Recent reviews by PrimeSubToMeTTV

I make a da pizza

A good game that is an absolute nightmare to complete. The game is presented in a way that seems like it will reward you for completion but it doesn't respect your time at all in regards to completion.

The core gameplay is good and fun and worth playing. I'm sure you can see other reviews to see about that, but I'd like to talk about the post game a bit. (So minor non-specific spoilers I guess)

This game has multiple completion monuments that ask you to find/complete various points of interest or deposit certain amounts of materials. The rewards for these are the ultimate tools, one for slashing and one for blunt damage. The tools are pretty cool and you can use them to destroy basically anything in the game. I do find it annoying that after delivering like 10,000 materials that I spent many hours grinding out and searching the island I then had to grind out MORE materials in order to upgrade the tool from each monument.

---More specific spoilers below---

There are a ton of great design aspects in the game but there are a lot of aspects like that that seem like the game doesn't respect your time at all. It's fine if a thing that takes a long time is fun but after finding all 10 of the Myth Tablets the rift that opens costing 5 Mana Chunks is somewhat insulting. It wouldn't be the worst thing except for the fact that I had already used up 6 or 7 mana chunks opening other rifts that led to ♥♥♥♥ all garbage nothing areas with no valuable materials or interesting things to do. The fact that you need to use an end game tool that uses resources that require hours to grind for to open rifts and most often they only lead to a small area with a couple normal enemies and some basic materials is a big ♥♥♥♥ you to players who spend the time to do it. If I hadn't wasted resources on those I would've already had the mana chunks needed to open that rift and it wouldn't have been an issue.

For anybody reading this who might not know, Mana Chunks cost 75 mana beads in a furnace. Each bead is dropped by any enemy killed in a zone where you've activated the no respawning signal. That means you have to kill 375 enemies to get enough beads to open the big rift. Each mana chunk also takes 15 minutes to smelt. You can speed it up a bit with a trinket that effects time but it still takes forever.

The final blunt weapon feels okay to use but could do with more range and there are times where you're hitting things with it and it only hits one object even though multiple are in range which feels kind of bad. Especially when compared the the final slashing weapon which feels GREAT to use and is pretty cool. Although it would be neat if the extra effect it has worked on everything it could break instead of most things. It would also be cool to have a tool that works on all objects possibly combining the two so that you don't need to swap between them and can really go on a fun rampage at the end of your completion quest.

---Super Secret Spoiler of a secret that really REALLY doesn't respect your time---


There is another secret in the game that requires you to do a deathless run of the game including completing one of the two completion monuments. The reward for doing it is a key that opens a secret door. In the current version of the game (Which is fully released at this point) the thing that happens when you open the door is...


...


...


It opens. That's it. It opens and then there's just an open door in the middle of the desert.

There being no significant reward for completing something so demanding is absolutely ridiculous. Maybe it'll be added in DLC but if that's the case it just shouldn't have been included in the base game at all.

There's also a phone at the end of the other completion monument that says it isn't ringing YET which implies that there's something you need to do to make it ring. The phone is next to a map of the island that marks all the radio towers. Somebody on Reddit recently posted showing that they had gone to every tower and completed the max ascension for every one (Killing 15,292 enemies), completed all achievements, and all medals and STILL nothing happens with the phone. If this is another thing planned to be used for DLC the player should be told that when interacting with it instead of being baited into thinking it might be something interesting.

I still give the game a positive recommendation because the game is good. It's just the completion stuff that is insulting and you can choose to just not do that very easily and still enjoy the game.

P.S. The obelisks are not worth spending the big blue orbs to activate unless you have more of them than you need to deactivate respawning in all the regions already. The resources rewards are mediocre and the buffs are as well (they don't stack).

The best traditional roguelike I've played. I come back to this game every year or so and end up falling into it for hours.

There is a pretty significant mid game difficulty spike I think mainly due to the strength of your equipment having a bit of a gap between tiers 2-3 and 3-4 and it being difficult to ensure you get a full set of gear at the correct tier that your character can use. This isn't a terrible thing though since it keeps the difficulty curve feeling challenging up until a chunk before the end where you've managed to get geared and leveled up and get to go on a fun power trip smashing enemies easily until you get to the final bosses and are forced to use every consumable in the universe to survive.

Also after the end that I mentioned there is unlimited content through procedurally generated dungeons that are actually pretty good. There have been lots of free updates that add content and bug fixes to the game including one within the last year.

I still haven't managed to beat the game on an ironmans world yet.

The gameplay is fun but there are a few issues with the systems that keep me from wanting to dive in long term.

There's no strategy to farming and at least early on you have very little control over your weapon.

Whatever seeds you get you plant. There's no real choice here you just plant everything you get. You pick what region you go to but generally you clear out every region you have access to get all the relics and seeds no matter what.

For some reason you end up with a metric ♥♥♥♥ ton of fertilizer no matter what that you have very little use for. Occasionally you'll find a shrine you can trade 30 of it to but other than that there's no use I've found so far for the excess of fertilizer. Could be nice to make it tradable for specific seeds or sellable for cash or something.

You have no significant control over what weapon you get on any given night because your previous weapon breaks at the end of the day and you get two randomly to pick from. It would be nice if there was an option to spend cash to keep your weapon even if it cost double the standard cost and you lost the upgrades.

There's a massive gap in costs for things you can buy. It quickly goes from 70 for some seeds, 100 for a pickaxe, 30-50 for a weapon to 6,000 for a hog or 3,000 for a cow etc. There's not really a middle area in terms of price or power so there's a segment of the game where you have 1,000 cash every day and it both feels like you can buy everything but nothing that is relevant.

Also wings are MASSIVELY overpowered compared to basically every other item, basic turrets are pretty much entirely useless and unhelpful, and the tractors system is not explained AT ALL in the tutorial so you just kinda have to figure it out for yourself. The tutorial could use some work. It tells you to go left to the desert but doesn't tell you you can go right as well and that there are different types of seeds in each direction with different attributes.

Once you get your farm up to a larger size it's extremely easy for a random projectile from the enemies that attack you on your farm during the day to go completely unnoticed and hit you without you ever seeing it on the screen. Since one hit is one damage it's extremely detrimental for that to happen. The farm gets extremely noisy in both audio and visually as you grow it larger and all the glowing jumping wiggling plants + animals make it very easy for enemies and attacks to get lost in the clutter.

The core gameplay is fun but the systems seem too uninteractive or unintuitive for me to really want to invest more time into the game to discover more of the meta progression.

I love this game!

Main bad.

1.0 is out now. The switch to squads only and all the changes have made the game feel great and I'd recommend you check it out again if you played in the past. Or check it out for the first time since a lot of the changes make the game much more accessible for new players.

The problem with this game is that you are completely screwed if you don't get incredible RNG. Good rogue likes are difficult but possible to beat 60-80% of the time if you understand how the game works. This game requires you to get lucky and find certain cards that allow you to make it past even the middle 10 waves. The game scales wildly every 10 stages ramping up the difficulty several times over. Some of the best cards in the game require you to unlock them by playing every character through several runs. Unlockables in roguelikes should open up new play styles, not just straight up give you more power.

Other than having all the right cards drop for you or appear in the shop the only other bit of skill comes in the form of an APM check and your ability to guess what's happening on one side of your settlement while looking elsewhere. You can zoom all the way out and see everything but the icons don't get any bigger on buildings with active abilities so they're near impossible to click on. Could do with some extra keybinds for active abilities like the aid station and some QoL changes to make doing what you want easier. I know what I need to do, it's just a pain in the ass to do it which makes it less fun.

Card upgrades making the cards more expensive is needlessly confusing on the part of economy cards. If the price goes up 10 and the gold gain goes up 20, why not just keep the price the same and only make the gold gain go up by 10? It makes it just that much more difficult to comeback if you fall behind even a little bit. If you lose one wall ever you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and might as well give up the run so long as you're past wave 10 already. You'll know if you're going to go far in the run or not after the first 5 or 6 waves. If you aren't though you can't just abandon the run because there's an event that requires you to make it past wave 10 on the previous run. If you didn't the event does nothing which means you're missing out on the possible benefits from a different event.

The game draws you in with a visual style similar to Kingdom and the Roguelike Deckbuilding genere of Slay the Spire but it doesn't deliver any of the feelings those games do.

I'd be willing to check it out again in the future to see if things have improved at all but for now I'm just not enjoying the game.

Pros
- Great art and art style The game looks great. All the art is nicely done and fits together well.
- Fun at the beginning

Cons
- After the first hour or two you've seen everything the game has to offer.
- The story is nothing, and the "comedy" isn't funny. There is no reason to watch any of the cut scenes in this game because the story is not really relevant to the game play at all and half of the cut scenes are an old man spouting nonsense at the adventurers. The joke of those scenes is that the old man is wasting their time and making them angry. Unfortunately the cut scenes are also wasting the players time and making them angry.
- Tons of waiting around doing nothing This is the biggest issue with this game. This game has F2P game mechanics that are only used in F2P games in order to frustrate people into spending money to speed things up. I have no idea why you would put those mechanics in a game that isn't trying to milk money from players over time because they are specifically designed to withhold fun from the player. You send adventurers on a mission, gotta wait for it to be done to do anything else because your adventurers are also your crafters and nobody else in town can craft things while they're gone. Adventure is done? Okay now you can spend gold to heal your party right away but gold is hard to come by early on so your best option is to just wait for them to heal over time. If you have things to craft you can do that to pass the time because you ALSO HAVE TO WAIT FOR THINGS TO CRAFT. While crafting your heroes are locked into the crafting building and can't be used for anything else. Costume contest? You gotta send your heroes (and you better send 3 because the more you send the better chance that you're not just throwing money into the garbage by entering) and they can't do anything while they're gone which means you're stuck doing nothing while the 2 minute long animation plays for the contest (It gets longer on higher tier competitions). You want to research something? Okay just pay the resources to research it and then WAIT anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes for it to complete. Some waiting is fine, but this game is 90% waiting and 10% playing the game.
- Boring Grind Grind in a game is fine but NOT if the grinding is sitting doing nothing. This is not an idle game. You have to interact with it once every couple minutes which means you can't even grind the resources you need while AFK. There is no automation to speak of. Even once you have four or five heroes at lvl 20 or above there's no way for you to tell one of them to just endlessly run through the first area gathering materials. You have to manually send them every time. You don't need lower tier resources for higher level gear, but you can craft them into things to sell for the tens of thousands of gold you'll need to level your party up enough to even gather anything from the higher tier areas. If the game didn't require you to use heroes as crafters and instead had separate people that you hired and trained to craft for you while your heroes are gone the game would feel WAY better to play. In order to complete an area you have to successfully run a party through it to gain progress towards being able to confront the boss of that area. This makes sense and it works alright for the first level where you gain 5% each time you run through and you need that time before the boss to gear up and level up your heroes. The next two zones each give you 4% each time you run it and if your party is defeated you lose 4% progress. Meaning you have to run through both areas 25 times to reach the boss plus one time each time you accidentally let your party wipe. You do not need the time in this zone. You already know how the game mechanics work at this point and by the time you've made your party strong enough to fully clear the area every time there's not much left for you to do while you wait an hour for them to grind out the % you need to fight the boss. Once you fight the boss your reward is... a few hundred gold and maybe a couple resources. You get basically nothing for killing a boss. For comparisons sake by the time you kill the bosses on the 2nd stage of the game you will likely be spending over 3,000 gold for one level for one character. If you're lucky your reward for killing a boss will be 10-15% of that.
- Equipment is a mess in several ways Equipment in this game is either acquired by crafting, is given to you as a quest reward, or as a reward for a random event (which I will get to later). The bulk of your equipment though you will be crafting yourself. Each crafting station can be crewed by one hero and you need to pick the right one because their stats will determine the chance of getting a better version of the item you're crafting. That's not a terrible mechanic, but it leads to a lot of doing nothing(see above). When looking at the crafting menus you have no way of comparing what you're looking at to what you currently have equipped. You have to exit the crafting menu, open the guild, click equip on the unit you want to equip and... wait... what was the RANGE of stats this item might have? You'll have to back out of this menu and back into the crafting menu to compare back and forth for each of the six stats and special attributes a piece of gear could have. Gear gets stats randomly within a range of number and can sometimes have random stats or attributes that you can't know until you craft them. The solution is of course to craft a ton of them and equip the best one. Again that would be a fine mechanic if crafting one item didn't require 3-15 minutes of grinding hoping you get the right drops during which you can't do anything else. This only gets worse as you progress to higher tier gear.
-Random Events Feel Bad Occasionally a random event will show up. This event will preset one of maybe 5 scenarios and in each of these you will be given two choices. It never matters what you choose. It is pure RNG if you get a good result or a bad one. Even if you choose the option that doesn't require you to risk anything there's a chance that the outcome will just take gold from you anyways. These events repeat over and over and over and over and eventually you might as well just open them up and click the first option without even reading them because there is no way to determine the correct answer and they do not relate to the story in any way.
- The Game Sucks to Watch This game asks you to sit back and watch it play itself for a significant portion of it. Unfortunately, while the art in the game is great, what you're watching is the same every time. The combat/costume contest animations just cycle around over and over and over and over until they're completely uninteresting to look at. You will have to watch them dozens of times thanks to the grinding nature of this game. Again, this would be much less of a problem if you could do things in town while combat/contests were happening.
- It Takes HOURS to Get to the Point Where You can Make Meaningful Decisions Look at how many hours I have in this game. I only just unlocked the ability to send three heroes on a quest together. Up until that point the only real combo you can have is tanky sword hero in the front, ranged damage dealer in the back. Once you get a full party of three heroes you can start mixing things up. You still need a melee in the front and two ranged behind them, but you can start mixing in gear that gives stats to the whole party. You can give your tank equipment that takes damage for the rest of your party, or heals the whole party when they get hit. You can give a spell caster gear that buffs the whole parties damage. You can get these items earlier on than this, but until you have three heroes to buff they don't give enough stats to be worth using.

The game just isn't fun. It's boring content stretched out for no reason.

This game is not done. It should be early access.

-There are no tutorials as if the devs expect people to go to youtube and watch videos to learn how to play.

-Most building have little to no information even though the info box is the same full size. 10 words that don't explain nearly enough about the building with space for a full paragraph is very aggrivating.

-The "Advisors" feature is garbage. If your people become unhappy they'll tell you to make sure you have enough food no matter what the problem is. Half your populus died of a plague causing -50 happiness? Well make sure they have food even though you have a surplus of food 3 times what your population needs at the moment.

-The music is not bad but it needs two or three more tracks in the rotation. It gets old after just a few hours of hearing the same 4 or 5 tracks on repeat.

-Archer tower "29% soldier skill 58 damage per second" What does any of this mean? How do I get their skill up? It seems to raise from 5% to 30% over time after building them but doesn't go higher even after warding off an attack. 58DPS is useless info because I have no idea how much health the vikings/dragons have.

This game seems like it should be fun but it lacks any kind of clarity or depth. The lack of clarity makes you think it's interesting for the first hour or so while you're trying to figure out how things work. After that you realize how shallow the game is.

Started out alright started to get the hang of it (Meaning I realized you get points for making money so ♥♥♥♥ everything else and focus on income) and then it crashed. Luckily the game saves constantly so I got back right where I left off.

Unfortunately everything was pretty much bugged.


-3 buildings were solid the rest were opaque. Toggling that option just switched the 3 solid back and forth.
-Score was reset entirely for every kingdom.
-All quick quests were locked agian except for 4 random ones.
-Same with supplies for quick quests.
-All progress on epic quest unlocks was reset.
-Basically everything was completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Also if you do play make sure you wait for a hero to actually start doing what you set them to do. Some things will allow you to set multiple heroes to one building (Such as training strength). If you do this any hero who arrives after the first will be stuck doing that thing forever and you have to fire them and start over with a fresh hero.

TL;DR Starts confusing, gets stupidly easy once you realize you can win the game by spamming shops everywhere, glitches out and you lose all progress.

Great Game