Recent reviews by Petur

My time at sandrock is a pretty decent game with pacing issues.

If you play crafting games for the story, this review will not be very useful for you. I don't play for the story and usually skip cutscenes and click on random dialogue choices. I play for the crafting and I enjoy getting new recipes and new equipment, completing orders and managing and upgrading my workshop.

I played My Time at Portia and enjoyed it plenty, so I have been looking forward to the release of Sandronk expecting more of the same. And for about half of the game it is so.

For the first few in-game months the game goes pretty smooth, the player has plenty to do gathering materials, adding and upgrading machines, fighting monsters and growing crops. Every now and then progress is halted because the next machine/upgrade needs to be researched and I think this is kind of needed so the player doesn't end up with more than they can mentally manage and leaves frustrated.

However, there has come a point where to keep on progressing I need certain recipes that I have to buy but they are not available at the shop until a quest is completed. The game doen't tell this, mind you, I had to look in the wiki how to get those recipes. This has happened before but in a few in-game days the quest appeared and I completed it and was not issue. However, this time I have been waiting for several in game weeks, more than a month. I have been completing main quest at what I think is a normal pacing, I have not been speedrunning them neither I have negleted them.

Playing the game with no progress, just waiting for the quests to came and go feels like a chore and maybe I will return to it in the future but I am giving it a rest for now.

Iratus is a very interesting tactical RPG. It allows for multiple strategies and there are many creatures to try.
It is heavily inspired by Darkest Dungeon and it falls short of that game in some regards and suppasses it in others.
It has a good atmosphere and a good "narrator" (Iratus himself) but still is not as atmospheric and charismatic as DD,
On the other hand, I like better how the game is structured, one combat at a time. Also there is a system to quickly level up minions (brains) that makes it feel less grindy than DD.
The combat system itself is also a bit better in my opinion due to the addition of Iratus spells and potions.

This remake of Trials of Mana keeps all the good stuff from the original SNES game and enrichs it with both new graphics and audio and with new mechanics and post-game content.

The strongest point of the game is replayability: Not only the player can chose 3 characters out of 6, with 24 total possible final classes, but also the story has 3 arcs but only one develops to the end in each playthough, depending on who is our main character.

Simple combos have been added to the combat system, as well as telegraphed enemy attacks one has to dodge.

The character building now includes "passive" skills that our characters learn when upgrading their stats, and can be equipped in a few slots.

The cartoonish graphics look quite nice and fit the original game's aesthetic.

The SNES tunes have been remastered and the characters have voices now, though not all are to my liking.

The cons:
-The elements of the story (villains controlling kingdoms in the shadows, the source of magic deteriorating, etc) are VERY tired by today's standard and I never liked them in the first place (still it is easy to skip cutscenes and dialogues).
-It is not very clear what each stat does and which one raise to increase the damage or efectivenes of certain skills. Thankfully, a damage "power" is listed in the spells' descriptions.

Essential game for anyone who enjoys tower defense games.

The strongest point of the game is the variety of towers, more than 20 starting towers each of which has 3 distinct upgrade paths. This, coupled with enemies that look simple but actually have inmunities and modifiers that need to be covered, gives lots of potentian strategies to theorycraft and test.

The maps, game modes and tower upgrades are locked initially just to avoid overwhelming new players, but are available after only a few hours of play. What you find then is a game without story line or level progression, but a more sandboxy experience where you pick a map, a game mode, and try to beat it. There are also daily challenges with specific rules and rewards for reaching certain rounds in any game.

I see other reviews complaining about microtransactions and I just can not understand why they find them so irritating as 100% of the game can be enjoyed without them, all that paying extra provides is extra currency that can also be acquired without paying.

The game is crossplatform and it shows in the user interface that it was designed for mobile devices. Still it is perfectly functional, but could use an optimization for big screens.

By no means an awful game, but not quite good enough.

It suffers from three main problems: Unoriginality, lack of content and slowness.

These problems go hand in hand in such way that after 50 minutes of play and having completed six dungeons, I find that I have only seen four different enemies, haven't got items for half of my characters equipment slots and have only 3 characters (party size is 5).

If new gameplay conceps had to be introduced I would have understood the slow pace, but it is a very conventional turn-based game and the player can be expected to be familiar with it from the begining and start pumping out variety.

If I had the complete rooster of characters, a good variety of items, and faster leveling speed (at least for the first levels) it would have kept me interested fiddling with party composition and builds.

The story/dialogues don't add very much to the experience either. They are rather funny but even parodying fantasy game cliches is seen too often nowadays.

Aunque la mecánica principal es muy divertida, la curva de dificultad arruina todo el juego.
A partir de la tercera o cuarta misión se hace extremadamente lento avanzar, teniendo que repetir estas misiones varias decenas de veces para hacernos lo bastante fuertes como para superar las misiones siguientes.
Es más: El juego no nos permite repetir misiones hasta que hayamos fracasado en una misión, lo cual significa que forzosamente hemos de intentar misiones que sabemos que no podemos superar y por si fuera poco perder el dinero que no hayamos gastado.