Recent reviews by Rokk

I'm a little lukewarm on Slay The Spire 2 right now. There's potential, but it will take some time to get there. For now, I don't recommend the game.

Spire 2 is way too stingy with energy. It feels like they saw the necessity of energy relics in StS 1 and decided to almost completely axe them instead. Everything has shifted to in-combat resource generation, which also overly rewards "degenerate" decks that tend to go infinite really easily. Gameplay doesn't feel good because you're always incredibly starved for energy and bleeding HP left and right because of it. You can never play those 3-cost powers because that's all the energy you will have in the turn, and most decks can't play a power and block for 30.

That lack of energy completely warps the meta and the optimal gameplay around it. Everything is just a struggle to either gain energy in-combat or find a way to scum energy costs. Even now, the developers are looking at balancing Sly, ignoring the fact that Sly is only good because it's a reliable way to deal with "you must have this much energy to live".

In Spire 1, you got punished for lacking something in your deck (Nob punishes not doing damage, Time Eater punishes playing low-impact cards, Head punishes slow scaling) which steered you to making better decks. This game punishes you for "not having ridiculous scaling in act 1", "not having only high-damage high-cost attack cards in act 2", and "not having only low-damage low-cost spammy attack cards in act 2" (yes, these are in the same act).

Some events that give you card enchants are completely unhinged in how broken they are. One moment you're struggling to stay alive, the next moment you're bulldozing over the spire because you lucked into one broken event. It feels like too many of my won runs were decided by some broken enchant like Clone. It makes pathing into events too easy but also makes runs into slot machines.

Finally, Ironclad has been completely gutted and I don't see him being fun again unless they outright replace a lot of his cards. They completely killed him and looted his corpse, his most interesting pieces of kit given to other characters instead. His design was perfect in the first game, a lot of synergy pieces that worked really well together. But they took all of his status generation/benefits and gave them to Defect instead, leaving the "Exhaust" part of his kit without any ways to generate exhaust fuel and completely trashing his ability to block damage. Reaper has been removed, which means the self-sacrifice/self-heal archetype is just a "suicide" archetype now.

I think the action economy being so tight in Spire 2 is why runs feel like you're either rolling or getting rolled, no fun in-betweens where you just barely struggle to win. Every decision has such a major impact that there is no line anymore between dying in Act 1 and facerolling everything.

If you're interested in a deckbuilder that doesn't mind letting you have some fun but also doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the enemies... and if you can stand the weeaboo themes, I think I've had more fun with: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1140150/Touhou_Lost_Branch_of_Legend/

The game's alright in singleplayer, but great fun in coop. The writing has its fair share of eyerollers in sidequests, but for such a cheesy game, it really is quite well-designed.

Not something I would play for very long, but the game is about 10 hours long and I got my fun out of it. Solid recommendation if on sale.

Fantastic DLC for a great game. Looks pretty, even more so than the base game, despite being released a decade ago by now. Gameplay is fun, the exploration is fun and rewarding. Around almost every corner of this seemingly open-and-empty rural map is something to explore and find, even if there are no quests telling you to go there.

Admittedly there's a little less focus on the parkour, but only a little. Not much to parkour in a farm field, though you might be surprised how much parkouring there still is, especially if you don't skip it with the grappling hook.

The main complaint people have is that there is no fast-travel, and that a lot of quests will send you across the map. My advice is to take it easy and relax. If you just accept all quests in an area, you will find that you can knock out 3-4 quests at the same time when you do venture out. Don't just chase the next objective marker, have a drive and look around and explore places you come across. (That way you'll actually be prepared for the final timed driving mission, which is actually quite easy if you practice using the cars, level up driving and loot better parts for it, instead of using save&quit to fast-travel everywhere and skip both the intended XP and the loot. You did this to yourselves, guys)

The Following is incredibly atmospheric, and that's helped by the soundtrack which, again, has no right to be as good as it is. It perfectly sets the mood for the game.

I think The Following is just included with the base game now, but if you somehow don't have it yet, buy it.

This game is really good.

On the surface level, it doesn't seem like it should be any more special than any other typical open world zombie looter shooter. But somehow, this game has a lot of soul, and they knocked it out of the park even more in The Following.

Good writing that doesn't take itself too seriously, runs well, still looks really pretty, and fun gameplay. The map design has also had a lot of care put into it, to ensure the parkour flows smoothly.

Dying Light even has full 4-player coop support (though it's also still fun in singleplayer). No gross limitations like "only the host gets their progress saved", it's full coop.

If you haven't picked this up yet, you should (along with The Following).

This game encourages too much stalling to pick up all the bits and bobs on the ground and heal your party to full every single fight, which is INCREDIBLY tedious. But it is objectively the optimal thing to do, so you are forced to do it.

Mewgenics does not have an undo button, can't select allies or enemies to preview their actions. Attack range can only be previewed for the basic attacks. Enemies are often hard to see, or take unexpected and unlisted actions like running away.

What makes the lack of undo infinitely worse is that mechanics almost never do what they actually say they do. Clearly an attempt was made, but for example: the rat boss throws bombs that say "can be disarmed by attacking them, but they will go off when hit by fire". I hit them with a "Magic Bolt", which "does both magical and physical damage". The bomb still goes off because this is also fire damage for some reason, even though this is never specified anywhere. Trial and error is unfun, especially when you can't undo actions and you are childishly punished for save scumming with an intentionally annoying dialogue.

Throw Scrap says it can "Give 3 armor to a unit". Except this is wrong, it can give 3 Armor to any unit except the caster. This should have said "another unit". The "Toss" skill selects a random adjacent unit, but once again it doesn't tell you this, you just have to find out the hard way. The game is full of nonsense like this, not a single skill or ability actually does what it says it does, turning Mewgenics into either a slot machine or a wiki simulator.

Bosses are all made to hard-counter specific builds or strategies, but you can't see what the boss is until you get there, which means your run can potentially die with no possible counterplay and no player agency. Every other game like this shows what the boss will be, but not this game. Why?

This game really loves information hiding for some reason. There's a boss that lays bear traps which are shown when they are thrown, but become invisible later, forcing you to tediously take notes of where they all are. You can't force your cats to move in a certain path to go around them either, a basic feature that every other tactics game released after the year 2000 has had. "Open notepad" is unfun gameplay, please don't do this, hiding information adds literally nothing to the game and just makes things tedious.

Managing cats quickly becomes equally tedious, there are no lists of cats or quick overviews of anything. You can't see anything without individually clicking on each cat. I was only 2 hours in and it was already becoming tedious, I can't imagine how it would get later into the game when you have many more cats.

The combat itself is quite slow and becomes tedious and repetitive after 3 runs. Damn near everything is a basic melee, basic ranged or damaging floor attack. So far I have seen nothing interesting.

I refunded the game, but I might come back to this later once Edmund has actually played any of the games that Mewgenics is shamelessly ripping off.

Really just not that fun to play.

The music is offensively bad, but I won't necessarily hold that against the game since it's a matter of opinion. Genuinely from the first second that you start the game, the music made me want to turn it off. I toughed it out for 30 minutes before I turned it off entirely, it does NOT get any better.

The gameplay is just boring. The movement is fun at first, but insanely repetitive, really easy and very shallow. You also get a crumb of gameplay for 10 minutes before you have to watch another minutes-long forced story segment that you cannot skip.

Combat is a chore and it gets in the way, and just like everything else in the game it involves spamming the same 3 buttons.

There is literally no challenge in this game whatsoever, nothing is hard or even remotely challenging. You literally cannot fail at anything ever. It's basically a sandbox game with nothing to do.

Really, the game is just nostalgiabait for Jet Set Radio. If that game had never existed and this game existed in a vacuum rather than riding the coattails of a Dreamcast game, this would be rated nowhere near as highly.

I came back to this game years later to be greeted by in-game advertisements plastered all over the screen and every single UI

This is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ asinine

Surprisingly fun game. Good level design, good platforming and the game is unexpectedly good at letting you zoom around at mach 5. This feels like an old Newgrounds flash game (unsurprisingly), and I dig it. Seemingly also a fair bit of inspiration from older platformers like Sonic and Jazz Jackrabbit.

Fantastic game. Surprisingly great story, fun gameplay. Lots of build variety. I recommend experimenting with different strategies and builds, as there is often very little variation in your strategy while in battle. Game is about ~25 hours long and if you keep using the same build you'll probably get bored.

Can't play Restored Land in co-op, it's singleplayer only.