Recent reviews by WolfWings

This is another game where everything you do in the entire game suddenly doesn't matter for the finale.

You irrevocably lose your entire party, all your equipment and inventory, and there is no combat at all for the entire final finale area, and the literal only path you can take is being slightly mind-controlled and blowing up the entire archipelago the game takes place in so the entire game of leveling, tactical combat, etc, every single game mechanic, gone.

And it's not even done with care to send-up the genre as a pastiche like Undertale did, it just takes everything away and drops you quite literally naked and tries to flip the entire mood to body-horror and existential dread with time-travelling cthulu horrors that actually feels like a worse ending than Mass Effect 3.

At least there you got to pick the fireworks color.

The 'every single click causes things to jiggle like jelly' shaking is under GAME options, not DISPLAY and it's not a toggle, you have to drag the slider for the strength all the way to zero on the left side.

The background image-smearing has a mod recently released that turns off the background.

Disabling all the visual nonsense so the game is actually playable without taking you on a ride of the Vomit Comet? The game is freaking AMAZING!

But I seriously hope they re-think these visual effects because boy howdy I've never in my 30 years of gaming encountered a game that induced motion-sickness like this one, I think some grad students could literally use this as a tool to induce nausea.

With the developer standing with the community AGAINST their own publisher, risking their jobs, and getting the publisher to back down sincerely, even if this game is NOT my jam, it's worthy of a thumbs-up, because these developers CARE, and are standing by their players.

MAY EDIT: Well I'm not gonna be checking back in on this NOW, holy wow. My only regret now is I can't assist with the Orbital Dislike[imgur.com] Sony has well and truly earned DESPITE (and in fact TO SPITE) the Devs, since my review was already negative.

Original Review Follows

This is the most confusing, unexplained game to try to play. The tutorial doesn't teach anything about what to actually do in-game, ammo limit feels like I'm playing Resident Evil not an FPS game, and matchmaking is entirely broken so you can't do anything but play single-player when all missions are designed to have 4-player squads.

The gunplay feels good... for the 20 or so rounds you get before you have to manually reload every single time. Maybe it's the vibe they're going for? But it's just not my vibe when it's THIS manual including having to enter street-fighter-esque button combos to call for support drops, it feels shockingly hostile to mouse-and-keyboard play for an FPS.

If you're looking for a new fun themed PvE horde shooter you can drop in and play... unless you were a fan of the first one AND have a group of friends to play with that you organize outside of the game itself... avoid.

I'll check back in next month, or maybe April, but for now this is significantly less fun to even attempt to play than a 3-year-old game like Aliens: Fireteam Elite. XD

Sadly the player count has already shrunk so far that only the hardest of the hardcore play or build bots anymore, so unless you're god-tier at building... you'll almost never get any kills or even really hurt anything and just get frustrated.

I'll try again later if the player count goes up on some future update.

So this is an AMAZING game... the mechanics are wonderful, the deck-building is a delight, so... why the thumbs down?

Because for a game with difficulty settings, "Normal" is where "Hard" should be, making this game frustrating instead of fun. Too many runs get stopped stone cold even in the first of the three zones, often in the first couple of fights, just due to the smallest mis-played card or bad deal that denies you any dodge or shield so suddenly you're paste.

Normal is what Hard should be, etc.

Otherwise this is a truly amazing, pristine game, but... sometimes I just want to progress or have fun, not feel like it's a kobayashi maru before I've even had a chance to tweak my deck to give myself a chance.

So yeah, maybe I'm too old and need an 'Easy' mode, but early on it's too easy to get dealt basically almost no dodge or shields and just get wrecked. Needs a bit more bad-luck mitigation in the first sector or at least 2-3 fights in the first sector.

Also on a tertiary issue... I've yet to ever figure out any way to not be crippled if you take anyone besides the starting 3 characters. I do significantly worse whenever I take the newly unlocked character? This seems counter-intuitive, are the unlocks only meant to make the game harder!?

A very hearty thumbs up, especially for their expansive list of 'automatic fire' options which makes this very extremely accessible to being played with as little as one joystick all the way to mouse-and-keyboard spazfests. This does for rail-shooter FPS games what the Sony Spiderman games did for accessibility options.

If you wanted a mashup of "Vampire Survivors," "House of the Dead," and "Serious Sam" this is it, comically over the top weapon spreads and large swarms of enemies coming at you at times, albeit with limited levels that could do with more decoration (even my laptop sits at 120fps with max settings).

Two caveats:

The game play is limited to a 'rail shooter' type hallway approach, which is not a bad thing (enemies are in front, not on your sides/behind generally) so you can focus on aiming and playing the actual game, but some might find it boring if they're expecting 360 gameplay. If your favorite levels of Vampire Survivors were the Library and Tower? GET THIS GAME PRONTO!

The leveling-up experience was re-tuned from the demo, so it's MUCH slower if you played the demo. This makes sense, as the demo was meant to be 'completed' more or less during only a short week(end) so all the costs were dramatically lowered. The progression is markedly slower so it takes 10-20 runs through level 1 to be at a point to tackle level 2, etc. Each run is <10 minutes but it can feel a bit 'samey' to some.

So 30 hours in... I find out the game becomes a tactical wargame instead of an RPG, where I'm having to micromanage units on a battlefield instead of just going on adventures and juggle "Can I afford to sleep now? Or will bad things happen because I took too long?" and that's not what I installed it expecting. :(

Loved the first 30 hours, but I'll never see the rest of the game since I didn't come looking for a wargame, I got it from the humble monthly bundle and was excited for a new RPG with great review.

Also being so time-crippled where if you don't do things in a walkthrough-exact order you get punished, and a single misclick with no confirmation prompts can send your ranged archer barreling through all the traps and blowing themselves up instead of just standing there shooting at enemies makes combat a giant chore.

Story? A+
Handling all the complexity of Pathfinder? A+
But gods the tactical wargame stuff is just an uninstall cliff for me, I have no patience for it. :(

So yeah, if you're looking for turn-based Skyrim or something like a modern take on the old Ultima/Gold-Box games? Still not it, look elsewhere.

But if you want Civ 6 Light with extra RPG elements blended in smoothly? This is your game, right here!

That's just not the game for me though.

Is this a good game? Yes.

Is it a game for me? No.

Am I recommending it? HELL YES! It's cute as hell, really plays well, and this dev deserves your money.

I just can't stomach the constant "reset to zero" mechanics disregarding the actual warning count.

A game that lies to me about how risky something is is a game I can't play, essentially. "Pirates arriving in 9 stashes" for example and they show up after I check 3-4 stashes instead so I lose all items I've found so far that are needed to progress the story instantly ruins the game for me. Alt+F4, uninstall, I'm done personally.

But that's not a review of the game, gameplay, UI/UX, accessibility, that's purely a "Is this a game for ME?" and it's not.

The game itself is heckin' marvelously done, please, give it a chance, but be aware if you get frustrated by surprise "progress reset" mechanics like me this is not a game for you.

In an era where so many game companies end up milkshake duck'ing themselves, this overlooked gem of a game with an AMAZING soundtrack seems to have flown under everyone's radar almost because of the lack of major issues.

It was released, it was fun, it was shockingly bug-lite compared to many major releases, and it's well crafted and fun gameplay from story-level all the way to "Good luck, you'll need it." difficulty settings.

And unlike many newer games it doesn't rely on you having a web browser up looking at an (un)official wiki constantly, it's quite possible to get the super majority of the achievements entirely using in-game knowledge and details you can go back and review.

As others have said, this has a LOT of cons:

Zero voice acting, so the game feels ridiculously out of touch considering most of these characters are known for dozens if not hundreds of zingy one-liners.

The controls are unable to be changed AT ALL, nadda. And they're wildly different from standard Smash-alikes so everything feels off, and many otherwise fully usable keyboards literally can't play this game as a result without a separate game controller.

And regarding controllers: Even there the controls are wildly different from most Smash-likes.

This is a HARD pass, this feels like a fan-made Mugen character pack not a standalone brawler.

And yes I ignored things that it has and it's expected to have (netcode, etc) because... I don't congratulate something for doing the bare minimum in an area. That's like saying "Ooh, it supports 16:9!" at this point.