Recent reviews by StrangerOdd

Grind fest with buggy gameplay, not really worth the effort to enjoy

This game may be the most well produced warhammer 40k game available, or at least the most tone accurate. From the moment you start the game you will understand how well this game sets its tone, and it holds its theme in every aspect of game-play, from exploration and fighting, to menu scrolling and cut-scenes.

As well as stellar sound and great graphical style, the game's turn based combat is something other games of the genre should take note of. It has a a learning curve, but the combat feels original, less like a copy/paste of Xcom or Valkyria Chronicles. Every fight is a puzzle with multiple solutions, and the tempo of the fight follows that feeling of unraveling the solution.

The game has its faults, the difficulty can spike suddenly, but it is manageable. The classes for your main troops are also seemingly not well balanced, many classes are simply better than others, their bonuses far outweighing others. The game looks great, but it is still clearly an indie title in graphics. Suffice to say this game is phenomenal however, and as others have said the sound is golden, and the game would frankly be worth playing for the sound alone.

Get it, if you have the time for it, as all turn based games tend to suck up your time. You will enjoy every second of it.

Glory to the Omnissiah.

Its good, go a viking lads and lasses.

Extremely unfinished and boring game. Even on higher settings the graphics are very bland. There is nothing much to do other than eat, which as a prey creature is simple and easy to find food. As a predator your only option is to hunt another player, which is also easy thanks to the bare bones smell mechanic. As a prey creature once you are full you just "hide" and grow, for the sake of growing. You can try to pair up with a player to make a nest and eggs, but that is all there is to it really. There is also a basic comfort mechanic based on weather and a food bias system for eating mostly the right thing.

One feature of the game is the varied play styles, flight and aquatic animals. However, flying animals play the same as terrestrial, they just get around easier. What could potentially be the most interesting feature of the game, an aquatic play style, is extremely lack luster. There are basically no sea creatures, just one prey creature and two predators, and the vast oceans are only filled with one or two types of fish. Its all barren, even coral reefs are bland and have no other life around them. No fish, crustaceans, or cephalopods. Its a very basic game, and after 3 years there's just not much in this game, to explore or do.

Its just not very fun. People who seem to enjoy it defend the grind as though being beyond grindy is a good thing, but there is no real point to the grind. You grind to get more money to get a bigger and better ship. That's basically it. Most cosmetics are microtransactions, and you are only getting a bigger ship to decrease the grind, but it doesn't because the higher level delivery missions take just as long.

The visuals and sound design are excellent but sparce and repetitive, pretty much everything gets old fast. The game just feels shallow, in a weirdly overly complicated way. Things are tied together in ways that are not very meaningful, like the economies of different systems, because they are mostly static. The best rare goods route is and will always be the best, and the best place to sell a given rare or high quality good doesn't change or bounces between a few.

Combat is pretty straight forward, missiles, lasers and guns, some drone fighters for good measure, and counters to some of these, but combat in space takes place at a very limited range given the vast distances. Its also the worst way to grind anything worth getting in the game.

tl;dr Euro truck simulator in space, press warp button to jump for 14 minutes edition. Seriously large swaths of any productive gameplay and grind are literally sitting around for tens of minutes of travel time.

The game relies too heavily on RNG and clings to its rogue like elements to a fault. What fun could be had from a hero game were the heroes don't matter falls apart as progression is slow and can be frustrating. Good rogue like games let you learn from failure, this one relies on so many dice rolls for negative affects its inane. Health, sanity, food, light, and others are just the front resources you need to balance, but the game can randomly drastically reduce these resources. Combined with most positive events being small and many negative events having a huge impact on a run and a fresh party in a level 0 short dungeon can die due to one horrible combat encounter. No big loss, but after the upteenth time training new heroes, the player didn't gain knowledge, experience, or resources, and likely lost some resources, plus time.

Its a buggy mess that constantly leaves me frustrated. If the game was more refined and optimized it would be fun, but for now I'm either fighting the unintuitive controls, the friendly AI, or the weird glitches and bugs in the game.

Extremely simple rogue-like that's extremely luck based. Its quirkiness wears out quick.

Rise to Ruins is a fairly brutal village building god game, if played as intended. In fact its basically quite unfair, and the game pulls lots of tricks to ruin your village and any fun you're having building a village. There are thankfully modes of incremental difficulty for the less masochistic gamers, and the core difficulty curve can be learned in relative safety in a Traditional Mode. The issue is village AI is fairly dumb, and you have no control over them except in an obtuse sense. Villagers will walk into enemy land while "wandering" outside of the village, starve to death with a massive surplus of food, and generally bug out and not do their job even if you have set up everything to be as efficient as possible. And this is working as intended, apparently.

You build a little pixel village under threat from a spreading corruption that decays the land and spawns bad guys. You are a deity with a fairly comprehensive set of powers, both destructive, creative, healing, and utility in nature. You have no influence over land that is corrupted, so cannot attack it directly, and for the most part the corruption cannot be conquered or destroyed, only endured. The point of the game is to simply survive for as long as possible, through defenses and arming of your villagers and judicious use of magic.

There is an overworld map, and each region on the overworld is a biome to survive in. The only primary victory condition is to survive a year in every region, which you have to spread to organically from each village you form via migrating villagers you select to leave for the new region.

And that is Rise to Ruins. You are a deity to a small group of people trying to simply survive an unstoppable, albeit partially containable, corruption. If you enjoy god games and village builders, and a have a taste for lite tower defense, this is a very fun and addicting game. Be warned, on Survival and higher difficulties it can be brutal, and even on Traditional difficulty a few too many mistakes and setbacks late into a village can doom it. There are many "features" to enemy AI that will essentially ignore established rules to circumvent your defenses, and added to this are "random" disasters like earthquakes and lighting storms that target your village. Pretend its just the corruptions angry god throwing its own spells at you if it helps justify it.

The funny narration alone is a great reason to get this, but its also a great multiplayer puzzle platformer with fun and unique art and graphics. The music and sound is great as well, and sets a quirky atmosphere.

Its a great game that has really earned its praise, and created some really funny memories with my friends.