Recent reviews by Verflair

This game is a classic example of why first impressions in a game are everything, especially if your players' free time is limited.

The opening of the game is very bog-standard "get to hub, meet threat on the way, kill threat, meet allies from hub". I ended up starting in Yaesha, which as a world just felt barren in a bad way. You spend the first few hours of the game just scouring the barren map for chests and enemies, and otherwise it's just doing nothing but that. The gunplay is dreadfully boring, the abilities don't feel impactful, and the few characters you do meet in this empty game are either cardboard cutouts of every RPG NPC you could think of, or they talk ad infinitum and info-dump to you for literal dozens of dialogue pieces.

I almost gave up and told myself "Let me give it one more shot". That shot put me up against a boss that purely consists of one-shot mechanics with zero leniency or progress checkpoints, which is somehow worse than the dreadfully boring rest of the bosses I've fought so far. So that'll be where I draw the line, I think.

I'm sure this game is fun once it opens up more, but the first few hours of play were so dreadfully boring and unfun that I frankly don't even want to sit through it to see it open up. I work full-time and barely have energy for much of anything anymore. I don't have the patience nor the interest to spend another 2-4 hours slogging through the slowest opening chapter I've frankly ever seen in a game.

Quite frankly, I can't even call the game "bad", because it's probably not actually that bad despite my issues. It's just boring, which is honestly a worse problem for a game to have.

Potionomics is an extremely solid economic simulator with a lot of surprising depth hidden under the surface. The deckbuilding is very solid, and the character animations and art style are insanely charming. That being said, for all the aforementioned depth, much of it is also bogged down by questionable UI and design choices that can easily halt a playthrough to a grinding stop your first time around, unless you choose NOT to actually use certain parts of the game.

Pros:
-Basic gameplay loop is very engaging and fun
-Deckbuilding is complex and allows for many strategies.
-Art and animations are very solid and charming.

Cons:
-Difficulty is often inconsistent and not immediately clear.
- Some systems in the game can (and should) be completely ignored, leading for some of the game to contain "noob traps" that can quite literally cause unintended difficulties that can end playthroughs,
-Randomness can be slightly annoying, to the point of determining victory or failure despite nothing else.


Custom orders, intended to be a separate money-making option that theoretically gives a massive payoff in addition to your shop, is actually a significant waste of time in general. Orders often require ludicrous requirements for potion ingredients and their traits, which leads you to spend too much time trying to gather the appropriate ingredients to complete the order. It is actually always better to simply sell the potions being asked for, without caring about the traits at all, as it is flatly more rewarding in both time efficiency and total profit. This type of issue, where aspects of the gameplay are actually best ignored, is very common in Potionomics.

The NPCs are all very charming and have complex, interesting character arcs that are quite fulfilling. That being said, the Hangout mechanic in order to increase Sylvia's relationship with the characters is flat-out pointless and a trap. You cannot max out all the NPCs in Potionomics if you try to do so via Hangouts, as it is quite literally mathematically impossible with the time limits for each week. Instead, gifting becomes the best option, as there is no time expectation beyond spending the 1 time slot needed to travel out of the shop. I had found this out about halfway through my first playthrough. Once again, it is better to flat-out ignore Hangouts for any reason except some extra stress management (which should itself never be an issue as long as your deck is built out well).

Additionally, Potionomics suffers from a confusing lack of replayability, despite having a great many hours of content available to it. Without spoiling the actual story content itself, once you've defeated the final boss, the game ends. You do not have an option for "free" or "endless" play in order to see all the other NPC storylines you may have missed. This is especially confusing considering it seems to be the most requested post-release feature.

Despite the three above issues, though, the game itself is extremely solid and worth buying. There's a lot of care given to the character designs and art, and the gameplay at its foundation is incredibly fun and strategically engaging. Definitely worth getting!

Put plenty of hours on the EGS version before this.

Spellbreak is probably the only BR I was genuinely interested in, and it did pay off. Combat is unique and fun, but if you're used to playing BRs with mostly hitscan shooting, you will find it hard to adjust to Spellbreak's largely projectile-based shooting.

Combat is very fast paced and the six different gauntlet types allow for varying degrees of difficulty and complexity.

That being said, I can't recommend anyone pick up this game as, unfortunately, at the time of this review, Proletariat has gone completely radio silent since September 2021 and as far as anyone can tell, there is no further roadmap for future updates into 2022 as of yet. This game suffered from a lackluster release, to the point where despite actively looking forward to it, I didn't even know it was about to come out until it actually did. Proletariat barely markets this game at all and as such, very few new players actually come to join it. As such, the game is basically (as much as I hate to use this phrase) dead and it's literally not worth your time or money to play it.

This game is essentially a prime study in failures of marketing, as well as a good example of why exclusivity on platforms is more damaging than helpful to developers.

Darkest Dungeon is pretty fun at first, and I really really wanted to like this game, but it really does not feel "difficult" so much as "punishing". Progression doesn't really feel very fast at all even when doing well, and there's no real milestones to make the sense of progression more tangible.

One of the things the game is going to warn you about immediately is how you are going to lose sometimes, and you're going to lose party members. What it doesn't tell you is most of the time you won't lose them because of your failures to prepare, but because the game has just randomly decided not to let you win. There is a LOT of RNG mechanics involved in the game: Dodge and hit chances, resistances to certain types of damage, and on top of that, when one of your heroes hits 0 health, they enter a "death defy" state where they have a random chance of the next attack against them killing them. Sometimes you will get extremely lucky and successfully roll the dice, and other times the game will sh*t in your cornflakes and repeatedly roll the worst outcome.

Darkest Dungeon's difficulty doesn't feel "challenging", as in it doesn't feel like I'm battling enemies with new mechanics that change up how I fight. Most encounters are always "kill the 3rd and 4th position first, keep the 1st and 2nd locked down". Instead, the difficulty seems to come from the game's arbitrary punishments for things outside of your control, which takes the agency away from the player and doesn't give you a chance to learn from your mistakes. It feels deceptive to call this game "difficult" when the difficulty isn't derived from a sense of challenge, but rather punishment.

The hamlet upgrades will somewhat lessen the sting of defeat, but once again, the progression for the upgrades is a slow drip, as the currencies needed to upgrade each building come at an agonizingly slow pace, and by the time you are able to upgrade to an acceptable level, you'll have reached a point where it barely matters compared to the impacts of the missions you're entering in.

Bottom Line:

Pros -
* Unique art style
*Excellent voice acting
*Decent eldritch horror

Cons -
*Difficulty feels deceptive and artificial due to randomness and lack of variety in encounter design
*Progression is unclear and often frustratingly slow
* Confusing design choices (i.e. being unable to take high-level heroes in on lower leveled missions)

Ridiculously fun. Light on content for the moment, but even still VERY replayable thanks to being a roguelike. Definitely needs some QoL in multiplayer runs to make it easier to avoid accidentally stealing other people's items, but you can mod for that if desired.

Good decks for the most part. However, major complaint about the single player campaign. It's so heavily stacked against you. The AI will always get the best cards in their deck early on guaranteed, and be able to use them at the perfect time. It's predictable, but frustrating because the core of every encounter is essentially down to you being able to draw your core cards before they do.

I'd like to actually have a fair chance in the singleplayer instead of losing for ridiculous stacking.