Recent reviews by Tunuko

Bait and switch.

Paid for a warframe style MMO, getting some crappy single player experience instead.

The game's very cute but doesn't have enough content for the price tag currently. Don't know if the dev intends to add more, but I played around 4 hours of the game and reached a point where you're just waiting to get from level 65 to 100 to unlock the final thing so the remainder of the time was it just open while I slept.

New battle pass is ridiculous. Daily challenges removed, new daily missions award less xp, give no keys and take a substantial amount more time to complete.

Obvious predatory cash grab.

https://youtu.be/5SjTNkqDWxs

This game has some gorgeous artwork and a delightful soundtrack.

The controls can sometimes feel a little bit annoying, but you get used to them.

There aren't too many levels to get through, but some of them are quite challenging, and satisfying to beat!

I'll start off by saying I received a key for this game in exchange for a non-biased review.

However, much like others in the same boat as me, my review has been met with hostility from the devs. Ironically my video review even points out at the start that they will respond negatively, and hurrah! I was right.

The devs are active in their game, but if you're not singing them praise be prepared for them to argue. Which is a shame, it's obvious they're pationate about the project.

However, the main dev made a Pokémon mod for discord in the past, and I have little doubt that all of the good reviews are coming from his previous fans/friends. So take them with a pinch of salt.

The art work is lazy, some of which appears to be ripped from a low poly asset pack on the UE4 marketplace. The game is also using some default UE4 assets (I'm partnered with Epic as a teacher for the engine) and content ripped straight from tutorials on YouTube.

The combat is dull and buggy, you can leave fights while another NPC is in range so you just get dragged straight back in. If you run from a battle, chances are your character will immediately overlap the same mob and will be pulled back into the same fight you just ran from.

The game was originally supposed to be free to play with microtransactions, but guess that was too hard to create so they just slapped a price tag on the game.

Stop expecting reviewers to be complacent yes men. I wouldn't recommend this game if you paid me.

TemTem is already shaping up to be everything this game isn't. Wait a few months and invest in that instead.

A fantastic little game!

It's a nice spin on a classic, let you juggle different tetronimos for some awesome tactical play.

The difficulty curve seems well paced, it starts nice and relaxing, and soon becomes a little harder to handle. Once it speeds up the blocks are harder to manipulate, and mistakes are less forgiving.

Incredible game!

Some references are obvious, and some are really subtle. But this game his all the nostalgia buttons.

The gameplay itself is a really interesting twist on the rhythm genre, and thanks to each zone having it's own soundtrack, it doesn't get stale.

Speaking of soundtrack, the music is amazing!

Before I start, I'll point out that I received this game for free as a partnered alpha tester.

So Rend is a team based survival PvP game, with some cool features, but a lot of dreadful design problems.

Personal progression is separated into 3 different areas: main character level, which unlocks class perks. There are currently 4 classes to choose from. This style of progression lets you unlock perks that give access to spells and quality of life buffs.

Then there are the "skill" trees. If you want to gather more from bushes, you're learning Botany, if you cut a lot of logs, you get woodcutting experience etc. Everty so many levels you get a choice of two perks to lock onto your character. Most of the time the choice is easy to make as one perk is inherently just useless...

The third is ascension perks. Points for this progression seem entirely random. On one character I was ascension 5 by regular level 4, on another I reached level 12 before my first ascension point. Although you can get more points at the end of a game.

Character progression is very grindy, and promotes players taking on specific jobs - no use in all 20 mastering woodcut after all.

To craft more gear, a team needs to work together to research specific areas of progression, and for me this is where most of the problems are.

Even if your team researches something specific, such as bows, then to craft that tier 5 bow, an individual player still needs to craft tiers 1-4 personally. This unfortunately promotes resource waste.

Griefing is far too easy. I will not list things here as I don't want to help spread it. But it's far too easy for players to ruin each other's fun.

Between Reckonings you will rapidly run out of things to do. You spend all of your time fortifying and preparing for the Reckoning. The Reckoning itself is incredibly fun though, everyone's shields are dropped and you're attacked by waves of creatures and then sit with no shielding for an hour. It's quite spooky!

But, the between time is lacking... There needs to be some sort of PvE event that allows a team to trigger a Reckoning at another faction's home. It would let players control PvP events, as full scale raids aren't possible which shields are up.

Finally, possibly one of the biggest issues I have noticed is balance. Not genuine game balance, each team gets the same gear (with a unique resource in their area). The balance issue is in being able to pick a team.

I can pick a server, make a character on one team, check out what they have, delete the character and check out another team.

I can do this until I see who the most powerful group is. And I feel this is happening a lot. On most servers during non-peak times you can see one or two teams heavily outweigh the other.

Do I think Rend was ready to leave Alpha? Not by a long shot.

But it does have a lot of potential. The problem is that it's being held back by some pretty damaging design flaws that are putting a lot of players off. If these were fixed, and more content beyond fortifying was added, this game could be awesome.

Of course, this is just my opinion, but right now I wouldn't personally recommend this game. Wait until it's further along in its development cycle.

So, I'll start this off by saying I got this game for free.

The dev team approached me and offered me work on this title and gave me a key to test this out a couple months ago.

I tried it out and honestly the game ran like absolute ass. I'm unsure of if they've optimised it yet or not as I didn't play it again.

AI was buggy and often spawned on top of the character for insta-death, or didn't move at all.

The devs are also childish and have a list of people in their credits (or at least did at the time) of people who refused to work with them or spoke badly of the project. If it's still there my name's probably on it!

Anyways, save your money.