Recent reviews by Textual Deviant

If you don't pick green I'm crushing you in the macerator

This game just isn't game of the year material. Better with Friends, sure, but not GOTY. Not when ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Baldur's Gate and RE4 are in the running.

Don't get me wrong; I love this game, it's amazing, and their success is not even a fluke when you compare it to their other work. The problem is that it's popularity hinges entirely on the visual style it's adopted and the comedy inherent to the game, rather than a suite of carefully-managed elements in... most of the other GOTY nominees. I'm looking at you, EA.

Many of the game's issues persist simply as a matter of 'oh well, it's a hard game, they can just restart' or 'Youtubers found a way to make it funny, so it's fine right?' rather than meaningfully addressing them. They have the money now to (in heavily summarized terms) throw at most of their problems, but they're scared to because they don't want to disturb their breadwinner, YouTube. More content though, that's something that will get the valves turning.

The one and only thing that will change my mind on this is if LC somehow pulls out all the stops prior to New Year and brings it from Early Access in a matter of hours. That isn't going to happen. Still, I can't think of a more fitting game for Better with Friends, at least.

Wonderful as a soundboard, but the settings could use a touch-up from the default windows tab and, as far as I can tell, it lacks even simple voice modulation, unlike Voicemod. Also, unlike Wallpaper Engine, it lacks workshop support, which could do wonders in allowing less driven soundboard makers to get decent soundboards, for springing off of if nothing else.

I don't care if it has to come in the form of a DLC, if they kept up the current standard it would still be more intuitive and reliable than Voicemod. Hell, that's the reason why- despite my grief at a lack of an equivalent tool here- I use Soundpad still. Reliability. I recommend making a purchase.

For the price tag, Muse Dash is a great introduction to the genre of games known as 'Rhythm', with potential for more complexity tacked on. Simplicity is, ultimately, it's biggest upside as, although it does only a few things, it does them well. It's almost like the polar opposite to Guitar Hero in it's design, but has a similarly impressive amount and quality to it's songs when compared to the massive franchise.

Score-based unlocking of new songs encourages players to go back and get better scores on existing songs to unlock more, though personally I unlock more songs faster than I can complete them. Additionally, characters and sidekicks exist to add a slight progression element in the form of collectibles that are given after completing songs, which each give their own bonuses and, occasionally, tradeoffs, usually in the form of getting more score in exchange for more risk.

My only truly major gripe with the game is that the dlc is prohibitively expensive, and basically disables the progression aspect that I just described, which many enjoy. At least it's *mostly* optional, but it's really annoying to be staring at that 35 dollar price tag that comes with a nerf to one of the game's progression mechanics every time I go to this game's store page. I really don't need it, not for $34.99.

Fun little wave-based top-down shooter. I'd compare it to Enter the Gungeon when it comes to the gameplay, except you only have one health so you have to carefully consider what's attacking you at any given time. Getting sub 20 deaths is hard, but possible for players who are experienced in these types of games. I think I made it by a hair. I was tempted to get the 20 deaths for the achievement, but not having it feels like a nice badge of it's own. Speaking of badges; get some Points Shop items devs! I don't care if you have to make a dlc to do it. Some fun profile backgrounds would be great.

So, yeah. Fun short experience. 9.5/10, it would be a 10 if I wasn't annoyed by the end boss requiring that you beat the previous waves before starting the fight. They really should have just made it it's own wave.

Please read to the end for how this game can become significantly less hot garbage; skip to it if you have to. In the mean time, here's some scathing remarks.

All it's good mechanics are stolen directly from MOBA's. The map design, the bots (probably unintentionally close to the weak bots in games like LoL, but yeah around 40-75% of any given team are bots), even the microtransactions are taken from other games. Much of it's game "balance" and mechanics is stolen from happy wars. The spells, attacks, every one of the 'cataclysms' and 'group spells'. Even the 'armor style' is clearly a poor imitation of the bonus class system. A vast majority are from happy wars and the ones that are wildly different, to nobody's surprise, tend to be overpowered; Crows, Powerbomb, Colossus Form for god's sake. Meanwhile, they poorly apply a lot of Happy Wars' old abilities, from Ressurect to Smash to Dispel, which are wet blankets when you compare them to other things that could be in their slot. The resulting system is slipshod and patched together, with things feeling oddly disjointed at times.

My theory regarding the rank system is, they designed it originally to be far more flexible than it currently is, then realized that if it was how I would much prefer it to be- 5 individual title and loadout selections for each character- these players might be overwhelmed by the amount of options or, worse, complain about the small selection of spells compared to how much the loadouts offer you by means of changing strategy. Let me explaine exactly how bad this is;

This thing, the rank system, has become the most problematic issue when it comes to advancing my characters. Limitations surrounding titles mean you can advance all you want but if you don't want to spend most of the match with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ character because the higher tiers can take more than four minutes to regenerate once they die (and they will) you will be restricted to more reasonable one stars. You're basically rendered ineffective because being more bold would leave you playing the rest of the game with a handicap if you're killed; a recipe for a major steamroll. You can't play the game how you want and can't benefit from most of your grinding because they wanted to balance the OP characters.

Truth is, this idea is sound on paper. In Happy Wars you had huge bullet sponges of endgame characters that could make the game unfun if you get targeted by them, your only possible reprieve being cliffs that these vetera players are far too smart to risk getting anywhere near.

Issue is, OP is still OP. In fact, all they did was pivot most of the strength from the equipment to the abilities. As a result, have ruined their veneer of balance by shooting themselves in the foot. Remember how respawn times for characters get insanely high? Well, if you happen to be a four star fighting a five star, get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ I guess because they have some of the most OP spells in the game and they have cooldowns barely longer than the average group spell. Take Collossus Form as an example. Instant full heal, 300 max health bonus, 30% more damage, 36% faster movement speed while guarding, an insanely annoying group stun attack that can be casted ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ incessantly, plus an automatic level 5 Barrier, all with a duration of 15 seconds.

The cooldown? 90 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SECONDS. Do you know how high a TIER 3 CHARACTER's respawn is? 280. They can wipe teams because they shut down your highest level characters faster than you can respawn, and this is FAR from okay. You are already restricted to just 5 characters. The moment you die, that goes down by 20% for what can be a quarter of the match. It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ridiculous.

How they SHOULD have done it, is make it so that you can select 5 different loadouts for each character. One for each title. Respawn for that particular character increases up to a full minute at 5 stars, but the super abilities themselves have a use limit per game. And, once you advance a character to their 5 star form, you can't advance the others. One character can use the same items across their multiple tiers, but different ones can't.

To balance the OP abilities that are far simpler, like Powerbomb and Crow, simply make them part of titles.

Currently, one Centurion or the rare Souleater is literally all it takes to win a game. They can just ignore your entire team if they want and prioritize the core during their 15 seconds. If they have good items, they can even one-wave the core on their own due to how OP Roar is for crowd control, and how good their guard is. The defenses are just too weak to support the level of abilities offered in Warlander; as a Commander for most battles, the Attack formation wins far, FAR more frequently than the other two. The reason why? The ♥♥♥♥♥♥ automarker system. It constantly overrides your orders based off of the stratagem of the units, and in defensive teams it basically leaves your team twiddling your thumbs most of the time without considering the threats like catapults or siege towers unless you manually do so; it often GOES OUT of it's way to change them from what you want. The bots literally are useless without proper orders, so get bent I guess if you are trying to defend and need help, because the automarker will basically tell you to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

After all, doing 1% more damage to it is how you win, and if an enemy team gets in? The automarker doesn't care.

Oh right, yeah, the royally ♥♥♥♥♥♥, anticlimactic, annoying version of the tower system.

See, in Happy Wars, you were locked in place and were restricted by build speed to destroy and rebuild towers, something that gave some actual nuance to taking respawn towers and 'core' health from the enemy team. You couldn't just sit in a corner of the room and spam spells at it. Now, it's ridiculously easy to get a win just by doing 2% damage and hardlining the enemy team.

In Happy Wars, it actually felt like you were building up to a victory. Breaking the gate and the castle was an ordeal that needed all hands on deck, and you actually had to put yourself at risk for a win condition; one sole individual could get spawned on at base and countered with numbers before they could get too much damage in. Additionally, by tying the weaker health Clerics and Engineers to the highest tower damage, they encouraged team pushes. In Warlander, all it takes is one lucky individual to win or lose the game for you. Which is all too common when your Commander isn't watching the enemy markers.

Sure, the singular path with only handful of branching ones helped, but the lack of unnecessary vastness stripped away the possibility of someone cheesing the game through luck alone. You actually needed to think about stats, items, abilities, strategy. The upgrade system was rewarding, the grinding gave actual immediate benefits, and the matchmaking was reasonable, even if you could get crushed by high levels still. In that game, you mostly lost because you had the wrong mixture of classes. In this game, you lose because you weren't picked as commander and the doofus on your team picked Defensive, rendering 60% of your team (bots) practically useless for the duration of the match.

This isn't good game design, This is an aesthetically-pleasing moba using the corpse of a loved one to masquerade as an actually decent game.

But, it could be better. Way better. So, if you're interested in possibly changing this, consider reading my long, long list of suggestions to improve the game:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675900/discussions/0/3882722797161621548/

Impeccable campaign that's incredibly well designed, and once that's over, the expansion is neat and just divergent enough to be fun. This is, of course, completely separate from the amazing selection of mods.

If you're on the fence about adding mods, consider utilizing the collections I plan on making; one with barebones QOL items and such, one that has only the highest quality additions, and one that has a sheer amount that only just barely isn't to the point of redundancy. All will include each of the maps I have, though, as those don't affect performance upon enabling, barring a few exceptions like Chronos that affect a vanilla map as well as their own.

Not enough content to peak my interest for nearly long enough to justify the $30 price tag. Luckily I got it on sale, but as far as I can tell, those are few and far between. They haven't implemented automation gadgets either so you have to manually mine everything the slow way. It doesn't help that it's the Exact. Same. Gameplay loop. Give this game a few years and it will be fun, but it does very little to branch out or be unique in my opinion. The visuals are nice, but the ranching is almost identical in the end. All the same farming strategies, synergies, etc. Upgrades are also the same. Vac upgrades it tried to branch out for, but in a really annoying way. It forces you to look around for really rare materials and I just end up doing laps around the same spawnzones over and over for them.

So, yeah. If you want your slime rancher fix REALLY bad, go ahead and get this game. Otherwise, put them back in the oven for another year or two.

It's a pretty ok game

I still haven't completed the game yet.

If that isn't a representation of the sheer amount of content and replayability that is to be had here, I don't know what will. It is also, however, an almost unfortunate indication of the amount of dedication needed if you're a completionist, even if I have spent a lot of time miffing about.

The game is incredibly technical, and heavily rewards planning if you choose to use spreadsheets and the like. That being said, you can play as you want, making spaghetti monstrosities without too much long-term consequences. Personally, I felt like mapping out the entire explorable map with radios so I didn't have to use the wiki, and that took several days and many, many inventory's worth of supplies.

The only thing you really have to worry about ruining your fun is energy production and basic supplies. The rest is just the process. Enjoy.