Käyttäjän Buntkreuz viimeaikaiset arvostelut

Only needs coop and it would be the perfect alternative to any Action Roguelike/Danmaku.

Its basically a change in size and scale.
At first this seems to be a major difference, but at its core it isnt.
You dont build one house, you build a housing district.
You dont manage one house, you manage an entire district.

Numbers are higher, instead of a few dozen people you now have a few thousand people.

This change in scope also represents a change in the games core philosophy:
Having players collect scraps to prepare for a game phase that slowly destroys what you built up until a timer runs out and if you maintained your management, you won.

It now goes with a new philosophy that switches the initiative back to the player:
Collect the abundance that is being left over, stabilize your city, prepare enough to withstand major impacts (through people, events and weather) and then expand.


The game maintains its core concept with that, but instead of just pushing you into the frustrating role of building something up to then being forced to watch it crumbling down while a timer ticks, you now get motivated to strenghten up further, withstand and expand.

It also provides a larger scope.
This isnt about Billy and his heater anymore and a few dozen people barely surviving in a snowy pit.
This is about humanity claiming back and not only surviving but prospering.

This was made very clear.

Frostpunk 1 was the story about surviving, Frostpunk 2 is the story about Expansion.


This means if you need the scope of playing with individuals, then you will probably dislike FP2.
While it maintains its core gameplay and mechanics but with higher numbers, it can feel different because of that.
Instead of dealing with Billys fate you deal with the fate of a part of your population.
Thats a bit like having a game like Warcraft 3 with a party of 20 units where every unit individually matters and you level your hero, to then playing a game like Crusader Kings where you manage entire provinces, populations and deal with an overarching political layer, relationships and factional demands.

If you prefer to manage your little village and deal with problems about who owns that sheep over there on the hill, stay with Frostpunk 1.
If you prefer to manage a city and deal with questions about regional conflicts and relationships, go with Frostpunk 2.

Both scopes are fine for different people.

I pretty much received it for free (key from friend from bundle), so take it with a grain of salt.

I hadt he game sitting on my wishlist for some time.
I feel like 12,50€ is a quite steep price for an arcade game like this with the look presented.
It doesnt look bad or without love. It has animations everywhere and it has that Castle Crashers vibe to it.
Yet it doesnt look too good on some areas especially the main menu.
Im not even sure whether it runs on my native resolution at this point.

Its also prone to performance issues when you get the right things.
On a 2080 with an Ryzen2700X 16GB RAM on an SSD that shouldnt be the case.
I basically killed the final boss simply by powering through. No skill involved. I tanked hits as the game ran at like 2 fps due to the bullet count on screen.

Yet, its a good and fun game, maybe even incredible for some.
I think for like 50% off it would hit the right price spot for me.
This is ofcourse very subjective.

You have like 5 Planets with different playstyles, a ton of items to unlock and like 3-4 modes.

Dont know what the dev is up to, but he should continue making games.
Isle of Arrow has some severe issues, but its not a bad game and has several things going for it.
The artstyle is cool and the gameplay solid.
With some more features and expanded design, getting rid of the problems (also in design) like balancing, while focussing on whats fun and not "what is artistic", it could be incredible.

Maybe he will get back at making games. It could lead to some good ones.

Its really really well done.
I was a bit pessimistic after the beta.
It didnt run well on my system, the matchmaking or server hosting was not working properly and it actually didnt look good enough to justify the performance.

But the release version is incredible.
As of now it runs stable and fine, looks really good, the voice acting is good (i play in german as of now, will try english later), the changes are nuanced and logically improving what the original didnt do well (like reusable god powers).

Its super fun and the content is there.

I had a few things i dont like, but that are minor. Like the translation has occasional english text inbetween, a lot of the icons in the Ui are very similar and easy to confuse, keybinds are weird (attack move on spacebar), the automatic worker distribution system (which im a fan of) seems to sometimes get confused and i personally think the techtree is confusing compared to Age of Empires and others (i think Age of empires 4 did it best).
I had some more minor things, but overall its a good purchase.

Also i feel like it was worth it to get the Premium Version.
It comes with an additional Nordic God and Missions, as well as the older god pictures (that i dont use as the new ones are well made) plus the first two DLCs (hopefully more will follow).

I just played 2 hours straight through the first missions and it was super fun.
Looking forward to spend more hours.

More fun than at release.
Areas have been fleshed out a bit more with less dull walls and more caves and new paths to explore. Even found a new way into the sewers and such.
Some more weapon affixes too i guess. Have a sword that is unbreakable and has enemies explode. Im level 3, so i guess thats good.
Some more QoL too and im looking forward to the Crucible grinding a bit.

Im still hoping they redo Bows and make them actual weapons that shoot and not something you can only use when spending mana, which you need to earn by doing melee first.
Also dual wielding and two handing more. If they are fancy then they go the Diablo route and allow me to one hand a two handed weapon once i get above a strength threshold.

It would also be cool to have your character look different dependent on your stats. Becoming larger with more stamina, strength or thin when going clever. I know, stereotypical, would still be cool to have your character show who he/she is.
I remember there were even games doing permanent scars when being hit and such.
Too ambitious expectation, i know, but sitll.

Another thing im hoping for are crossbows and maybe Muskets. Would fit here and i would like to have a fun ranged character that isnt magic.

Performance also seems mostly fine now. But need to play a bit more and longer to really know.
I remember it to be far worse though at release.
All in all, i spent playing about 30 hours with like 1 1/2 characters and didnt even play a mage, clerik, Thief or Paladin as of yet, which i want to do.
A quality of live issue i find, is the lack of fast travel.
The current world isnt really large, in fact its pretty small and doesnt feature any "dungeons", but im still sick of traviling back and forth.
Hate running through the city too, it feels like wasting my time.
Being allowed to fast travel between "checkpoints" would be a good addition.

Other than that, its great.

See, its a fun TD Game but it only runs at 30 fps, locked.
No chance to increase.
And you can feel and see it drastically. The mouse is no fluid, menus arent fluid, animations are laggy and a lot of the stuff feels or objectively is unresponsive due to that limitation.

Would give this a thumbs up in terms of gameplay and grind, but for a game from 2020 being locked to 30 fps is a no no.

Its pretty much Ashes of the Singularity TD.
Its ok and i havent had any crash in my one hour play as of now (that was about 7 missions played.
Had massive fps drops in some instances though.

Overall the TD is solid. Not great, not innovative or anything, but ok.

Actually think that a coop mode and some more depth in terms of what you can build and how you upgrade could have turned this into a real gem.
If you are looking for that, i recommend "No Creeps were harmed TD", as it has pretty much what i would want (coop, endless mode on any map, itemization (random loot to upgrade towers with)).

I think what kind of is weird about this game, is that it has a fixed campaign and not some sort of planetary campaign by default.
Its called Siege of Centauri and you would expect some sort of dynamic planetary battlefield where you play a mission and it develops frontlines and adds mutators to missions and all that.

If you are looking for that, i recommend "Taur" at this point.

This would have been a real treat and added replayability.

As it is, i bought this game for like 5€ and for that its a solid standard TD that does what any TD does but possibly with a few more enemies per dot and good graphics.

Not for me.
I like the idea but hate the execution.
Right of it glitched resolutions around so i had to restart a few times to make it work.
Controls needed to be set up as somehow stuff like shooting is set to "X" and controlling is set to Arrow Keys and such.
I use mouse and yet couldnt go through the menus using the mouse but needed using arrow keys to set my options.
Once im in Mission Selection, i also couldnt get back to main menu.
No button got me out, needed to alt-tab.

Im also not a big fan of the style of some things.
Cool space ship flying but more often than not my ship ends up being outside the screen when trying to evade gigantic projectiles and aiming at stuff while evading was pretty abysmal.
Hated the "catgirl runs with a huge gun" "hacking"-levels. Like the space ship style, but that was weirdly ugly and misfit.

I assume the open levels are possibly fun, the on rail ones werent really good or fun to play.
Like Whisker Squadron Survivor far more for many things.

I could get over the bad catgirl levels and endure the unfun on rail levels, but the lack of polish and bad use killed it.
Maybe the dev should add some more meat too, as there werent a lot of levels and the on-rails ones were pretty short.
I played for like 20 minutes and finished about 5 missions (3 main, 2 side (catgirl with gun)) and then i think it had like 5 more to go.
Replayability then would be a key aspect and im not the kind of player trying to improve score.
Would expect modes, branching levels and such.

In general im confused that there werent different paths per mission to go through.
A no from me for many reasons.
Will come back when its finished.

Knuckle Cracker games have two main things:
1,) A major problem that is consistent across all the games: The UI, Menus and Information flow is utter garbage. This developer doesnt know how to create proper menus, Ui or provide necessary information.
Theres no tooltips, the ingame info menu is completely pointless and void of any valuable information on what things in the game actually do.
It also leads to a wiki section via your browser which is a no-no but even worse, the wiki pages are completely useless or simply unfinished.
That has you sitting there asking yourself what things do or show.
Theres a panel on the bottom left side that shows numbers and graphs and stuff but nothing there tells you what these informations are about.
I bet they are useful, if you can read them.
The tutorials also dont show anything or give you enough knowledge to keep going.
Crucial stuff and basic functions are never explained AND the game makes it worse by having bad pacing on the little information that it gives you.
For example the introduction of the "Terp", a terraforming tower allowing you to raise or lower terrain but also, and this is important, decontaminating Terrain.
The mission introducing the Terp has also a new Terrain Type that shows a blue mesh that spawns the Creeper.
Logic goes, the game gives me the Terp and tells me "it can decontaminate Terrain", so i assumed i push to the blue Mesh spawning the creeper, using the Terp to clean it, to stop it from spawning more.
But this Mesh cant be decontaminated.
After digging through the abysmal Wiki i found out that Decontamination comes much later and im not supposed to do that right now and that this Mesh isnt a Mesh but a simple type of "copy" Terrain, that just spawns Creeper as long as Creeper is there touching it.
It reproduces.
Theres also Mesh that produces creeper, that i can shoot with towers.
But its not the same, it looks the same, but is different.

Ingame information on all of that?
Nope.
The same mission also tells you, that you can use the Terp to dig up valuable stuff.
So me assuming again "this mission must contain a secret to dig up", but no-no, this comes in the next mission for some reason.
Which you dont know, so me digging around finding nothing, wasting time.

The entire UI and the Menus look awful. Like a 12 year old crafted them and the developer didnt know the difference between placeholder and proper quality.
Absolutely awful in EVERY of his games. Whether its the main menu or mission selection or ingame UX/UI/GUI, its shockingly void of any skill or polishing.
A lot of it looks straight out of a 90s Dos-Box browser game (hello "C-Dogs").

This guy needs to take a few lessons on that, because as of now, the presentation is this developers wort problem in terms of selling his games.
Its literally the only actual issue i find with his games which leads to the second point for any Knuckle Cracker Game:

2.) They are all fun, deep, strategic and fresh.
The entire premise, while C-Movie quality in terms of story, is fun to the max.
You have economy, you have defenses, you have support buildings, harvest resources, fight a fluid simulation and in Creeper World 4 you do this in a 3D world AND with optional coop, which includes randomly created levels, handmade levels or the campaign.
Maybe the selection of towers is a bit thin and i wished there was more plus variations or actual upgrades (like lets say turning a standard tower either into a gatling gun type or a slow fireing but AoE damage type).

But Knuckle Cracker really has a talent of creating fun games.



Bottomline:
The Creeper Games are all really fun and cool Tower Defense Strategy Games.
They all offer a lot of modes and content for a quite good price, deep gameplay and a ton of interesting functions, allowing for different strategies on each level.

What is holding these games back majorly is the overal presentation quality that is not just lacking but problematic.
No Tooltips is a no go. No proper ingame "Manual" or info section is a no go.
And all of that is ignoring the bad quality 90s style of menus and panels that lack information and making a lot of the gameplay pure guess work.

And my assumption is, that this is due to some tunnel vision on these shortcomings.
Creeper World 4 seems to follow the idea that "people buying this played the previous 4 games i created and thus know all the stuff already", ignoring new players or occasional players that just dont.
And they cant learn the stuff, because the game doesnt give them any information on a lot of things.

If he went out and actually spend time improving that area drastically, these games were absolute Tower Defense masterpieces.
But with the lacking quality offered, they are rather a 75/100 than a 90/100 experience.
Fun gameplay held back from a bad framework and lacking polish.

Still a recommendation, but dude come on, focus a bit on the shortcomings.