Recent reviews by Haplo

Steam: Play for free! Ends in 6 days

Do not download 85gb only to find it was just a trial and up to level 20, which took me only 5.6 hours only because I've talked with everybody, asking every question and going over every dialogue.

Even the side quest in the first town cannot be completed because it asks you to use "cheer emote" but you can't use; they won't even let you use emotes because you are on trial.

It is Blizzard, we couldn't have expect more.

𐰼𐰃𐰾𐰚:𐰇𐰯:𐰼𐰀𐰃𐰤
𐰀𐰤𐰓:𐰚𐰃𐰾:𐰢𐰇𐰔𐰃𐰚:𐰉𐰀𐰔:𐰅𐰠𐰅𐰚𐱅𐰃𐰼𐰃𐰚:::

My feelings are mixed tend to "not recommending" until it get QoL fixes which would never seem to get. Also the game overall doesn't deserve 86% positive review, it should be about 70 at most for the sake of the Donkey. 3-5 Hours playtime reviews are nonsense and shouldn't be valid to take count into overall ratings.

This game was on my wishlist for the past 5 years. I bought the complete pack on the last halloween sales and the game loaded all DLCs so I started as it is. It took me about 77-78 hours to complete all quests the game offers and I have spent another 5-6 hours to get rest of the achievements like fishing, burying bodies etc. which was boring instead of a relaxing experience. I was able to withstand boredom by the power of second monitor content.

There are not much of a pros but THE STORY was the biggest part for me. I've enjoyed following the story of The Village and NPCs most of the time. And dialogues were usually good, except for lazy written shallow fetching quests. There were funny references I won't spoil. It was fine stories overall.

There are a lot of cons and lack of QoL features which are obvious and never got an update since the release despite getting 3 DLCs. Let me tell the ones I hated most because you will get bothered by it too.

1) There are queue system for some items in the crafting stations only if you can't change "input" items for example crafting 1x Flitch to 1x Wooden Plank or growing veggies from seeds. You can que these 10x or even set for ∞ which would keep crafting as long as you have input items in your storage. BUT most of complex items you cannot que and have to craft one by one and scroll down to select the input item every single time because the game doesn't remember which input item you want to use. For example a Burger: you can cook a burger with a "Bronze, Silver or Gold" quality onions which would affect your output as a bronze, silver or gold quality burgers AND the game asks you everytime which ingredients you like to use after you craft a single burger, SO you can't que this and every other item that have "quality" inputs and outputs (except auto-farming).

2) You spend your hours mostly running left and right, finding right people in the right day and right time and try to fetch their quest before end of day. There is a teleporter stone, it is the first thing you are gonna buy, but it has 30 seconds cooldown, also cooldown ticks only if you don't have any open UI like a inventory, chest, shop, map etc. And teleportstone doesn't even let you teleport to Morgue or Graveyard, you have to walk from home everytime. It is a short distance, maybe ten seconds walk without a "Speed Potion" but when you do that everyday and sometimes more than once, it becomes so much time wasted walking. Once you get your hands onto speed potions you want that effect up always. A speed potion doubles your movement speed for 10 in-game minutes; a day is 7 minutes 30 seconds which speeds up if you sleep or meditate, so you will need approx 5 speed potions for every game-week (6 days) if you want to keep the speed up always. You want to buy Speed Potions as much as you can from the shop because if you go for the "craft yourself" option, this means you have to "draw blood" from dead body everyday, use 5 of them on your speed potions and able to keep only 1 blood/week for other needs and alchemy products. There are many spots and people/shop you can't teleport and have to walk, thus speed potion is a life saver.

3) There are so many items that mostly comes from quests are trash and there is no way to get rid of these trash items. You cannot destroy them and you have to keep crafting trash storage chests and store them in there forever. And know that, the space you can put a chest or crafting station is LIMITED. And some of your first crafted items like Sword or Iron Armor is also trash and you cannot destroy them or sell them, you have to keep them forever!

4) Progression balance is off:
a) Technology progression; everything start so slow especially with the "faith currency"; which is required for "study table" to gain research points; which is required to unlock new researches/technologies and perks in the tech tree. "Faith" is also required for some quests and grave quality items like better stones and marbles.

b) Graveyard quality progression; you want to jump to highest tier tombstones or one below before crafting anything between them because there isn't much difference in terms of inputs. Also there are some tombstones you can recycle back into a stone, some you can sell to special shop and some you CAN'T recycle nor sell, but at least you can "destroy" them instead of keeping forever in a trash chest. You are supposed to be a "Graveyard Keeper" but you will hate the graveyard and the morgue and mostly won't care about at all after the "200 quality" which is required for a quest. It seems you can push forward the quality of dead bodies and build a graveyard with over 1500 quality but it is just mindless grind. Devs also must be ralized the game loop wasn't fun, so they did not made quest or achievement for higher quality graveyard. I am giving plus point because of not forcing us to keep making better and better graves. Even catching 200 fish for an achievement was too much of a demand.

5) Inventory is small, managing it is ♥♥♥♥. I don't know what would have I done without "Game of Crones" DLC which brings new "bag" mechanics. Don't get me wrong, bags are also mechanically ♥♥♥♥ but at least gives an extra inventory space. What do I mean by mechanically ♥♥♥♥?

a) You have a "Fishing bag" which you can store your fish and fish baits in it. When you go to fishing, you can't select bait from your fishing bag, instead you have to carry those baits into your main inventory in order to use and select a bait from your different type of fish baits.

b) If you scroll down in your inventory, you can see all your bags and all the items inside of them. You can also use those items without opening those bags first. BUT you can't hold and carry those items between different bags without opening the bag first, move the item into your main inventory, open the next bag, and put it there from your main inventory.

c) Also every bag takes a space in your main inventory, good luck managing your inventory when you have ten bags. It's just a mess. And since there isn't "stack items" button, you will go chest by chest and keep scrolling down in your bags to find if you have a matching item and then store it. If you keep unload your items to every chest you find, amount of chests at your home and garden won't be enough and you will have bigger storage management problems.

6) Alchemy Workbench notes: (Removed because of Steam review character limit. I recommend use Wiki for unknown recipes instead of random experimenting.)

7) There are some MISSABLE ACHIEVEMENTS in quest dialogues. And since the game auto-saves only when you sleep, you can't load back later to different save file for different dialogue option to find out different outcomes. Which means, if you miss it, you have to start over a new game. For the completionists these achievements are;
a) He trusted you b) Best seller c) Apprentice d) Alchemist e) Master alchemist

8) You will come across some cut content. For example, upon trying to enter some houses, the game tells you to have 80 reputation with the owners, but it is impossible; it just never made into the game. There are some more, you will see them.

In the end, I watched Youtube contents on my second monitor all the time while playing the game and only gave my full attention for the story and dialogues which I enjoyed the most. Everyone is responsible for their own money and there are different regions and currencies too, so I won't say how much you should pay the most.

They seem to give many thoughts on different type of bullet/spell types, synergies and object/element interactions, and many different upgrades you add to your weapons (4 max) but execution fell short with disastrous balance. You end up not using 80 percent of them. New unlocks and upgrades also suffers from progression and balance issues. There are 5 achievements only available to Single Player or Host Player; anyone who joins cannot get it. There are optimization and fps drop issues (RTX 2060 and 32 gb ram). We stopped reading quest dialogues and story after a while and skipped lore books entirely. We were able to endure it only because we were playing it co-op; so I don't know if any solo player able to stand it's unbalanced weird grind alone.

"Banished-like" became a genre. With every similiar releases and in their text and video reviews, more and more I come across a similiar comments from people, comparing it's mechanics and style to Banished only and mention no others.

The trailer doesn't show the things they should show and since I didn't check any gameplay videos and reviews, I did not see the deeper gameplay mechanics like many character selection with different stats and traits, weapon classes, damage types, level ups, perks, weapon/item shop between waves, upgrading weapons, stats etc. Upon starting the game and hitting the play, I've realized it was actually promising a lot than the poor trailer and screenshots.

I can see myself playing this until I get every achievement. Therefore I wish to see more achievements so I can play more and more with a purpose.

Bruh, it's fricking a mobile game. Worse than that, it is damn gacha game that is made in China. No relation to Runic Games or Gearbox whatsoever. How the fudge they took the name and released this abomination? As the developer's name indicating, this is a big fricking laugh at your face. Did you realize they don't show any piece of UI in any trailer or a screenshot? It would be so evil of me if I ever say download and see yourself, so I'm doing a big favor to tell you do not ever try.

Steam must have "mobile game" and "gacha" tag so we can ignore these abominations.

You can't compare this experience to Rimworld. I play Rimworld on hard difficulty and get along with it, meanwhile I play Space Haven on easiest difficulty and keep resetting; my highest achievement was jumping to another star system before Sandra Bullocking into the deep cold space. I think this is more like Oxygen Not Included with factions/combat mechanic on topdown plane. If this is Alpha stage, I wonder what would happen until the release. Also Rimworld requires more micromanagement to the point where you can't look away; this is more relaxing experience where you can hang with your second monitor content while playing. I just Sandra Bullocked again, gonna start over right now.

Having a bad personality and delusional beliefs doesn't makes your game also bad. It's obvious people copy/pasting same sentences about removed content; there are even people with only one hour gameplay time and telling that contents are removed since they bought the game, that's tragicomic. Most of them do that because it seems to bring many Steam point shop awards from people who mixes apples and oranges and want developer to suffer because of his offensive and inhuman thoughts.

I don't agree on dev's thoughts; to be honest I hated his personality and thoughts; both his inhuman thoughts and his antisocial attitude are totally wrong; I refer to dev's offensive update comments, I think he should also grow up and free himself from positive feedback loops. But people reviewing his personality in the game review page is also wrong. Still I do respect the ones who sends negative game review and commenting about the developer's bad personality even if they do not comment about the game; they are at least being honest to you and themselves and not lying about removed content from released game. Even if I don't like DLC concept other than releasing only cosmetics and support DLCs, dev is right about the BETA testing branch. Joining the beta testing of unreleased content doesn't make you own the content right away; meaning you have just beta tested the upcoming DLC. Also when you download any game in Steam, you don't download beta branch right away; specifically and intentionally you have to select the beta version and know it may be buggy and the content may also subject to change.

And about the game, I think it's fun and unique, I got seven friends who owns it but only got one friend who also have the DLCs. Go watch some Youtube gameplay content and decide for yourself if it's worth or not. It's not hard thing to do.

I also strongly suggest the dev to not step on the game owners because 10 percent of people who has no intention to play the game caught in a mass hysteria, but the dev also caught in the same hysteria. What even if it is 40 percent, you still trying to step on 60 percent of majority over a loud and vocal minority. That's unfair and there is no difference between both sides that trying to hurt each other by any means. People must act civil in the civilization. Go to a boxing club or something if you want to release your untamed and violent inner animal.

Well designed combat mechanics, currently includes 166 active and 133 passive skills under 9 classes if I counted right. You don't have to stick to a single class, you can try new builds by mixing all class abilities. As a turn-based tactics lover, I liked it. It requires you to think about not only your skills but also the environment and your opponent's abilities. Turn-base is not slow and one by one initiative, so in your party's turn, you can select and use any of your characters and skills.

A party consists of a maximum of 6 people, if you wish, you can manage 6 people in a single player game or share 3/3 with your friend. I've never tried or researched, but it should be possible for 6 people to participate with one character each.

The maps you fight are not very diverse for now, sometimes two fights can come back to back on the same map layout, but the shrine and barrels in the environment seem to be randomly distributed on the map.

Combat AI is good, some skillful enemies show signs of intelligence and can stop messing with your tank and charge to your range DD or healers.

There was 4 Act as far as I see but I'm still in Act I. Every act has handful of missions and once you complete a mission in a act, side quests on your level starts popping up. A mission looks like "Slay the Spire"s dungeon crawler; once you beat the enemy party, you choose from 3-4 lines of crossing roads to proceed until you reach to mission Boss party. Once you defeat the boss, you teleport back to town to select your new mission map.

You can reset your skills and stats at towns and try new classes and builds as you go. You can buy, sell at merchants, craft pots and enchant some stats for your equipments. There is also a shared stash for your drops so you can share with your other characters later.