Recent reviews by Pastry

Game good

Game good

One of the best dating sims on the market. Pretty cool D&D side attached to it.

Super fun coop roguelite with simple but nicely stylized graphics. Definitely benefits greatly from coop but it's still alright, if much more difficult, solo. Each character starts with 2 unique active abilities and can unlock 5 unique passives with soul essence, the persistent currency earned by playing the game. The game has a wide array of weapons with semi-random passive attributes that alter the weapon's properties. These attributes change damage types, weapon stats, can apply various effects on-hit or on-kill, and more to add interesting variety when picking what weapons to use for your build. Due to the random nature of power ups in each run, relying on a specific build is unlikely and you'll often have to make the best of what you're given. This can lead to wildly different power levels between runs but this is mitigated somewhat by a large talent tree that is universal to all characters to permanently boost your stats as you play.

The actual gameplay is a fairly fast paced, first person shooter, room to room dungeon crawl with a boss at the end of each level. Upgrades and weapons are found fairly regularly as you move from room to room via universal buffs in the form of scrolls or character specific buffs in the form of goblets. Some characters are better than others for solo play depending on their abilities and in general the game feels skewed towards coop. Luckily there is a matchmaking system for people who want to use it, I've never actually used it so all I can say is that it exists. The visuals are simple and blocky but I like the art style. All in all I would definitely recommend it for roguelite fans who have a friend or two to play it with and only recommend it to solo players if you just REALLY like first person shooters or roguelites.

This game is basically Final Fantasy Tactics, which I mean in the most flattering way possible. If you wanted a new Tactics style game, this is absolutely worth the purchase.

Pretty good game. The fighting is fun enough, but not something I would do more than necessary. It took me a really, really, REALLY long time to understand the dodge mechanic (which functions more like a parry than as a maneuver to avoid attacks) and there are WAY too many reuses of old enemies with reskinned appearances. It gets pretty egregious later on, the game's idea of a difficult fight later is just to throw multiple reskinned minibosses/bosses at you with reskinned trash mobs around them and it can be pretty overwhelming to dodge/parry damage when there are four or five massive particle effect sources flying around from giant spells and abilities. I liked it well enough to beat the game, and for the time I played it I guess it was worth the 60 dollar price tag, but I'd recommend getting it on sale.

I saw a review from someone insinuating that the only AOE heal is behind paid DLC, this is simply not true. There is an AOE heal spell in the base game on Shionne and, aside from Zeugle hunts, I barely scratched the surface for unlocking abilities via doing side content.

Heroes of Hammerwatch is a dungeon crawler that features a few rogue-lite elements with items that upgrade your passive stats and some elements of the game resetting between runs. The soundtrack has some pretty fantasy tracks with a video game-y sound that's mostly good but the battlements stage is pretty repetitive. There are several characters with different playstyles allows players to mix up the gameplay. The classes are various tropes from fantasy genres: Paladin, Archer, Warlock, etc and have abilities that fit their archetype pretty well. The paladin charges into enemies, swings a sword around, and heals while the archer focuses more on avoiding melee with enemies and firing loads of arrows. The Sorcerer, Wizard, and Warlock are actually fire, ice, and lightning mages respectively with only the Warlock having the option to do something besides elemental magic in the form of a lifestealing dagger. There is a cleric that works as something of a mix between a tank and a healer in the beginning of the game though as you scale the difficulty of the game tanking becomes much more difficult. The basic gameplay loop is a pretty simple dungeon crawl.

You begin in the lowest level of a tower, slaying monsters, collecting currencies, and finding stronger gear mostly from dungeon shop keepers and treasure chests. Like many rogue-likes, you are not really expected to beat the game on your first try but in Heroes of Hammerwatch this is mostly because your character isn't strong enough. You technically COULD beat the game on your first try but that isn't really what the game about, this game is ultimately about dungeon crawling/grinding for xp and currency to get stronger and then upping the difficulty to make the next dungeon crawl more rewarding so that you can continue to get stronger and so on.

Between runs you upgrade your your character and numerous building within a town that functions as your central hub for non-combat gameplay. As you provide Ore to the town it expands and upgrades the number of services your character can purchase. Using Gold, you build up your characters stats at the blacksmith and wizard, your potions at an apothecary, buy temporary passive bonuses by drinking booze at the bar, upgrade buildings at the mayor's office, buy pets and upgrade your skills at the guild, and eventually purchase permanent passives through the church. The player is also given a great deal of freedom to alter the way the dungeons work from the town fountain by making wishes. These wishes can be positive, such as extra treasure chests, less damage from traps, or creating tiles in the air for the player to access otherwise difficult or even impossible locations. The negative wishes can do things like cause more enemies to spawn, make enemies faster, traps do more damage, shop keeper shows up less but all of these downsides also provide the player a passive experience and currency rate boost while they take these downsides so they aren't entirely negative.

I haven't mentioned the story much because there basically isn't one. The townspeople have a few dialogue lines to set the scene but none that make any of them stand out. The premise is a straightforward one though I admittedly didn't realize all of it until the endgame "you did it!" screen spelled it out for me. The land is covered in snow because of a dragon named Thundersnow who is at the top of a tower and you are gonna go try to kill it. Some titles like Hades really weave their story into the cyclical nature of these kinds of games but this one definitely does not. This game is about the dungeon crawling and the grinding.

Part of what makes dungeon crawling fun to do in this game is the combo system implemented in the game. After defeating around 10 enemies in a short span of time, you will enter a combo. On its own entering a combo is a neat buff that lets you move faster while attacking but it gets really cool when you start picking up items that cause extra effects to occur during a combo. Stringing together a massive combo number is definitely when this game is at its most engaging. Overall, there are a wide variety of power ups in the dungeons that manage to mostly be at least sorta useful regardless of the character you play as. Heroes of Hammerwatch has my recommendation IF you have another person to play with, you can get it on sale, or you just really like grinding I guess.

It's pretty good