Recent reviews by Seigneur Necron

This is a game about a goose (or two) trying their best to come up with new ways to troll the people of a village.
This is probably the most hilarious game I've ever played. xD

That was a pleasant ride.

Let's start with the gameplay:
You build a deck of 8-10 cards that you can upgrade with runes (3-5 slots per card). You start the dungeon with all of these cards in your hand (you can't change them but you can still change the runes). When you use a card in a fight, it's put aside. You get all the used cards back at the end of each fight... but, If during a fight, you need more cards than there are in your hand, you can choose to rest: that allows you to recovers all used cards, discard a card of your choice and skip a turn. You do not recover discarded cards at the end of each fight. You can get them back by reaching a camp fire or defeating an elite enemy. Some cards have effects called Halo that activate when they are discarded and stay active until the end of the dungeon, even after getting the cards back. Having no cards left to discard means defeat (you will keep your loot though). Defeating strong enemies and opening chests allows you to pick 1 of 3 random items, which gives you a buff for the duration of the dungeon. Events can give you a modifier to apply on a card, which will also last until the end of the dungeon, as well as some funny dialogues.

Beating the game was pretty easy imo, but the card and rune system has enough complexity to make building decks interesting. I didn't try a lot of different decks because when I saw that discard mechanic, I quickly went for a deck using halos massively, and it worked great. Maybe that's why I found it easy. But there are a lot of different combos available.

The story is short and pretty simple but touching. The art and animation look great both in game and in the H-scenes. The music, sounds and Japanese voice acting are nice too. Special mention to that elite boss music, "Indomitable Hero", I'm now addicted to it. xD

Don't forget to inadvertently loose to each boss once to unlock some of the scenes. :p

TLDR: It could have been a funny casual ecchi game but it's ruined by super excessive grind with low reward, misplaced RNG all over the place, and other design flaws. I wouldn't have completed the game if I wasn't so stubborn.

So, it's a dungeon crawler in which bosses are monster girls that you can recruit and include in your 5 members party.

Dungeon exploration is a pain because the encounter rate is absurdly high. You will often only be able to move 1-3 cells before being interrupted again. So you will spend 99.99% of the time fighting the same ugly color swapped and unanimated enemies over and over again. Fortunately, there is a button to spam auto attacks with all characters in fast forward mode and that will work well most of the time because you earn good amounts of exp with all the fighting going on. On the other hand, drop rate is low so you might still struggle farming the materials required to upgrade the girls' rooms. (Fortunately, you can buy that material in the shop at the end of the game, so you can just farm gold instead.)

There are rings that allow lowering (or increasing) the encounter rate or improving the drop rates, but they arrive quite late, they are rare and you only have 10 ring slots that you might want to use for other stuff. You will need to farm a lot anyway...

There are a lot of monster girls to recruit and they all have 4 different outfits (well, panties). Each outfit comes with its stats and skills. But there are so few different skills in the game they all end up being similar. Girls also have passive traits that activate under some conditions, often requiring other girls with specific traits to be in the team, which I found frustrating because I would have prefered to bring characters I liked more, but I needed other ones to activate interesting traits.

Each character only has access to one outfit at first. Getting the second and third ones is easy. Getting the last one involves praying RNG though: Sometimes - rarely - one of the monsters will have a heart icon above the head. To get the fourth outfit of a character, you need to kill a specific monster with a heart icon. You don't know which one though, and monsters that already dropped their outfit can still have the icon.

To recruit a new girl, you first need to find her in the dungeon (they are visible on the map once it's explored and follow a fixed path, so that's the easy part). Then there is a fight phase, followed by a "rub" phase. While the rub phase should have been some kind of reward, it is actually an annoying mini game in which you have to find specific spots to click the right way in a very limited time, with terrible controls. If you fail there, the girl will take some time to appear again on the map and you will have to do everything again...

I told you earlier that you could fast forward most fights in auto attack mode. At some point, this suddenly stops working because monsters start performing very dangerous AoE attacks dealing huge damage or inflicting status ailments to the whole team, especially paralisis. At that point, the balance of the game is so broken that trash mobs are actually way more dangerous than bosses. Oh, and if your whole team gets paralyzed, it's game over. (There is a ring that protects you from paralisis... I found 1 during my whole game, so I can protect 1 character.) This sometimes happens before you even have time to do anything in the fight...

And there we get to another problem: You can only save at specific spots in dungeons, and these save points are pretty rare, especially in the latest dungeons. Even if we forget about the fact you could lose at the very beginning of any fight - which keep popping at an insane rate - that kind of save system shouldn't even exist nowadays... What if I suddenly had to go but didn't encounter a save for an hour? Then I just lost one hour of gameplay... Well there is an item that allows you to teleport back to the town, but it's a one way portal.

Still reading? Let's get to the worst part then: Remember each girl has four outfits with different stats? You can change outfits anytime in town. The thing is, these outfits don't only give a fixed amount of stats when equipped, they also affect the stat increase when the characters level-up, so if you level-up a character with a physical oriented outfit and then switch to a magic oriented outfit, chances are you will have bad stats.

But that's not all: Stats increase at level-up is also random, so you can just get bad stats because of RNG! There is a function in the town to reset a character to lvl 1... ok, so what next? Do I have to quit without saving every time a level-up goes wrong? I'm not even sure that would work and you will understand why after I talk about the next issue.

There is a crafting system that you will probably never bother using because the result depends on:
- the monster girl performing the craft and her intimacy level (that's ok)
- the rarity and type of both the material and the pet used (and both consumed)
- RNG, again, and more than once: first, the craft can simply fail and give you some random garbage. If it doesn't fail, there is RNG on the prefix of the equipement, and RNG again on the +X at the end. I tried saving the game, crafting, reloading and retrying multiple times... and you know what? The result didn't change. It's probably using a seed that is saved with the game, so yeah, it's trash and there is nothing you can do about it.

Enjoy.

This game is magnificent and the Rot companions are super cute. This is what made me buy the game and I'm not disappointed. Exploring the world and clearing the corruption is very satisfying. :)

I didn't look at tags or reviews and didn't expect challenging combat. xD
Be prepared for precisely timed dodges and attacks, cause it's indeed a Souls like, except your character feels less heavy - and it's not that Dark obviously.
There are 5 difficulty levels and the first one is called "Story Mode" so it can probably be played much easier if you just want to enjoy the view. I'm currently playing the game at difficulty level 3/5 and didn't test the other levels.

There are a few minor issues with keybindings If you are using a non QWERTY keyboard that will probably get fixed:
- Remapping WASD to something else will not work for scrolling the map, which you can do with the mouse too (but will work for everything else).
- Optional interactions with Rot keybindings cannot be changed currently. They are bound to 1, 2, 3, 4, which are not simple inputs on AZERTY keyboards (you need to use shift) so that doesn't work. (You can shift+alt to make your keyboard QWERTY.)

You can also play the game with a controller though, which I didn't try.

TLDR:
This could have been a very fun game but is wasted by typical disastrous Korean game design aberrations. But that's not all: In addition to being bad for your mental health, this game is also potentially dangerous for your steam account! Details below.

1) The potentially good but wasted:
- The game is visually pretty good, mainly because of effects. Skills are stylish, impactful and satisfying to use. On the other hand, these beautiful effects can quickly make the game unreadable, especially when playing with a lot of people, so in raids, which is when you especially need to see what's happening, because there are a lot of wipe mechanics (which is a bad thing in itself).
- Unlike in lots of MMOs in which you start with only 2 skills that you use once in a while among hundreds of basic attacks, here you actually start with a nice amount of skills (6-8 iirc) that you can spam pretty easily and I found myself almost never using basic attacks, which is pretty pleasant. You can only have 8 skills equipped at a time, but you can save multiple configurations and even have these configurations automatically switch when you enter certain specific content. Progressing through the game, you will unlock more skills, and improve/customize them in various ways (skill point distribution, runes, armors with skill upgrades, engravings...), although reaching the point in the game in which most of these customization options become available can take quite a lot of time. There is one piece of equipment though, that is the absolute worst thing I've ever seen in equipement. It's a stone that drops with 3 random engravings (2 positive and 1 negative, from a pretty large pool) that you have to facet before you equip it, which will determine how strong each of the engraving is, and which basically means that after you finally stumble on a stone that has the engravings you need, you still have to throw 18 to 30 dices before you know if that stone will be useful or a complete trash.
- The world map is pretty big, and the maps on the continents (and even some islands) can be pretty big too and generally look very nice, but they can feel kinda empty of stuff to actually do. Killing monsters rewards you with negligible amounts of exp, you will get 99% of your exp from quests. They also don't drop anything worth farming outside of collectibles, so you just find yourself rushing through the quests to the next area. Also, if you are looking to play with friends, you should know that playing together is only really required in end game raids and is rather annoying outside of dungeons because you kill monsters so fast that most people in the team won't have the time to hit anything. Pretty bad for a game that is supposed to be a hack n slash MMO. :/
- There are two menus called "collectibles" and "adventurer's tome" that give you a huge list of kinda optional and often hidden stuff to do/find in each region and rewards you with items, permanent bonus stats or even skill points. Sounds kinda fun right? (at least for me) But! It's clearly designed to make you waste absurde amounts of time for minimal returns. Stuff is often hidden in ways that doesn't just require you to look carefully... for example, there is stuff you just can't find unless you try yo crash on each pixel of every wall in the map with the right angle to find out there is actually a wall that you can go through (not even a breakable wall, an intangible wall). There are also lots of collectibles with insane RNG, collectibles gated by other collectibles, or stuff you can only do if you have enough of a specific "virtue stat"... which is, in the end, another form of collectible.

2) The bad:
- There are bots everywhere and it seems Amazon isn't exactly efficient at getting rid of these. You can see them all running on the exact same path, sometimes stuck, glitching on a wall or something... I once got 7 of them stuck at the same spot, waiting to kill a specific enemy I was farming for collectibles, that was pretty fun actually. xD You can also see them spamming the chat with gold trading site links in major cities, which is less fun. And they probably have a negative impact on the auction house too, but I'm not into that, I like to loot my own stuff, so I don't know.
- On the other hand, I've read some clothes have been changed from the original kr version, because they were "too sexy". Come on, the game is rated 18+ anyway, just let us enjoy every aspect of it (or at least make it an option), even if it's clearly not the most important part of it, it's still part of the fun. Stop that censorship nonsense, put efforts/resources into actually improving stuff.

3) The very bad - now we get to the core of classical Korean game design bs:
- Your progression is hard gated by daily missions, which is one of the worst plague in modern games. Come on! Just let me play when I actually want/can! I'm supposed to be playing, not working!
- But fear not, there is an in-game cash shop, in which you can buy loooots of stuff to get stronger faster... just hope you have another job in addition to Lost Ark... with a really good paycheck... aaaah f2p games, what a wonderful business model. xD
- But that's not all: there is A LOT of content that is only available at very specific hours of the day or night, and when I say very specific, I mean you only have a 2-3 minutes window, a few times per day, and for some of them, not even everyday. So yeah, basically, the game thinks playing it is your full time job.
- To make things worse, you don't only need to be there at the right time, you also need to be at the right location when events start... but travelling to these locations can take A LOT of time, and multiple events often happen in close succession (if not exactly at the same time) on distant points on the world map. There are ways to teleport at a customizable very short list of destinations (1-5 depending on your collectible progression and whether you have the "crystalyne aura" subscription, which you can get for free by trading gold for crystals) called "byfrost", but - guess what! - even these teleportations have a cooldown, a 2 hours cooldown!
- Last bonus, most of these events are designed to (more or less directly) require a certain amount of players to be completed, so if you are playing at a time of day/night during which there is not a lot of players, especially when multiple events happen at the same time, you often waste your time travelling to the event, only to find out you won't be able to complete it. A very simple and obvious solution would be to scale events based on the number of players present at the start of these events, but heh, guess it was too hard... duh!
- Oh, and most of these events have their own specific RNG collectibles farm, enjoy!

4) The unacceptable:
- Now, what could be even worse than everything listed above you ask? Well, I just got banned after 1050 hours of play time for no reason... if it only prevented me from playing the game any more, well, that'd still be very frustrating but, in the end, I'd just say "good riddance"... but it displays an ugly red message on my Steam profile now!
I've read in other reviews that some people got randomly banned for writing in the chat or because they bought a skin on the auction house that was part of a package bought and then refunded by someone else. In my case, the "reason" is probably that I tried to start the game while I was using a VPN a few days ago, which causes an error message (that doesn't even mention VPN) on main menu and closes the game... that should be it, but no, they also had to ban me apparently. Using a VPN shouldn't even be a problem in the first place. I've read this is an attempt to get rid of the bots... which is a gigantic failure. Bots are still everywhere and legit users can't play while using a VPN anymore.

Conclusion:
DON'T PLAY THIS GAME!
FLY, YOU FOULS!

EDIT: Ran of of characters, see comments for EVEN MORE !

This is a great game, with gameplay similar to Factorio... on an epic scale!

It's the Future! You're in space, controlling a mecha and building giant automated networks of structures and drones on the surface of rocky planets and in orbit of gas giants in order to gather and process resources on a large scale. The final goal is to build megastructures around stars to directly gather their entire energy output: Dyson Spheres (this is the real name of such theoretical megastructures). This is so satisfying!

The game is also soooo beautiful - I sometimes take a break in my building madness to simply enjoy the view. And it seems to be very well optimized. You can freely travel in space between planets and even between systems (with warp drive) without loading screens. The star cluster you can visit contains various types of stars, planets and moons, even including neutron stars and black holes, which promises more awesome screenshots.

The UI is very well designed and allows you to build, upgrade, or dismantle stuff in bulk very easily. Building a line of conveyor belt (or even other buildings) is as easy as drag and drop from start to end. There are options and shortcuts to upgrade or dismantle entire lines of conveyor belts. You can also do these operations in a square region of your chosen size, and you can even combine these two functionalities to upgrade any line of conveyor belts touching the square. You can also easily copy-paste a building with its settings and attached mechanical arms or even save blueprints of entire production lines. When dismantling stuff, you get every building back, you don't lose any materials and you don't even need to recraft buildings. You can build conveyor belts at lots of different heights, making it easy to cross different lines and you get even more convenient ways to transport resources between your production lines later in the game.

There are no enemies (yet) so you have all the time you want to plan, build, rebuild and optimize your factories. They are working on adding enemies as an optional content that you can choose to activate or not when starting a new game.

Oh, and the music is great too! Calm and soothing, feels good. The perfect OST to focus either on the game or on work.

I nominated this game for game of the year award 2021. :)

Thank you devs for making this awesome game. So much talent in all aspects of the game! Take my money and keep up the great work.

OMG! This game...

It's a story about time travel... unlike anything I've seen! Best VN I've played.
The way you interact with the game - the phone - is original.
Graphics, OST and voice acting are great.
The characters, though weird at first, are endearing.
The story, though slow at start, is just wow.
There will be a lot of fun moments, but also very sad ones, prepare tissues.

I like how they added a dictionary to explain various things like japanese words, references and scientific theories. Each entry unlocks the first time you encounter the word(s).

If you watched the anime and are wondering if buying the game is still worth it, it is! I watched the anime first but still had a blast playing the game. There are so many details you won't know if you just watch the anime. And there are of course the alternative endings. If you plan to watch the anime and play the game, it may be better to start with the game though.

Now, buy the game, cause this is the choice of Steins Gate!
El Psy Kongroo.

In Protolife, you fight against an alien hive that spreads over the map. It's not the first game on that theme, ex: Infested Planet, the Creeper World series... I love these games :)

But the gameplay is different: You can only place blocks and crystals and, depending on the pattern you formed with these elements, it will create a different tower. If one of the blocks is destroyed by the enemy, the tower will stop working or transform into an other tower because it formed an other pattern.

It's not a classic RTS in which you can control the whole map and give orders from afar. You have to move the builder unit(s) and place blocks one by one. For this reason, the game require quick planing and execution and can be quite difficult in later levels (which can be a good or bad thing depending on what you like to play). I prefer Creeper World gameplay myself, but still liked Protolife.

The campaign may be a little short depending on how fast you beat the levels, but I think it's still worth it.

Controls can feel a little hard because you can only move with WASD and place/take blocks on your current position. You can't place blocks from afar with the mouse for example, but that's part of the game.

I'm usually not a fan of MOBAs, but I love this one, because it's mixed with an RTS, and probably because it's not 5v5 but 1v1, so I don't lose because of my team and - more importantly - my team doesn't lose because of me. xD

Graphics and musics are nice, plus it's in space! I'm in space! SPAAAAACE! xD

It's in early acces for now, so there are a few issues of course, but I have faith in the team, they will be fixed.
A 2v2 mode would be perfect to play with a friend, and it's planned. :)