Recent reviews by Shadowhawk

Requires you start the game by inputting an email address to allow you to "sync" your data....no. This is Steam, sync your data through Steam.

Played this a bit back when it had no real content, hence why the time on record is so low. Finally came back to it because when checking the patchnotes they claim to have version 1.X out. Sweet, the game is completed, at least as far as 1.0 versions go for nowadays (totally fine to have post 1.0 patches, even content patches). Except no....apparently this game only represents 1.x to mean Act 1 is completed. I don't know how many Acts are going to be made. I don't think I care to see how many acts get made. There are too many games of a very similar premise that are of very high quality that are already completed to be worrying about and keep checking in on and being disappointed by this one any further.

I bought this game because of how much the developers seem to be commenting on reviews and wanting to get people opinions on how things are working so far.

I only have a little bit of time currently because I ran the tutorial a few times, not liking the results I got from said tutorial runs, and trying again a few more times. I have no clue how much the tutorial affects the game, but it makes itself out as if it affects a lot, so I wanted a "good" run...which just led to some horrible time rerunning it several times. I have no doubt the rest of the game is interesting, and fun, but the tutorial instantly showed me several flaws the game has, and I was hoping I could point it out from a new players perspective, that way its not forgotten later. (note: I am marking it as recommended because I feel these flaws are an issue in early presentation, not indicative of a bad game)

First off I want to talk about a rather annoying bug I found right away. Easily fixable I'm sure. Upon playing the games tutorial and getting the worst possible everything (more on that later) I ended up leaving that game, deleting its save, and starting a new one. Upon starting up the second game I found the problem to be that the tooltips that are supposed to show up when you are supposed to kick the dwarf out of the bath don't show up unless you close out the whole game, and reopen it. I think it has to do with tips only being shown the first time coming onto a screen and since I didn't restart the game it still had the scene registered as having seen the tooltips already...the problem with this is that if the tooltips dont show up, the game doesnt register that you have kicked the dwarf out of the tub, making it so you can't hit the X button to leave the screen, effectively soft-locking the game, as you are stuck there until you leave the entire game.

Another issue I found, though it isn't a glitch, was that during the equipment filling part of the tutorial, you are unable to see several of the characters stats throughout the tutorial because the game puts a tooltip directly over the stats as it trys to push you along out of the equipment screen....even though it is heavily beneficial to boost your characters abilities in this moment as it "affects your future game," by making it more likely to win encounters, which makes more positive early game traits/reduces the likelyhood of negative traits. Being unable to see the stats isnt that big of a deal, but its a major annoyance, and can easily be fixed by changing the size/shape of the tooltip to not block important things.

As for gameplay once the adventurers set off on the trail....even without changing any of the items of my party I found that my adventurers had approximately 78% chance to succeed in the saving of the people along the way to the portal.....and they failed LITERALLY every single encounter they had. On the next run, I boosted their gear in a way that earned them some more %, I think hitting around 86% or something, and still I only "won" 2 of the encounters.
I have a theory that the odds are supposed to be how they are in the normal game, but during the tutorial they are FORCED to fail certain events (Im not talking about the rock climb or the spider/endgame, but the first like 6 randomized ones that decide how the world is effected) and the other events you get a "chance" to win...meaning you can fail those too, with poor luck. I realized this possibility when one of the events literally gave me 1% effort on one character, 2% effort on another and 3% effort on a third (the fourth was 19% I think) the odds of which happening are ridiculous, since that was what was needed to get my failure to occur since with normal effort levels I was hitting around 130 points vs the missions needed ~80 points, the effort levels pushed me down to around ~75 points, in the most ridiculously designed auto fail ever.

If the game is supposed to fail these, then make the events harder so that the characters will obviously fail them, don't just make the number "roll the wrong way" because it just makes the game feel ridiculous and rather hateful. I was given the idea that I need to do good so that I can have a "good start" and then I am shown how horrible I am doing despite the fact that my characters should easily be able to take care of the situations at hand. I am terrified of the implications of possible outcomes later in the game, as the game words things in order to make you feel like the implications of things that occur during your travels in the tutorial (despite it being randomized and seemingly tailored AGAINST you) are astronomical and will gimp the save.


I would like to note: the complaint about the tutorial randomization isn't really meant to scare you away from your current gameplay decision, but more to make you at least mention what is to come to players....maybe instead of making the odds of completing the early objectives legitimately hard, maybe make them actually random chance of success or failure (as I will reiterate that it definitely does not feel so), or maybe just tell the player that bad things are about to happen that might be beyond their control, and beyond the expecations that the game itself will tell you to expect (this feels weak, but also would fit the situation that the tutorial heroes are facing, so it might be interesting if done "correctly"). Also, I would like it if you made a better way to "retry" the tutorial, so that a completely botched run doesnt require a full restart + re-equiping the entire party, then waiting through all of the events to possibly go your way, or fail horribly again. Those would alleviate most of the problems that I had with the start, and I think would make a better first impression for most players out there.

I would love to hear what you think about my analysis, and if my theory was correct or if I have the luck of a dice painted to have only 1s on all 20 sides.

While I have only played a short bit so far, I can say that the puzzle aspects of this game are fairly interesting. Gameplay is (as others have noted) reminiscent of Sudoku and Minesweeper. The puzzles themselves arent very hard, and to my knowledge have no life system other than the fact that you get rewards based on how few mistakes you make. This system works very well and is very easy to understand the mechanics of the game with its "do it to learn it" tutorials.
This game has my praise as being a simple brain teaser, and I recommend it for this reason. It does its job and it does it well. Everything else below this is annoyances I have however, as this is a game about following the limited rules, and trying to do as well as possible. Some of the rules introduced, however, limit your ability to use your brain however and this peeves the hell out of me.
An annoying point for this system is that 1 mistake might be no lost points in some levels, while other more difficult puzzles might be that 2 mistakes is 2 lost points. Another issue I have with this is the need for guessing, in a system that gives its credits based on mistakes made. This game REQUIRES you to guess all the time, even in the first few levels even. And what I mean by guessing is that instead of intellectually plotting out your course, you are required to take a stand and say "well at least its just 50/50." And this is exacerbated by the "?" buttons. There is a level where there are ROWS of these unknown buttons, making it impossible to go around and therefore impossible to know how to move on without guessing. Turning this puzzle game of intelligence into a bit of a ♥♥♥♥. And then theres the fact that the blocks you fill in as correct dont have numbers on them too. Meaning that if you are in a choke a couple blocks wide and you only get fillers then you have no way of moving forward, yet again forcing you to GUESS!

As stated by the only other negative review at this time-there ar no players on the servers whatsoever-across the world as it is broken up into like 9 different servers of 1 person...me.
I only got the game thinking that since the game is brand new it would still have players like in the first few weeks of the game Screencheat. Note that the time I was searching for servers was at 930 PM US east.
The gameplay itself (in practice mode) is very awkward but obviously meant for you to play it for a while to get used to the movement, ammo, aiming, timings, and of course the powerups...but with no players it is impossible to tell how that would feel in combat.
Definitely don't recommend solely on the premise of no players.

MAIN POINT: At least in the US servers, I was unable to find a single match! Checked for a while on each game type, no matches at all.
I was watching an old video on a streamer I liked and thought this game looked good, and it was cheap. From what I can see, it is a good game, played a couple of bot matches and can tell that it is a very precise shooter-and I always did like the railgun from Quake-however, without ever getting into a single match in the game, likely due to this being an older game that wasnt major-and losing its people over time- I cannot recommend this game to anyone that doesnt have an entire party to do a private server with....