STEAM GROUP
Calicifer's reviews Calicifer
STEAM GROUP
Calicifer's reviews Calicifer
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IN-GAME
3
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Founded
29 November, 2021
Language
English
Location
Lithuania 
Nightbringer 13 Jun, 2024 @ 11:05am
Swarm Grinder
A twist which goes nowhere

This game is just another copy of Vampire Survivor. It tries to be unique, but ultimately it doesn't deliver on anything and ends up just as worse version of an original. Combine it with performance issues on weaker systems and lack of refined gameplay, there is little reason to play this over something else.

🕹️The Twist🕹️
Game was advertised about fuel management and pulling of enemies to get fuel and to progress. There was supposed to be risk/reward factor involved. Upgrades and running of your bot were ought to be an important factor. However, there isn't any of this here. Systems are in place, but they are not balanced to matter.
    Pull of enemy cells
  • This game is unique that enemies do not come at you, but you come at them. This should had been something which would make it different compared to Vampire Survivors, but in reality it doesn't achieve anything. You still have to rush through the map, because enemies scale with levels. Game is designed around going to digsites to which you want to get as fast as possible. So, where is exactly the difference? You can stop and deal with existing enemies, however that is when you are start falling behind. You always want to be moving forwards, circling excisting enemies once or twice and then do all that again. Cell mechanics have no relevance on actual gameplay.

    How to Improve it?
    There should be different types of cells. There should be some paths devoid of enemies while most direct one would have more and more powerful enemies. This would allow you to make some decisions about how you are going to approach the point. Then you could improve the system by making more meaningful objectives. Rather than going to all drill sites, a player would only need to harvest X amount of stuff which would equate to most, but not all drillsites. That would allow him to skip points which happens to be too much trouble. A heat map would also be nice for you to plan your approaches.

    Grinded Dinosours
  • Game has a fuel system where you need to replenish your mech timer with drops from enemies. You get them by activating pods and killing them. That gives you your fuel back. The more upgrades you get, the more fuel you consumer per second. However, in reality you rarely will run out of fuel. When you run out of it, nothing happens. There are upgrades to make fuel management inconsequential even if it was a consideration before.

    How to Improve it?
    Your mech should only use fuel when fighting. This would allow careful planning of your next steps, provided with previous changes. It should also have power levels and lack of fuel should be a death sentence. Now it doesn't matter. I would run out of fuel multiple times and then would just get some. What is the point of making a system and then rendering it useless? Game should be around managing your fuel. To help you do that, your systems should have power settings. These settings give 30% to 100% of your abilities at increasingly steep energy cost. That would help you to save energy in downtime and activate burst when you really need peak performance.

    Game also should have better screen to track how much fuel each system would use up. Combined with slower pace of a game, it would allow RPG elements where you could take powerful abilities and upgrades which would annihilate enemies and your fuel reserves. Likewise, you could modify your mech in a way where you could carry a lot more fuel, allowing you to harvest a large fuel reserve before commiting to a big fight OR building your mech around efficiency in order to maintain a steady DPS. Even better, you could spend upgrade points on building internal reactor which would generate power, allowing use of more demanding weapons without a risk of them blowing up your energy reserves and killing you in the process. Imagine that! Having a weapon which is super powerful, but each shot could deplete your fuel reserves if you are not careful and then end you a game!
📋Flaws of a product📋
What puts me over the edge is that this simple game is at its core flawed. It runs badly on older systems. Some enemies are badly designed, abilities, progression and weapons balance is lacking. There are many small issues which add up.
    Performance issues
  • First of all, games doesn't run well on older systems. I mostly played with my old computer back at home. This game had 1% drops to 1 FPS. I can see same tendency and here with system maxing out game's engine framerate, but something keeps on driving framerate down hard.
    https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3267737835
    Design issues
  • What annoys me is how this game is designed. It has little content, but it is drawn out. Most people quit few hours in, accomplishing very little. Part of this is that unlocks are slow. You keep on grinding through missions with too little of variety.

    Then the little there is in this game, it's badly designed. For example, boss has an underground attack which simply means that he goes away for a little and appears in a red circle. First versions of it are harmless. However, at later evolutions this circle is bigger and faster. It is impossible to evade it and developer clearly intended for player to use dash ability. However, dash is a special ability which you can take or choose any other one like poison. This then creates a design issue where you cannot play this game properly, because you are missing crucial mobility options.

    In the end, all of those abilities are poorly balanced and thought out. In a game which is all about speed and not being overwhelmed, dash is crucial. All the other upgrades are too weak anyways and will never be as good as a base ability. Same balancing issues apply to weapons. Trying mortar run ends your match, because you cannot complete it on second evolution phase, because how weak it is while blade build slices through enemies with ease.

    Needless baggage
  • Game is a Vampire Survivors clone and thus it carries needless stuff around which is here just because it copied that game. First there are meta upgrades. They are upgrades in menu screen which makes your mech stronger. However, such systems prevents you from actually playing this game properly the first time, especially when crucial upgrades in this game give a lot of power and are very cheap. Furthermore, getting resources for it is directly at odds of completing missions. It drops a small crystal which is easy to miss and comes from cocoons which are annoying to kill. And what it all adds to a gameplay? Absolutely nothing. It serves only to make it incredibly grindy while it is already struggling with content and player engagement. It is a system which adds nothing to gameplay and serves just to prolong the playtime.

    You would think that indie developers would have at least some creativity and would not copy entire systems just because, but here we are. How about adding more weapons, more mechs, more enemies? In few hours I had played, I was already missing content, the little additional content this game had is stretched so incredibly thin. For context, only 9,1% of players had won this game 10 times. For a game where a single mission lasts about 15 minutes, these are incredibly low statistics. It highlights the fundamental problem here. Game is already boring and developer brutally tries to stretch playtime of this title for no reason just because Vampire Survivors did it.
The Time Grinder
My ideas just highlight how lacking this game is. It doesn't have unique features on its own. It is an attempt to make a copy of a Vampire Survivors. While it is a good effort from what is probably one person which can't even sustain itself as a full-time developer, it is however not as good as other games. Lets not delude ourselves and waste precious time playing games which are just average at best. Life is short, there are plenty of other, bigger and better games out there. If you want to try out for some reason, go ahead. It is competent enough of a game, but it has no redeeming qualities.

Calicifer's Reviews
If you are interested reading full review or want to discuss something with me, please follow the provided link. I do not allow endless discussions under my reviews, because it rarely ends well.
Last edited by Nightbringer; 15 Jun, 2024 @ 8:51am