STEAM-GRUPPE
Calicifer's reviews Calicifer
STEAM-GRUPPE
Calicifer's reviews Calicifer
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I SPIL
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Grundlagt:
29. november 2021
Sprog:
Engelsk
Lokation:
Lithuania 
Nightbringer 10. okt. 2024 kl. 11:24
Warpips
Drops right of the cliff

This game starts off strong and becomes just awful with time. It is unbalanced game where computer cheats like crazy. Your options are very limited while playing brutally drawn out campaign mode which difficulty shoots to the moon halfway through.

☢️Campaign☢️
The main meat of the game is its campaign mode. It is a rogue-lite campaign which strings skirmishes together with varying types of tools and challenges which you have to face. On its own it could be a fun, long game mode. Sadly, it falls flat on its execution.
    Difficulty goes straight to the moon!
  • The fundamental problem with this game is that its difficulty goes insane at third island. You need to know the exact meta of what to do. Farm first two islands. Game is so badly balanced that difficulty meter is completely non-important compared to how hard games become later on. It is also the wrong type of hard. You will be fighting computer which heavily cheats against you and you need to know specific counters to even progress. You need to play in a specific way through half of the campaign to get a chance at third island. This is why this spike is such a massive turn off for people. Notice how many people had played this game around 6 hours. This is roughly how long you need to get there...

    Non existent balance
  • You would think that balancing this game would be self evident. Infantry fights vehicles. Some vehicles would be good against infantry. Tanks would be good against vehicles and helcipters would be good against tanks. It is not a rocket science to establish battlefield hierarchy. However, this game has silly tiering system where more expensive stuff is better in every way than cheaper stuff. So, all vehicles counter all infantry. There are nothing in between where some vehicles would be good for anti-vehicle duty or fire support. No, they all just mow down infantry. Then you get tank which is again, a total counter to all infantry. If you have a single tank against hordes of infantry, you are going to win against the whole infantry army. Helicopters then are timed units which can stay on a field for minutes and just destroys everything in sight. Game has some dedicated units like anti-tank infantry which can fight back against vehicles, but they are rare, expensive and useless outside of that job which they don't do particularly well to begin with.
    https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3346902363
    This lack of balance doesn't allow player to outplay the computer. When you are in third island, you will discover that most of the AI composition is vehicles. Naturally you think that they would be slow to deploy and could be overwhelmed by infantry. You couldn't be further from the truth. Infantry army loses to a single tank which AI can just rush you with. In those missions, AI just replaces infantry with an endless spam of vehicles. Units which are just higher tier than your own and you cannot do anything at all against them.
    https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3346905797
    This problem then is exaggerated by campaign lacking rewards which would help you out to counter such compositions. Anti-tank infantry and weapons are very rare and you need them in every mission. This is where knowing the meta and exploiting the game comes in. You have to get oil barrels for getting free money on a mission and then rush and spam vehicles. If there is a tank which there usually is then you have to spam tanks, helicopters or planes yourself. Just higher tier units and ignore tons of infantry and other support equipment you are getting.

    Mother of all tediousness
  • Game eventually feels bad to play. This is due to there being very little you have to do in a mission outside of pressing a button and watching your units fight. There is rarely any strategic shift you have to do. You have your own strategy and you rinse and repeat it. Usually it is to rush tech then veterancy and gold income. Eventually you can max out unit count and overwhelm your opponent. Various phases doesn't matter as you won't be able to win game early anyways due to cheating AI. So, every mission becomes a slog which you take to its maximum length with everything maxed out.

    To compound this problem, due to how awful game's balance is, you have to spend first half of the campaign in preparing for difficulty spike in the latter half. So, you have to complete the entire map and earn all of the rewards. This easily more than doubles time you have to spend in a map. In addition, you cannot use any cool stuff you get. It is infantry spam all the time, because they become useless later on and you cannot use upgrades for them, because you need to upgrade other, more important stuff like doubling your vehicles health or getting more stuff to hoard from the shop. It is like XCOM where you need to hoard all the materials and tech, but you never get to use them.
☠️The Worst kind of Rogue-lite☠️
You have life system in this game. However, if you fail a mission, what makes you think that you will be able to complete it again with now worse equipment? This game is the worst kind of rogue-lite where your failures are reinforced. If you fail, you use up equipment, lose a life and don't progress on a map. Your carefully planned route now gets blocked and you have to go back and around in a campaign which gets increasingly difficult on every turn. This has all the terrible practices of a lot of rogue-lites on the market where they put you on the failure spiral where if you don't get good RNG, you will fail at the start of the game and you will lose ten minutes later. It is a lot worse for people like me who are just too proud and good to lose. Thus it becomes a torturous experience where I bash against impossible odds while game being unable to kill me. Sometimes i power through and whittle mobs and bosses by chipping away at their health, most of the time however I go through most tedious and excruciating death animations.

Autobattlers generally have a pretty solid pricing and unit counter structure. One unit or spell is designed to counter units from another group. Then they get modifiers on top of it to be better or worse at a specific task. Pricing dictates its potential on the battlefield where cheaper units are worse when grouped up together, but you generally want cheap units to be flexible with their deployment and being able to quickly respond to threats. This game doesn't have fundamental mechanics of autobattlers such as Clash Royale, Rumble or Minion Masters. Instead, it is an old-school RTS tiering system where higher tier unit is always better, mixed with some crutches which are meant to give you some illusion of variety and give you a fighting chance against an opponent who got better units than you. It even does that kind of gameplay badly, because in good RTS games like Starcraft, an unit which usually could be countered, can counter its counter if there are enough of them. Like for example Marines becoming better with greater numbers. There are no such subtlety and depth here...

Good for couple of hours

This game was never properly finished or received attention to details which it desperately needs. As it is stand, it is fun distraction for couple of hours before it becomes tedious. Game lacks legs to be engaging in the long run and depth which would keep players engaged.

Calicifer's Reviews
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Sidst redigeret af Nightbringer; 11. okt. 2024 kl. 14:44