Recent reviews by Erkenfresh

The game is a bit quirky but they work to fix issues constantly. It has that same "buggy with charm" flavor of any Bethesda game. I got pretty far and ended up soft locked. I either had to fight a boss that one shot me or just hang out in town forever. I tried to start over in a new save but eventually lost interest.

The English translations are a little bit off. If you approach a bed but decide not to rest you have to pick "run away". I really hope they don't change that, as it adds even more charm to the game.

If you're looking for a goofy adventure and enjoy the NGU (numbers go up) progression of many RPGs, then this one is for you.

Very good JRPG in the style of the SNES classic FF6 (or FF3, whatever). Everything about this game is high quality. The music was also quite exceptional. But let's talk about the details a little bit.

The levelling system is fine. Instead of XP, you get a "level" with each major boss you fight. In the end, this difference doesn't really matter. As you progress, you get more powerful, just like any other JRPG. With each level you pick a new ability, passive, or stat boost. The abilities in this game are sadly, a bit lacking in variety. You can hit one guy hard, or hit one guy three times lightly. Or hit everyone lightly. Or do that with fire. Etc. It's OK, but I found most of the characters to behave in pretty much the same way. With 12 or 13 playable characters, I found myself just using the same four most of the time.

The overdrive system has you balancing "white" abilities with randomized "yellow" abilities. It honestly had zero effect on how I played. Just pick a "yellow" ability if it shows up. How hard is that really?

The crystal system is... tedious. Each crystal has a size and a purity and a power level, and you combine them to make more powerful crystals. The problem comes when you have to slot those into your weapons and armor. Equipment has different amounts of crystal slots depending on how upgraded it is. Transferring crystals from an old sword to a new sword takes so much effort, that I just found myself not using new gear I found until it was three or fours tiers higher. If I were to redesign this system, I'd make all crystals take one slot and give every character six slots.

The story was also pretty good. I was surprised at certain points of the game what some of the main characters did, yet it always fit well with their personalities. The main villains of the game were all pretty stupid, but it didn't sour the experience.

Overall, this is well worth the purchase. If you happen upon a publisher sale, you can also get a package deal with Astlibra, another fantastic game.

I played Voidspire Tactics before this, which was a story driven tactics RPG. This was a much simpler procedurally generated dungeon crawler. Less talking, just fighting and looting. There's some new classes here, including my favorite, the Bat Handler. The graphics emulate 8 bit retro graphics well. The music is good. The sound effects are kinda bland. The variety of abilities and classes is pretty good though.

Good music, fun class abilities, decent challenge with variable difficulty. I wish there had been more variety in the weapons and armor, but still a 9/10.

Meh, pretty dull RPG. Graphics are nice and the voice acting is pretty good. But the quests are the dull "go here and kill stuff". "Go there and get me the McGuffin". Do this and sift through mountains of gear that doesn't matter. Equip the bigger numbered McGuffins. See bigger numbers on the screen. The abilities are boring. Press a button to do more damage every few seconds. Well, yeah, but I have no reason to not press that button, so... why should I even think about what I'm doing?

It's boring... When I just stand there and shoot 100 arrows into a Cyclops to down it without having to dodge, while my pawns (bodyguards) do most of the work, it just gets old. Sometimes, your pawns get stuck on terrain and get themselves killed. Issuing the "come here" command doesn't help with their pathfinding. The quests are your typical fetch the McGuffin, destroy the McGuffin, or kill the McGuffin quests. The occasional escort quests are the worst. I watched this ox looking thingy pull a cart for about 20 minutes while easily batting away the random attacks.

It's an interesting idea with the pawn system, but the combat is so lacking in depth and the story so shallow that I saw no point in trying to complete the game.

For any Final Fantasy Tactics fan looking to scratch that itch (yet again), this is a great game to do it with. This game is very close to FFT in strategy with the exception of small things, such as terrain blocking projectiles. I was caught off guard when a few archers shot me through a tree. But, the game makes up for that with some unique spells and skills that are sure to give your brain a good workout.

The music in the game is top notch. It's the perfect marching battle music I've come to love from similar games. The stages look hand drawn and are gorgeous. At first, I wasn't enamored with the larger character sprites of this game, but eventually I came to love those too.

My only gripe is that it's difficult to see buffs/debuffs from a glance. Similar games put special effects on the sprites, for example oozing green liquid if poisoned, but those effects are absent here.

One advantage this game has over FFT is a difficulty adjustment. You can raise/lower enemy stats or add extra enemies for more challenge.

To anyone who hasn't played FFT, but enjoys games like X-Com, this is well worth the buy, even at full price.

Co-op hacking and slashing through hordes of rats. What's not to like here?

Game breaking bugs prevent completion of the tutorials. This is basic stuff, but during a spacewalk I run (well fly) into an invisible wall. I just aborted the tutorial and jumped into the game. It was fun until I had to scan for data leaks on a station. I actually did find one, but got blown up by the patrol ships. Fair enough, I'll take that. After loading, I looked all around the station for half an hour and gave up. I found a workshop mod to highlight the data leaks. It just flat out tells you how many leaks there are, and there are none. So, I'm stuck on this very early mission in the game. (This is apparently a fairly common bug for the game that's been around a while)

Bugs that break the game this bad simply make it unenjoyable for me. I program computers for a living, and I don't feel like debugging a game just to play it. Maybe Egosoft should work on fixing bugs as a priority before they add new content (with their own set of bugs).

I've asked for a refund from Steam. I'm beyond the two hour play period, except that I spent two of those hours stuck on bugs... so maybe they will have mercy. :)

EDIT: Steam denied my refund, so I was forced to continue playing the game. I haven't run into the same types of game breaking bugs I had when I started. There are minor problems with ships not following mining orders properly. Cancelling the order and resending it seems to get them back to working. All in all, it's a pretty cool space sim.

There's some quests that make you go places. It's really an exercise of frustration about optimizing your routing through quests to be more efficient. You end up failing most quests due to the time limits they impose. It was fun for a while, but then I realized the game doesn't change all that much after the first few hours. You can grind and save up for slightly better ships, but it's just not enough to catch my attention.