Recent reviews by Zenchess

11 minutes in and I'm STILL in the tutorial for a game with the simplest rules you could imagine. Just let me play the game, GOD

There's something not right with this game - only 80 players logged in , yet it finds a 60 player battle royale match almost instantly...all the players play the same and I get first place every race...

Fake multiplayer should be illegal, all you are doing is wasting my time before I quit the game

I've been playing for 29 hours since the game released. This game is digital crack.
First and foremost, it's a skill game. You may think it's very simplistic because all you mostly do is punch,
but encounters in this game are literal mind games where both sides may be afraid to over-commit and instead spin around in place, do fakes, take advantage of timing, etc.

On top of that, you have some really cool items that expand the interactions you encounter to hilarious levels. Who wins between a black hole generating machine and a giant hamster ball - find out!

You can tell thought went into this game. Everything from the cupcakes giving you a speed boost so you can chain combo them together to the fact that you can punch midair to redirect your fall is well designed.

The gameplay loop has no down time. You play a match, and as soon as you die you can get back into a game within like 10-15 seconds. You have to stop yourself because unlike a lot of games you don't get huge breaks between matches.

The only thing I'm worried about is there won't be anything to play for after I've achieved rank 1 in the crown leaderboard. There's no ranking mode that I know of. Please add some form of ranking mode so the only meta progression isnt just accumulating crowns.

It says I have played for 3 hours, but I also played a lot during the multiplayer beta. I also owned the original Solium Infernum and played multiplayer back in the day. Believe it or not we had to send each other our games files via dropbox, move them into a different folder, then load the game up and constantly repeat this process every turn. It took forever. I always wished someone would just make a utility to make the process easier.

Well, this is even better! All new graphics and sounds and a much better interface to boot!

Solium Infernum is like chess in hell. There is a lot of room for player expression because there are so many items, relics, artifacts, armies, praetors (commanders/hero units), manuscripts, rituals, etc!

Starting off the bat you have a wide choice of relics to choose from to customize your play style. You could get a crown that gives you +1 orders per turn, which gives you much more power because normally you start with 2 orders per turn. You could choose to get even more orders by raising your rank and raising your archfiend's stats to level 4, up to 6 orders per turn. Let me tell you when you have that many orders you feel very powerful because you can demand a lot of tribute very fast and pay for anything you want.

Instead, you could pick a relic that promotes your starting legion to get a military advantage right off the bat. You could get a relic that gives you the win if the person you choose at the start of the game actually wins by vote. There are so many combinations to start with and that is before the game even starts!

Once you're playing there's lots of paths you can choose. You can try buffing your stats in different areas like wrath/deceipt/charisma etc. Some rituals you gain from this will allow you to do things like damage enemy units, steal enemy units, steal enemy money, trick other players into fighting each other, etc. There are a vast variety of possible strategies and playstyles you could use.

The game does take a while to get going. Often you'll find yourself blowing a whole turn just trying to get more tribute (money). But the game gets more and more interesting as it goes on and the power curve ramps up.

Speaking of playstyles, you could try to win by prestige, or you could just go all out and attack Pandemonium which immediately excommunicates you and makes you the #1 target of all other players. But if you've got the army to handle it it's a valid strategy.

The game had poor optimization during the beta, but is much better now. I put settings on medium and it runs fine. The game is very atmospheric with random hell based sounds and atmospheric sound effects. Just don't play this game if you have religious parents, LOL!

All in all I highly recommend this game if a chess like game that takes place in hell and requires cunning and subterfuge and plotting and scheming sounds appealing to you.

Last but not least: The fact that you can play this asynchronously and just take 1 turn a day makes it great for playing with friends who are spread over the world. An actual game would take quite a lot of time if you're only doing 1 turn a day but would definitely feel epic!

tldr: Atmospheric hell based chess, improves on the original, asynchronous multiplayer is convenient, endless possibilities for playstyle and strategy

Normally, I would recommend this game. There I was, playing classic tetris score attack in multiplayer and moving up the ranks, having an absolute blast. Then, disaster struck. My GPU apparently overheated, and I immediately got a blue screen of death, and then my computer was UNBOOTABLE. I spent hours trying to fix the master boot record, fix the windows registry, literally anything. My nvme ssd literally changed itself to write only, so I couldn't even reinstall windows on it if I wanted to. After hours and hours of trying to get anything to work, I finally just pulled out the NVME ssd and reinstalled windows on the other drive.

Now I get it, overheating GPU, maybe my system is poorly configured? Ok, explain why no other game causes my gpu to overheat. Explain why when I log into a Tetris Game, with intent to play Classic Tetris, my gpu fans need to run at full just to play this game. I'm literally playing NES Tetris in 2024 on my PC and a $1300 PC and $400 gpu is not sufficient for that?

Ok, well thanks for listening to my story. I've never had a game crash literally brick my system before. Other than that, the game is pretty good. I like the ranking system, the modes, the effects, the multiplayer, the tetris.

Cards add a dynamic to the game that encourages strategy. I've played 4 matches and didn't get a single kill but still had a lot of fun. It feels like there's a lot of ways to outmaneuver your opponent as well in addition to the card mechanics.

Matchmaking went down after the game had been out for like 20 minutes, but I'm sure they'll get it fixed soon. It's worth the wait, the entire package of this game is top notch. Apparently you can still get matches if you go to the discord and play private matches.

The game is horribly laggy, we're talking 1+ second lag, feels like you're walking in molasses in a normal wasd style control game. Everyone you see is a bot. I would have played for 1 minute but I wanted to write a review so i played another game. I won the game btw, everything about this is fake.

It's pretty obvious most of the reviews for this game were paid bots.

This review was originally posted on quartertothree (by me).

I was a beta tester but the small initial learning curve put me off (or maybe I didn’t find a match, don’t remember). I bought it though and here are my impressions so far:

It has everything you’d want in a pvp RTS: a rating system, matchmaking to find opponents near your level, quick entry into a match, and a replay system and sharable replays.

It is clearly an evolution on RTS design. I would like to see this system combined with a traditional RTS though. At certain points I wanted more fine grained control over some of my air units. You do get pretty good control to a certain extent but singling out a unit if there’s an identical type nearby is impossible.

The reason it’s an evolution on RTS design is that you can give ‘permanent’ orders. So it’s kind of like you’re writing a program as you’re playing. You’re drawing (select unit types that the command applies to, then click + drag a line from start to end) lines that units will continuously follow. So you don’t have to worry about constantly moving your troops from the back line to the front line.

I have played about 6 or 7 matches so far. In my first couple of matches, I got totally destroyed. I realized when watching the replays that my opponents were building 2 to 3 barracks and vehicle factories to my 1. So I was just getting swarmed. After that my rating was pretty tanked and I started using that strategy and streamrolled my next few opponents. But then I had some better matches in which there was a lot of back and forth and strategy.

In terms of strategy, it seems to be well designed. Every unit has a purpose. You have your standard infantry, artillery, tanks, SAM unit, and a paratrooper unit that can also be used for stealth scouting.

If that was all there was, it probably wouldn’t be that interesting of a game, but you also have air units - an interceptor to take out other planes, a striker to shoot missiles at ground targets, helicopters which can land anywhere in your territory and can do some good damage to ground units and air units (i think), bombers which are slow and have no air fire but can bomb enemies, and a transport plane that can transport ground units at long range. The different aircraft have different ranges they can operate at, and you can also build stealth airstrips that cannot produce aircraft to increase your range.

There are also sea units, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, and troop transport land boats, and even an anti air missile boat.

But that’s not all! You can build very powerful rockets that have decent enough range and can take out a huge number of enemy buildings and troops in one go.

So you have a counter to every unit and the game involves many factors on a grand scale. You can build for economy, putting cities and towns and factories down to generate more income (for troop maintenance and buildings), or you could build for military and expansion of territories (which give you a small amount of income each). Having control of air or sea can make a big difference in terms of individual tactics. Since you have a variety of unit types, counters, and tactical things going on, there is a lot of dynamics involved in the battle even though you would think with such a simple control system it would just play itself out.

The economy is gold which I mentioned, and energy which you use to power your tanks, boats, and aircraft. You can lose a game simply because you’re spending too much energy and your vital airstrikes for instance aren’t able to execute. You get refineries which you place over oil wells, which give you the most efficient energy available, or you can lay down power plants anywhere in your territory which give you half the efficiency of a refinery.

In terms of the control system, like I said you draw paths for certain receivers, you can then move those paths or change the receivers, or delete them (a beginner mistake is to draw too many lines everywhere which is counter-productive). You can also issue point commands to draw in the receivers instead of drawing a path. You can change paths to focus on movement rather than engagement and territory capture, and you can incur penalties for a movement bonus if you ‘hurry’ a path. There are hotkeys for all this stuff so in general you don’t have to do much micro at all and can focus on your strategic aims.

I was waiting for this one for a long time and am glad it is finally here, and doing well on steam (200 concurrent players last I checked).

Cool game with nice speedrun integration. You control your ship with just your mouse, and your ship has inertia. Also has some kind of live multiplayer mode but I haven't tried it yet.

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I have 0.8 hours on record as of this review, though I did play the demo a little bit too.
This is a review for the multiplayer. The game just came out, so I don't know how easy it will be to get matches down the road - but this game is really fun multiplayer.

There's tons of customization in your bot and pilot loadout, and multiplayer matches are these epic mind games. You might have a shield bot guarding your other bots and have them all huddle behind it, or go with long range attacks, etc. It's a real mind game and the meta will probably change a lot.

You can give orders to your bots before the match although it's not so complex that it's like programming them. You can give them various orders like attack this bot, wait here for 5 seconds, support this other unit, etc. If things go wrong you can hop onto the bot and control it directly. After 5 rounds or so you also both get a powerful mech to fight with.

I really hope this game gets a playerbase because it's fantastic. I will update this review as I get more playtime. I'm not that interested in the single player content, but it seems good as well.