildings aren't at all. Even more than that, nearly every map is mostly static. In a unit focused game, not a huge deal, but it would have been nice.

The Bad:

1. There are basically no skirmish maps. You have 4 maps in the game, and while each is entirely unique, they get repetitive.

2. There are no players. Not a huge deal for me, because I play with friends or against very competently designed bots. But, most of the custom game modes - read: the really cool and interesting ones - are multiplayer only and I genuinely wish they spent some time making bots for those as well so I could actually play them.

3. The big subjective opinion - the game is trying to be a multiplayer experience but the best part of the game is the single-player content. The game I'm playing is either almost entirely against bots, or very rarely in coop with friends vs bots. The skirmish bots are actually genuinely pretty good, and I think that if this game leaned into singe-player content hard they could really sell the game as one of the best solo RTS games on the market. But, as far as I can tell, that isn't the intended direction of the game. As a result, I expect that the already limited offering of solo content in the game will remain sparse, which just feels bad.