Recent reviews by Coplann

The world is full with idle games and sometimes I do not know why I and other even play those. I mean why play a game that you are not playing (e.g. it plays on its own?). Well, maybe because we all have our little manager inside and want to watch others do the work for us. Just like the quote, I used to hate work, now I cant get enough watching others work. Joke aside. What makes PANOPTYCA : idle RPG Manager special? For me it is the mixture of different aspects. It is partly a role playing game, that means it has a background story, some sort of quest / progression (areas) and allows you to manage up to 8 characters which currently can be of 6 classes (Wizard, Priest, Knight, Warrior, Archer, Assassin) each class has dedicated weapons and a set of skills of which 4 can be equiped at the same time. It is also partial an action RPG because combat happens in real time and you can control a character manually and explore areas, defeat monsters and bosses and collect their loot. In this regard you dont have to idle at all if you dont want to and you get this way also test out the various skills for yourself. Then it is however also a semi-ecoomic manager. You earn gold, equipment, resources and diamonds from the adventures of your characters and can use it to buy more skill books, resources or craft and improve gear for your party. Whenever your heroes level up you can increase one of their base stats, they unlock new gear to wear and your "guild" / commander level also gets experience and levels with which you can improve various aspects of the game, like increase your chance of loot chests or reduce the automation cooldowns.

Each hero walks alone in the standard areas, but you soon unlock the shadow temple where 2 of your heroes team up. There you can make use of synergies as you would expect of a team, e.g. pair your knight (tank) with a healer.
In the long run leveling your heroes wont be enough and the longterm-idle managing picks up. Even the lowest gear can be salvages into raw materials, which can be melted into higher tier materials. At first your heroes will be doing fine with gray/normal gear. But later on it will need magical or epic or better gear and you need to also upgrade and improve individual items and even enchant them later. Like most action RPGs you heroes can find a very rare epic item (gold, orange or red quality) even in the low level areas so the game hits that urge to collect all those shinies. There are also bounty-quests to do and free items in the shop every day.

That brings me to the monetarization of the game, which is free to play and thus to try out. There are a couple feature unlocks that can be obtained by about a couple dollars up to less than 20 dollars. None are mandatory, but all help make the game run longer and more effectively without you having to interact (e.g. auto-salvage normal gear), being able to carry more loot and so on. The price to me seemed very fair until this point. Additionally there is an optional supporter DLC that will give one of your heroes angel-wings (purely cosmetic) for people that do want to support the game even more. You earn plenty of diamonds ingame, but can also buy diamonds with money in the ingame shop. With diamonds you can buy more inventory space, skill books and resource, but nothing that seems mandatory or p2w-like.

The graphics are simple, but well done for the task. Especially the combat is pretty good to watch for an idle game. Effects and enemies are crisp and entertaining to watch.

Overall the game really scratches an itch that I did not feel in other idle games. It is simple enough to get into it, but complex enough to keep your interest. There is also room for expansion:
- new classes (necromancer, summoner or druid?)
- new races (forgot to mention you have your generic fantasy races like human, elf, dark-elf and orc)
- new skills / spells
- near gear
- new areas
- new dungeons
- more characters (would not be too hard to go from max 8 to max 12)
- offline mode
- 3 or 4 character-dungeons
- multiplayer (coop dungeons, maybe arena style combat)...

So if you like fantasy RPGs, management or/and idle games give this a try!

simple on the gfx side but fun gameloop with lots to do and discover

After a long time and a kind request to rate the game from the devs I write down a few lines to recommend the game. It is actually hard to describe what compares to it
- a turn based+2D Elite / X Type game? (trade, explore, fight, pirate if you want, ...)
- a classic RPG or dungeon crawler (although dungeons not in the original meaning, instead space and "wild" planets)
- combat similar to something like Darkest Dungeon, especially with the morale part
- a story-driven scifi-opera where you can decide to put your mark on history or not?

Maybe it is its own niche. Now for the game, yes there is a learning curve, yes the game does not explain everything and hold your hand. yes you will need to learn stuff, read it up or learn it the hard way by try and error. The game is 2D, yet extremely deep with lots of replayability (different endings/story pursuits, different careers, different ships...).

It has some rough edges as others have pointed out (like lack of hotkeys, or customizable controls, or some prevention of easy save-scumming which is a design decision to make your decisions matter).
Yet, even after all those years the devs still come over and fix bugs (if there are any left to spot) and add new content (new components, new ships, sometimes a brand new starting career). This adds a lot of replayability and makes every cent you spend on the game well worth it.

Long story short, if you like to learn a complex game and dont need to be hold by hand as well as like RPGs and scifi, then this could be the gem you might have missed yet.

By the way, I play the game mostly on my tablet (android version). On Android getting a great game that is on par with PC games is hard and keep your entertained for hours on a train or plane or for weeks on a remote location without a computer or internet, This is the definitiv answer to that.

Although the leveling, combat, world design and story aspect of the game is decent the core concepts inherit problems that other MMOs with grand ambitions and F2P/P2W/PvP games always plagued. Especially asian ones:
- weapons/skills are increadible unbalanced in the different areas (stunfest that is pvp, dont have a stun, well dont bother, tanking world bosses? forget about getting loot...). The new spear weapon coming the 5th of december is the first weapon with one mastery tree focussing pvp and has even more stuns. Switching weapons is expensive though (see equipment and skill progression)
- skill progression is really grindy and expensive (mastery, skill growth tokens...). Game is built to have you either suffer or p2w
- gear progression is decent up until after resistance gear (easiest attainable purple gear), after that it is grinding+luck, scamming people (guilds) or paying real money (auctionhouse)
- the endgame (castle siege) is a laggy bugfest where the strongest (p2w) guild wins and takes all the real-world money currency that piled up from taxing players. After that they can anytime define how big the tax is. If you see a big tax you should change server ASAP.
- dungeon bosses are mostly okay, although the lag, glitches and bugs make the mechanics too unforgiving, especially as a melee DPS. Ranged DPS has it easier and does more damage most of the time
- dungeons overall are a needless waste of time because no mob inside, even mini-bosses drop anything of value. A lot of people queue randomly, port in to see if the group is at the boss already only to drop out again if it isnt.
- players are often really toxic, blaming people for everything that goes wrong, for not playing how they want, for wasting time in their opinion or being new to mechanics (or screwing them up due to lag, bugs and so on). Get a nice guild and stay with those, ;)
- world events are mostly a waste of time, but needed for guild contracts
- major game loops are limited by tokens that you use or "quest" limits (contracts), esample you can have 4500 tokens for dungeons, one dungeons requires 300 tokens to loot the final chest (which is the only reward by the way). no tokens, no loot. similar mechanics at other places. This is causes people to not play because they dont have tokens or force people to play to not waste token recovery. Both is bad. Arguable reaon behind the mechanics is to limit the bot-usage to farm currency. There are still millions of bots and even top tier guilds use bots to farm stuff (currently angling is top).
- pvp (sometimes forced on you by night or eclipse) is basically: stun, stun, stun, stun, stun, dead or stun-dead

I could go on, but you get the picture. Still for being free it is okay to check it out and enjoy the world and story till level 50. Afterwards you can enjoy it with a good guild and friends although games like Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online (or even WoW) are better in like every aspect.

First impressions during Its early access. Right now we have only 3 biomes (maps are randomly generated within the boundaries of the biomes) sp dont expect endless variations just yet. Still the foundation of the game is great. So much potential for expansions.
I enjoy the time spent with the game. The setting is interesting and refreshing from the standard fantasy stuff. The graphics are great, the landscapes are beautiful. The atmosphere, look and feel of the forests for instance are the best I have seen in an open world / surival game and the sound design is also well done. It looks and feels like a true labour of love of the developers.
The building and survival part has everything you would expect. The crafting and gear progression is more complex than in other games, and might need some refinement or more hits and explainations how you should do and setup stuff. Of course in a finished game I expect more of everything, more polish and QoL stuff. But still, except the occassional disconnect on using a portal I did not run in any gamebreaking bug or any crashes (though I read from others they have crashed here and there).
Oh and the companion feature is nice and should be expaned upon too. You can get an NPC helper to carry stuff, fight for you and farm resources. Much better than the followers on Age of Conan right now already.

The only thing I am missing right now is some sort of character progression (base attributes and skills, e.g. leveling up) similar to Age of Conan, Valheim or the good old Ultima or Elder Scrolls games (getting better by doing stuff). Right now progression is solely based on your gear score so some more RPG elements would add another layer of motivation.

So for the price its a good deal that I do not regret and hope the game has a successful and bright future.

Despite some issues the game is decent and has a lot to offer as well as potential for expansions and continued development. Space exploration is pretty shallow so dont buy it for that right now, but the quests (main story, faction and minor quests) are overall well done with some twists and surprises. Graphics are okay, but could use some upgrades (better textures, more details space is too bright and cartoony in my opinion). Creating outposts is nice, but lacks the depth of other games like NMS and needs work on the interface (for instance the starmap does not allow to search/find outposts easily, does not even show the outpost names and so on. huge room for easy improvements on the User Interface). There are still some bugs in it and it seems to take quiet long to fix them. Still, with some improvements and even the rework of the space exploration part this could become an awesome game, where it is right now just a good to very good game. ignore all the snowflakes and haters, especialy the anti-voqueness crusaders. Most of them dont even have the game. Yes you can have gay romance options, but you have those in real life too and you did have them in other games before too (yes even Mass Effect). The way to self-improvement and enlightment is taking true responsibility for yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your opinions, your joy or lack of joy in your life. no one else is responsible for anything you feel or think. master yourself and stop blaming the world for your lack of understanding.

Still a great game. Make sure to use the Daggerfall Unity version with all the good mods.

Wenn man wie ich gern mal eine Runde mittels Steam Link vom Sofa aus auf dem großen TV-Bildschirm spielt und idealerweise das Spiel auch einen gut gemachten Couch-Coop Modus bietet ist Children of Morta eine klare Empfehlung. Die atmosphärische und wunderschöne Pixel-Grafik bietet viel liebe zum Detail und sorgt auch dafür, dass es auch für empfindlichere Augen 1-2 Stunden spielen ohne Probleme machbar sind. Im Gegensatz dazu empfinde ich moderne 3D Grafik am TV eher anstrengend und spiele solche lieber am PC.

Die Story ist gut geschrieben. Der Erzähler, welcher als einziger die Szenen verbal umsetzt, macht einen großartigen Job. Dazu kommt eine stimmungsvolle Musik.
Die Steuerung mit Controller ist einfach genug und präzise, dass man auch als nicht-Konsolenspieler schnell reinkommt und erfolgreiche Beutezüge abschließen kann.

Spaß macht es insbesondere im Coop, wo selbst meine Freundin als absolute nicht-Zockerin Spaß hat und auch mit der Steuerung zu Recht kommt. Die Charaktere können sich durchaus gut ergänzen (z.B. die Peitsche von Mark sammelt getroffene Gegner zentral vor ihm, dort kann z.B. Linda mit ihrem Pfeilhagel alle auf einen Schlag treffen) so dass die für Couch-Coop typischen, oft hektischen Situationen entstehen nach denen man am Ende durchschnauft und sich beglückwünscht.

Die Talentbäume und "Familienupgrades" sowie temporäre Segen und Fähigkeiten, die man unterwegs finden kann, reichern das Spiel hinreichend an, um nicht zu simpel und langfristig motivierend zu sein. Man braucht hier kein Path of Exile Talentbaum erwarten, aber es ist gut genug um interessant zu bleiben und seinen Charakteren auch einen individuellen Touch zu verpassen.

Die Schwierigkeit ist, wie von vielen beschrieben, am Anfang ein wenig hoch (der erste Boss kann einem Probleme machen, wir haben ihn aber direkt im 2. Anlauf geschafft) und kann dann, wenn man viele Upgrades grindet, später zu stark abfallen, dass es zu leicht wird. Auf der anderen Seite trägt das auch zu einem Erfolgsgefühl und entspannenderen Sessions bei, weil man hockt ja auf dem Sofa und will einen netten Abend verbringen (in Zeiten von Corona ja durchaus eine gute Sache). ;-)

Wünschen würden wir uns auf jeden Fall mehr Content (wir sind noch nicht durch, aber mehr ist immer gut), neue Charaktere, eine Erweiterung der Talentbäume, vielleicht die Möglichkeit das Aussehen der Bergsons ein wenig individuell anpassbar zu machen und natürlich mehr Geschichten und Zufallsbegegnungen.

Fazit:
Klare Empfehlung für Couch-Coop Fans von ARPGs und Rogue-likes die keine extreme Komplexität brauchen und Freude an den kleinen Details und der Atmosphäre eines Spiels finden.

Decent CCG in a WH35K Setting (taking place during the Horus Heresy starting with the betrayal at Istvaan III). You can collect cards and rank up towards the highest tier (Terra at 2500 ladder points) without spending a single coin. Of course investing into the game speeds up the process and one way or another it can take a long time to get a certain legendary card, especially those primarchs. If you want to make it into the top50 or top10 you need a competative deck and lots of time to grind upwards 4000 ladder points each month.

I suggest winning 5 matches a day (training match or ladder, doesnt matter here) for the daily reward crate and do the challenge (another better reward crate if you manage to do it with the highest needed score) and pick up the free cards every 6 hours. Also play events with the tickets you get for free as you can get much more and better cards there.
Also there are many content creators on youtube which provide guidance to every legion, warlord and strategies and also budget decks, e.g. Kazrim, Skypoint and LCFR

Only downside imho:
- balance, especially of new expansion cards and between event decks/warlords is often sub-optimal
- no way to craft a specific card
- no trading between players
- could use more game modes (e.g. 2 vs 2 games)