Recent reviews by Tacet the Terror

Megaman Battle Network series was a huge part of my childhood and is amazing to be able to play them again at such a reasonable price. Easily have over 1,000 hours across all 6 games between the campaign, post game completionist activities, and PvP with friends. Such a fun structure of deck building and strategy that isn't strictly turn based. Hope the re-release of this franchise eventually leads to a more modern sequel, as it has been nearly 2 decades since the last new Battle Network game prior to this collection.

Been keeping an eye on this game for nearly a year now with about 50 hours between demo and 1.0 and glad to see it finally come out.

The game plays out as a scrabble deck builder where the two most important aspects are the composition of the deck and the 4 pieces of gear that are taken. Since words are formed from the tiles, rarely can any one tile function on its own and has to be chained into words in order to do anything. Even on a optional mode where all words are visible for a given play, it still requires preemptive planning to fully utilize every draw.

Gear functions in an interesting way that it can never scale too out of control. Unlike many other similarly structured roguelikes where near endless power can be accumulated, there is a gear cap of 4 between weapon, shield, helm, and armor with an inventory of 6 for gear switch outs. Often multiple pieces of needed equipment need to be sold to invest into a permanent slot for the run, or take a cheaper option to have something functional for all 4 slots. Excess gold is used to upgrade tiles in the deck with additional effects or to remove unwanted letters.

This game is most often compared to Slay the Spire. Comparatively, 100% in Slay the Spire takes about 200-300 hours where in Words Can Kill it comes out to about 30-100 hours. The final challenges in Words Can Kill that are currently available at launch are a bit easier than ascension 20 Slay the Spire, more aligned with ascension 5-10's consistency, but can be harder than A20 if combining harder difficulties with doomed mode that hides all hints and gives no benefit for longer words.

Rare instance where a Steam game series can count to 3.

I am having a ton of fun with the Babble Royale, but cannot recommend.

The game is as Pay to Win predatory as it gets. In order to be able to choose what starting letter you get, it costs $9 for season 0 and $60 for lifetime. Almost every player with the paid pack either picks something like Q and AFKs hoping they landed in the final zone, or any of the many 10 value letters like Z near a 5x multiplier on turn 1, earning more points than a kill would.

The rest of the player base is stuck with A, which leads to an unprecedented amount of AA, AE, AI, ANA, and similar 'words'. Even once P2W is removed, starting with this bad of a monetization system is not a good sign for the future of the game, reducing the quality of play of all F2P players just to make a quick buck from people who want an advantage in a skill based game.

WARNING! This DLC has been out for 3 months now as of today, yet STILL has a soft lock.

In the 5th mission, the Virtuoso seems to consistently soft lock the game. If you find this enemy during this mission, you essentially just lose. From what I can tell it is due to the artifact effect related to the 5th mission.

Ignoring the soft lock, the DLC itself isn't too interesting. It takes the opposite approach of most other classes that commonly want to go for a mix of kills and tears, and instead is based entirely around the scare mechanic for tears. It is so efficient at scaring that it doesn't even feel like the class is fighting anything. While most classes can use strategy to determine if kills for blood or scares for tears is more worth it in a given situation, this DLC just goes 100% into tears. It is the least thought required class in the game, as almost every decision comes down to picking a character's moral reducing ability.

This is also the only character in the game who I find their voice lines to be so annoying that I had to mute all character audio during playing. The thought never crossed my mind for any other character, but I muted this one within under an hour of playing with it.

I REALLY tried to like this game, and overall would say I had a fun time, but there are enough factors that in accumulation makes Legend of Keepers feel very disappointing.

Before getting into the long list of bad, there are some good aspects:
- The game has a fair amount of content, taking around 30-50 hours for 100% completion and 100 total hours if you wanted to do all that and max the skill tree of all characters including DLC.
- The pixel art style for the game works great.
- It is an interesting twist on being the antagonist in a game.
- The game still seems to be in somewhat active development. One thing that made me get the game is they recently added a dragon/bird typing to the game that all classes can use.

For the most part, that is where the good ends. While I do want to list out all the bad, there is one things I saw a lot that made me get the game. It is from a lot of people comparing Legend of Keepers to things like Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon. If you liked either of those two games for their difficulty, Legend of Keepers is NOT for you. This comparison is one of the most misleading I have seen, as the game plays a lot more like a casual auto battler or a casual tower defense than it does a hardcore turn based strategy game. Luckily I like all of those genres, so it wasn't that big a deal for my overall enjoyment, but looking back there is nothing more misleading than saying something like "Legend of Keepers is like Darkest Dungeon if you got to build the dungeon.".

Now for the ultra long list of bad that I hope the semi active development of the game would eventually address, but some of them are so core to the game itself that they may be beyond fixable:

- Difficulty is WAAAY too easy. On normal you can basically just spam click the screen to win. The amount of power the player has compared to the enemy feels like an auto battler if you just spent $10,000 on micro transactions vs free to play players. With hard enabled, it is barely any more challenging. Ascension 20 is a joke and feels like what ascension 1 should have been. Endless mode is so easy to keep going that boredom will kill you before the difficulty ever does. This game seems to be targeted at a really casual audience, but what I don't understand is why the harder modes aren't actually hard. Out of every game I have ever played with an ascension system, none have disappointed more than Legend of Keepers. Ascension 20 is easier than setting all options to the hardest possible option in the story missions, has a weird 'negative' artifact that is often more of a benefit due to it commonly getting sold or exchanged during an event, and overall does barely anything to increase the challenge or strategy required to play the game.

- The game feels like a casual auto battler without an auto battle button. Even on ascension 20, I found myself often mash clicking the screen mindlessly as so few decisions matter or make much of an impact on a run. I would say about 10% of the player's input matters, whereas the rest could just be automated. If you had a bot randomly determine every action, it is likely good enough to beat ascension 20 as there are so few things it could do wrong as most choices barely matter.

- A lot of weird UI choices. While this may be a bit nit picky, there is one that is so blatant that I do not understand how it even got out of early access with it still in the game to this day. When presented with the page where you choose and save your file, there is a big red button that has the word "Delete" with two other words that do other stuff. This is good. This very clearly shows a menu where there is a button you SHOULD NOT press with 2 other buttons that you can press. It is laid out with all 3 horizontally next to each other. This is how the player is introduced to this format. So what is the problem? If you go to the options menu during a run, it has the same 3 horizontal button format with each one doing something. One of them is extremely important, as the button gets you out of the settings menu. There is a problem though. None of them are red. The bigger issue is that the "Abandon Run" button IS NOT red. This game is so easy that I legitimately have more deaths as a result of accidentally hitting the non red "Abandon Run" button when trying to get out of the settings menu than I have to actual deaths.

- Price of the game is too high. Counting just the base game and the current 1 content DLC, the game comes out to $26 USD. This is quite the ask for what the game is. It feels much more like a $5 or $10 game than a $26 game. I got this game for $12 with DLC around $3 during the most recent sale bringing it up to around $15. During that same time, something like Slay the Spire was only $10. Legend of Keepers pricing is just way out of its league for what it offers.

- Email required to unlock the full game. Currently, one unit is locked behind joining their email list. Honestly, this alone is worth leaving a negative review, as this is a practice that should be shamed and discouraged out of existence. I was originally going to leave a positive review with most of its content still criticizing the game, but remembering this aspect is the main reason this review is specifically negative marked with Steam's all in yes/no system. Despite me paying for the base game and the dlc, I still don't own the full game experience due to this.

- Gameplay is way too predictable. After about 10 or so hours of playing, a player would essentially know most to all the tricks the game will throw their way. Beyond this point, the game becomes extremely structured with no amount of luck in the current state of the game getting in the way of a multitude of various strategies that can be used to win. A player essentially has to deliberately try to sabotage their run and nearly try to lose to add challenge to the game due to the lack of it that it presents once you have all the game knowledge understood. This is a massive issue with the core difficulty scaling in the game, as the only real challenge that can be achieved within the game is challenge added by the player. The game does not have a proper way to present difficulty and play normally, as the player has to create it theirself by doing things that aren't optimal on max difficulties to present an artificially increased difficulty that the game does not currently provide on its own. Due to this, the first 10-20 hour are the best.

- Monster moral system seems needlessly pointless. The moral system in the game is probably one of the weirdest core mechanics within the game. For casual players, it will just annoy them because they keep having to bench their units. For hardcore players it just causes the game to be played in an extremely unhealthy way for the game's fun aspect. There are a lot of weird things that can be done to mitigate the moral system such as bounty debuffs that heal moral, units that can't lose moral, placing units only in the 2nd monster room to mitigate moral loss, putting meat shield units in the 1st room that aren't needed and then just power load the 2nd room, among many other strategies. This often leads to 0 moral loss on any units or at least 0 moral loss on any units that matter. This causes an issue, as a lot of the 'management' in the game outside of combat is based around moral. Random events and specific things like the therapist are also based around this. This leads to a lot of gameplay at a high level being completely invalidated due to just completely bypassing the moral system with good gameplay understanding. A weird combination of having to actively go out of one's way to address the moral system then getting a bunch of useless options to heal it just makes for a weird combination that does not feel satisfying.

The rest of the review is in the comment section below as Steam seems to have a character limit to how long a review can be and this review has just hit that max cap.

I have nearly 100 hours in the beta build of the game and personally haven't seen enough improvements since then to justify getting back into the game. It is definitely worth trying the game for a bit of fun, but I personally don't see this game having much longevity beyond the gimmick of "dragons".

Saw the mostly negative reviews and had to write a review as that was far from my experience. I enjoyed the Butcher's Circus more than the base game itself due to the lower time commitment and the full reset every match. Mostly just wanted to go over some points mentioned in negative reviews to clarify some things.

Relics: I see a lot of people mentioning the problem with starting relics, but I was able to reach Darkest 1 (highest possible rank) within 2 days and all relics within 4 days, having started around 1 week prior to this review. While some relics obtained later on are strong or require actively playing around them, the game gives enough up front relics to easily win matches. Had around a 70% win rate with only starting relics and around 80% with all relics available. It definitely can make a bit of a difference, but understanding the game makes a lot more of an impact. Have beaten multiple Darkest 1s prior to being Darkest 1 using just starting relics and non class specific relics despite them using level 60+ relics. Now that I have reached Darkest 1, recently I have been trying matches with 0 relics equipped just for the challenge. Despite this, am still getting over a 50% win rate without using a single relic even against level 60+ relics and other Darkest 1s.

Balance: I found the PvP experience to be surprisingly balanced for a side mode that is now free. Of the 5 teams I have saved, 14 unique characters are used of the total 18. Even when a character is used for multiple, it has different relic options that completely change how it is played, so having it again in a different saved team is still almost like a different character. The variety that can be viably used is rather surprising with almost no character nor relic being completely useless.

Que times and Desync: I have had some amount of desync while playing with an average of about once every 2 hours. Overall, not too bad. Queue times were also surprisingly decent normally taking less than 20 seconds to queue with the average around 30 seconds. Queue times do seem to get a bit longer once reaching Darkest 1, but that is likely due to the game trying to not match darkest 1s with lower players despite it still occurring.

RNG and Luck: Personally, there have been very few battles I have done where luck was ultimately the determining factor on a win. One of the main reasons for this is there is a 100% chance to kill if the enemy simultaneously has 0 hp and 200 stress. If going all in on physical damage with no deathblow dealer the game may seem overly luck based, but the fix is just to use a character that can deathblow in the composition or go for a more stress based composition. A lot of people when they first start off in the Butcher's Circus seem to want to go all in for damage and healing like is common in the main game. However, despite that still being viable, it is crucial to utilize some amount of stress management with a team like this or stress damaging to the opposition. Essentially, the mode may seem overly luck based if not utilizing stress damaging nor deathblow chance attacks as these are the two ways to actually secure a kill.

Overall, I had a great time in the Butcher's Circus. I definitely hope Darkest Dungeon 2 brings some kind of pvp game mode around the time of its full release so that the game can release with a side PvP component rather than it getting tacked on years later like the Butcher's Circus did.

Negative review just because the Epic Game greed is already showing from their acquisition of Fall Guys.

Season 4 has had 3 packs at $5 each in under 3 weeks. Every season prior had 2 or 1.

I give this game less than a year until Epic makes this game F2P and starts to also charge for season pass.

While I absolutely love Spellbreak's combat system, it has a lot of missed potential with blaring issues that either never get fixed or take forever to get addressed.

I have been playing the game since it launched back in September with 500+ hours on the Switch version and 150+ on the Steam version.

There are several issues with the game that is easiest just to list out:

1: Bots. Almost every match done in the Battle Royale mode will have some amount of bots in it generated by the game. The game at no point mentions these bots exist within the game nor does the game identify which characters are bots and which are real players. I went my first 10 hours not even noticing that a lot of what I was facing were bots. At low level play it gives a false sense of accomplishment, and at high level play they are just free loot that pretends to fight back.

2: Endless Beta. Despite this game going through a long alpha and beta phase, it still feels like the game never left beta. Constant glitches, crashes, and massive overhauls of in game systems. Most recently they overhauled the exp system, making things that previously took 100s of hours to grind down to only hours, making cosmetics that once were considered class mastery rewards down to free cosmetics that could be earned in a single day with no warning to these abrupt changes. It was about the equivalence of an MMO abruptly making a skill that took a month to max down to only hours.

3: Monetization. This game has an extremely overpriced cosmetic system. Yes, the game needs to make money somehow, but this game definitely takes it a bit too far. The average good looking cosmetic costs $15 each. Every season they release a skin locked behind $25 and $100, both of which has been done twice. Nearly every holiday they have added $100+ worth of holiday themed skins with no reasonably priced holiday items. After much complaining from the community, they finally added some way to gain the premium currency via 3 daily tasks, but this tends to average only 20 gold per day for 1 hour of grinding. An average good skin is 1500 gold. That is 75 hours of playing the game over the course of 75 days for only 1 skin.

4: Battle Royale. The devs for this game say they want Spellbreak to be more than just a Battle Royale, yet that is all the game currently is and has ever been. There are 2 game modes: battle royale, and battle royale pretending to be a death match mode. This game launching and continuing to trying to compete in such a saturated genre is going to be the death of it. The combat system is great, but the game modes around it is horrible.

5: Cosmetic Exclusivity. This is one of many games that has made the very bad decision of having limited time cosmetics that never come back again. These range from things like $100 skins, Amazon Prime skins, season passes, and many more. This highly discourages new players from getting into the game as some of the best skins in the game are never available again.

6: Skill Disparity. The skill ceiling for this game is exceedingly high with many design choices that make it even higher. For one, this game has been in open development for so long that some people have 2+ years of experience in this half year old game due to alpha testing it. Controller players on Xbox and PS4/5 basically have aimbot programmed into the game, whereas Switch players can count the frames and pixels on screen. All platforms are currently forced to have cross platform with each other as of a couple months ago, so now PC has to play with controller aimbots and Switch has to play against all the platforms that handle the game much better. It is possible to go 10-0 in BR or 20-0 in deathmatch one lobby, then go 0-1 BR or 3-10 DM the next match from how ultra wide the skill range is for this game from all of these factors.

7: Lack of Progression. This game severely lacks in rewarding players for their time. The only currency in the game is earned at a glacial pace, exp rewards are laughable, and almost everything that can be shown of in the game is a wallet size test rather than skill based cosmetics. My account from hour 50 to hour 500 looked nearly identical in progression if looking at overall cosmetics and currency. They have slowly been trying to make adjustments to this, but it is one of the least rewarding games relative to time put into it.

8: Dead Game. I try not to use the term "Dead Game," as people use it way too often to refer to games that once had ultra high popularity that just happen to have less popularity now, but Spellbreak definitely feels like a dead game. Many matches have more bots than humans, queue times take forever and normally are started with the forced timer to try to mitigate what would otherwise be even longer queue times, and a overall low moral in the community from the countless mistakes the devs keep making in regard to the game. Every week the game seems more and more like a cosmetic store with a game built around it rather than a game with a cosmetic store in it.

Overall, I do wish to see this game be successful, and still play it for a short bit a few times a week, but I personally cannot recommend the game. The combat system is great, but every other possible thing about it misses the mark.