Recent reviews by Deuxis

Big hordes go pop, I get happy. 10/10

Honestly the best idle game I've played yet, surpassing even the OG. It stands on its own strength, but is even better if you're into Runescape to any degree. The way you can take routes focusing on different skills to achieve a goal is very cool, made me fill up 3 out of the 6 character slots available at the moment with Adventure mode characters unlocking skills in completely different order, on top of the first regular character, a hardcore character, and a relic mode character, as all modes are worth trying.
Note: I have more playtime than shown as I've played a bunch on the web and mobile clients.

This game is pretty hard to review fairly for me so I'll just summarise the things that stood out. TL;DR: I wasn't sure whether to rate it positive or negative as its many upsides are countered by also many downsides, but after all decided it was net positive. It scratches the creature collector itch and has interesting parts. 6/10 tho.

Upsides:
1. The good ol' rock-paper-scissors type system is innovated in that hitting an enemy with an attack they're weak against on top of dealing increased damage will debuff them or even change their type, while hitting them with one they're strong enough will buff them. For example hitting a plastic type with fire will melt it, changing its type to poison for 3 turns, and then hitting that poison type with fire again will ignite it, inflicting burn DoT for 3 turns. This is also taught well, except I'm still not sure if transforming type interactions count as advantaged and deal more damage or not.
2. The overworld movement is fluid with metroidvania-like skills that allow traversing obstacles after catching a specific monster. This is cool.
3. Instead of "lucky" or "shiny" monsters this game has "bootlegs", which have have their type changed. This is also cool.
4. Attacks are learned via "stickers", which can be taken off one monster cassette and attached to another. Monsters keep unlocking stickers even after reaching max level, and you can buy more stickers in shops. This results in a good build variety.
5. There's enough types and interactions to make things interesting.
6. They somehow managed to make every two monster fusion I've tried look good or good enough. The game has over a hundred monster species.
7. Again, there's a lot of monster species (140 as of version 1.5) and some have interesting branching remasters (evolutions).
8. The graphics are nice.
9. The soundtrack is good and in some cases even awesome, with some caveats. It uses the trick of playing the instrumental version and seamlessly switching to one with vocals when the situation gets more intense.
10. There's a friendship/romance with your NPC partners element, which is cute.
11. Defended by the hp bar of your monster is the hp bar of your character, this also applies to enemy trainers. Meaning that if you bring an enemy monster to low HP and then hit it hard enough, you can defeat the enemy character and end the battle even if they have monsters remaining, but en enemy can defeat you in the same fashion.

Downsides:
1. The type system is unbalanced. This is especially obvious with the Beast type, this game's equivalent of Normal, which has *no defensive nor offensive weaknesses* and one offensive advantage. I'll repeat: there is nothing you can do to counter a strong Beast type. It annoyed me multiple times during my playthrough. They're plain OP, which is sad because they're also the most boring.
2. Speaking of my playthrough, I finished the game, maxed out all relationships and captured all monsters except for like 2. I have 20 hours of playtime.
3. All monsters are single type to facilitate the Fusion mechanic, which combines the two monsters you're using at the moment.
4. Some types are under-utilised. The Glass type has a single monster species which you can encounter once or so without chasing random timed events. The rarest type, Glitter, has no species, it's only available via bootlegs.
5. The fusion mechanic is kinda bad. I mean, it takes the double battle format and changes it into "you have this single more powerful monster that can spam a more powerful attack every turn lol". It's as if the game creators looked at what modern P*kemon games are doing with introducing a mediocre mechanic the combat is centered around every generation and removing it in the next one, and thought "that's a great idea, let's also center our combat around a mediocre mechanic that everyone will sure wish gets changed or removed if this ever gets a sequel".
6. Bootlegs are an important part of the game's appeal, so it's a shame that they're so rare. Before finishing the game I caught one or two, and I don't think I ended up using it/them. This is especially bad when you consider that this meant I didn't have an opportunity to use a single Glitter type at all, didn't catch one even in post-game. And that some remasters (evolutions) are unique to a given bootleg type, which means that if you wanna fill out your codex or whatever it was called, have fun hunting for a certain type of a certain monster via random wild fusion events that don't specify what you'll even be fighting. (They have a higher chance of bootlegs, but still not very high.) There's one saving grace in the form of a ~post-game item that guarantees the next fusion battle will include a bootleg of a given type *or* species, but it's the most expensive thing in the game (prepare to grind) and requires sacrificing a monster of that type and species. Either type or species is still random.
7. Since movement abilities are unlocked by capturing a given monster, you can easily miss them if you don't capture everything as you go along. The last ability is available via another monster that you encounter once without chasing random timed events which aren't even trackable before ~post-game, that is also extremely hard to capture.
8. Capturing monsters exposes one of the characters' main HP bar to attacks. Against stronger, hard to capture monsters this can mean that they'll just kill both of your characters before you get a good enough capture roll, even if you constantly put them to sleep with the other character, if they're even still alive. As this is an exposed character, there is no option to mitigate this with a monster with better defence or advantageous type.
9. Branching remasters are only hinted at what triggers them. It's a fun egg hunt, but also means that unless you're looking up every monster on the wiki and spoiling the later forms for yourself, you *will* end up in a situation where you remaster a monster you like and later learn that you got a generic version you can easily encounter in the wild and you missed a cooler form.
10. The plot is generic and feels kinda bad.
11. The characters except for one are your standard set of forgettable tumblrwave gender/race/orientation/culture combo tokens that manage to be quirky and generic at the same time.
12. The soundtrack grew on me over time, but the town theme version with vocals, which you're gonna hear *a lot* since it plays whenever you're inside a town building, ground on my nerves nearly the whole playtime. Like the characters, some soundtrack pieces give off tumblr vibes and not in a good way.
13. The hype, vocals-included, versions of battle themes play only when you're fused. I only grew to appreciate the main battle theme in the latter parts of my playthrough when I was fighting a lot of wild fusions and so used fusion more than against normal monsters. Another case of the fusion mechanic harming more than helping.
14. The evil organisation you can fight as a sidequest is literally a tumblr zoomer's strawman image of landlords. And I mean literally, that's what they are in-universe. Prepare to cringe.

Cute game, does what it wants to do well. The farming / gathering / building is fun, the monster battling as well. It does have one issue though, it seems to be not very well optimised and have some kind of a memory leak, at least on the Steam Deck, that results in the game starting out fairly smooth and only slightly laggy in/around the town, but then becoming more laggy and stuttering more often over time. I have to occasionally restart it to not devolve into lag fest, although it only ever gets annoyingly bad on the main island. I hope it gets patched soon.

Indie 2D Dark Souls? Yes please. Fun game, climatic, well made, 9/10

It's actually impressive how badly optimised this game is. It looks like it should run on a 2001 laptop and yet it struggles and stutters on my gaming PC which effortlessly runs modern AAA games.

It's a shame since it looks like it has a lot of potential, but with the stuttering it's just not pleasant to play.

It's heartbreaking how much this game has been ruined by pay2win. Avoid at all costs.

Good game. One tip though, "hard" is insanely hard and you can't change difficulty mid-play. Don't make the same mistake I did!

Rogue Legacy was so good they made Rogue Legacy 2. And all jokes aside, it's everything I hoped for and more. 10/10

more cookies
MORE COOKIES