Recent reviews by peg "peggers" pegginton

Let's start off with some context. Inverge Studios, the developers of Effie, are a team of 13 (plus a dog), headquartered in Spain. Effie happens to be Inverge's first release, and I sincerely hope they learned a lot from it. While I wouldn't recommend this game to others, I would recommend keeping an eye on Inverge's future plans, as I believe their team is quite talented, not to mention passionate.

Now for the actual review. I went into this game honestly hoping to enjoy it. The fantasy setting, the cartoon-ish art-style, and the soundtrack were more than enough reasons for me to try it out. I'm the type of person who adores the tried and tested medieval fantasy genre, as well as platforming, which Effie relies on quite a bit. I don't, however, have much love for beat-em-up combat and needless exposition. The game's main story, which took me roughly three hours to complete, felt more like a tutorial or tech demo than a full game. It showed me that, while this game has excellent potential, it was subject to feature creep from a very early stage. This was apparent to me from the moment I launched the game, with SteamVR opening up in the background. While virtual reality might make for a good selling point to some, I've found that its use is situational with the current technology, and the developers' time would have been better spent on smoothing out animations and transitions to make the game feel better to play. The feature creep didn't stop there, though, and upon reaching the overworld and learning the shield surfing mechanic, I found myself passing by a racing minigame. I'll admit, at the time of writing this review, I've yet to test my mettle in a race. My main reason for skipping past it was fuelled by a desire to simply finish this game and move on to something which could keep me more engaged. All in all, I didn't hate Effie, but the developers obviously didn't have much of an idea of what this game would be when they started it, instead letting the features of their game engine of choice decide for them.

Pros:
- Beautiful art direction
- Good soundtrack
- Plenty of graphical settings

Cons:
- Overly repetitive gameplay loop
- Little to no replayability
- Poor English translation
- Lack of consistent vision/feature planning

While I didn't receive this game for free, it was a part of a game bundle, so I believe I got it at a discounted price.

Mankind should not be playing this game. We should be threshing wheat and pushing wheelbarrows to the market.

An intense, dark storyline? Check. Hilariously absurd shenanigans? Check. More minigames than a match of Mario Party? Check.

3/3 it's alright

fun game. many hours of think. much socializing. wow

fun game. good modding community. extra spicy memes. buy it.

A beautiful and cute game with plenty of fun and unique characters and interactions. Perfect for music lovers and light gamers alike.

TL;DR: The game is fun but cyclical and its future looks bright.

Let me start off by saying I've been playing Cube World since I bought it back in 2013 and I'm personally glad to see some of the changes made since then. Wollay promised a fun game and that's exactly what it was and still is. But that's not to say I think he should stop there.

6 years ago, Cube World was an ambitious indie game boasting combinations of game mechanics no one had ever thought of (infinitely scalable rpg?! what?) and, for the most part, that's exactly what it was. That being said, the game is far from perfect. Region-locking items has its charm at first, but becomes very grindy after the first few biomes. Artefacts only scale your stats by small percents and thus become less and less useful the more you collect. You now don't have to grind against dozens of monsters to be able to sail, ride, or even glide, but you will immediately be kicked out of doing so when you enter a new biome and find that all of your collectables have been reset.

All that aside, I see this as a great start to a game I still have high hopes for in the future. Hopefully, being publicly available will help demonstrate which areas of the game need to be changed or rebalanced in order to bring the best experience possible.