Game controls constantly lock up, making you unable to do anything. Whatever nonsensical shortcut they had invented for this game actively ruins the experience. It seems like a malice from developers part as in fast paced tower defense (imagine adding reflexes to a tower defense game!) this is a frustrating death sentence.

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This game is amazing at what it is trying to do. At the end it starts becoming rather bothersome and it starts falling down the cliff in quality. However, very few people can appreciate for what it is and cult classics either never get popular or get popular way after their release. Walking simulators rarely garner an audience, but if you are in a market for one, this one is damn good one.

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Games which try something new often fail. People want something which they know and is comfortable for them. There are various players and different niches, but they all tend to conglomerate towards few optimal games which they like and gaming industry starts revolving around those axies. While game like these are strange, alien and thus unattractive to most people.

1. Best horror game - Alien Isolation flopped in sales and it took many years to catch one.
2. Aliens Dark Descent. The unique and competently made game didn't sold.
   
3. Spec Ops the Line. Game flopped on release and it took many years and word of mouth through a decade even to get going.

It is one of those rarest of gems in gaming which tries to push gaming as media forward and does it well. Sadly, humanity doesn't appreciate unique, well made experienes. It takes ages to get ball rolling and people who are trying something new are likely not getting paid at the end of a day. This is reality which gamers had created. Even talking to people which didn't liked, to people which supposed to know better. They just don't have a clue how to evaluate product like this. Their critiques are nonsenscial, inconsistent and irrelevant for game such as this. That is most disappointing is when you see people, gaming enthusiasts which should know better instead having an unfounded opinion and betraying their own principles by not exploring gaming media when it presents itself in its best lights. It is like women like to say. I'm not mad at you, just disappointed. This is how I feel towards humanity, towards gamers and developers. I'm not mad at you, I just thought we were just so much better than we proved to be as the species.

Scorn is wrongly critiqued for a lot of reasons. Bad combat, confusing puzzles, being boring. All of those reasons are fundamentally flawed. For one, you are not a soldier. You are civilian. Combat is supposed to be clunky like in many similar games. Nor majority of this game requires you to fight. You can just sneak past everyone and enemies won't chase you at all nor they can catch up with you. People having troubles with combat are same ones who find puzzles confusing. Sure, game could give some clues and introduce them better, but puzzles are few and straightforward. It requires you to think and a lot of people just fail at that. This is why I'm disappointed in people when I hear such complaints. It is also a puzzle for me when people complain about game being boring. I cannot fanthom how clueless you have to be in order to buy a walking simulator and be frustrated that gameplay is about engaging with the world and enjoying its atmosphere.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3365746768
I did enjoyed gameplay immensely. I was absorbed in this world. Exploring every room, taking in the atmosphere. I enjoyed game for what it is and it was awesome. Couldn't get enough of it. However, gameplay tends to start strong and then to gradually fall down and down with sharp decline in a last chapter. You are here to explore alien world, to see sights and to get immersed in an atmosphere. However, game fails to offer new vistas, presenting new ideas, give player cluess about its world. It starts as great as it ever going to get and you see all what there is to see in 1/3 of its length. All the rest becomes more and more tedious. First, you are exploring an equivalent to an alien train station. It might be alien, but even alien office buildings believe me or not are boring. So you are forced to how through unifrom alien rooms with highly forgetable layouts until you reach bottom of the station.

Then game really gets most in your face. As it is of course the hive with highest concentration of enemies which should never be a centerpiece of this game. Yet, you are bound to walk in circular coridors full of those little critters. This is when game starts feeling like a game. Previously enemies felt like real creatures. They weren't here to be your mortal enemies. They were just doing their thing and you were doing your thing. If you stayed out of their sights, they had no interest in pursuing or attacking you. However, in this segment, you have to interact with terminals which for some reason summon them. This is frustrating, because it takes away from the immersion of a real world. Then game pulls a dirty one on you. There is an ammo terminal in a corner. If you interact with it, it spawns two behemoths on each end. It is a cheap way to kill a player and you essentially need to take a hit and run through one to the exit. To see cheap tricks like this in a long and exhausting section really had hurt an impression that I had. This was a first sign of things to come.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3365791502
Then you finally take the train out of there, you go to the last chapter of a game. You see remaining natives who recently had ascended. That ascension is short sighted and story at this point becomes gibberish. Developers also couldn't be satisfied with amazing architecture and art which they made, so they drew people fucking on each corner. This is where they couldn't hold on anymore and revelead their true colors. Then gameplay became very convoluted, asking to interact with specific terminals to do poorly explained things. Immersion that it is a real world started falling apart. It didn't helped that you were greeted with a boss fight. While boss design is fine, it is however confusing fight which is more tedious and unnecessary than anything else. Cherry on top of all of this is its ending. It ceased making any sense and just to spite you, it is one of those unsatisfying endings which explains nothing and leaves you feeling like you had achieved nothing.

I go in depth analysing game's writing here:
In Depth Story Analysis

To me this game spoke in a lot more ways than one. I played the game, engaged with the community, read artbook for this game and what developers explained about their game. It just made me disappointed in everyone. Gaming community for one proclaims that they want unique and good games, but they rarely support such projects. Their lips say one thing, but their eyes betray them. All they want is to play Counter Strike or Call of Duty all day. Even our critical thinking about the art ends up with "hehe, interface has a hole thus it means vagina. We live in a failed society and even people who are supposed to be better are actually no better. They close down in their comfortable games which offers them nothing new. They talk big, but their actions make them no better than anyone else.

My greatest disappointment is for developers themselves. They did created an amazing experience...until the last chapter. They were creating this elaborate work and I was impressed that they could harness Giger's work and make something out of it. And then last chapter had hit with penises and sex everywhere. It saddened me. It made me believe that artists can try to express something more than sex. However, they ended up just as very sophisticated school boys wanting to draw sexual organs and giggle about it. They held it for as long as they could and then they just splurged their load. It made me genuinely sad. Is this what humans limits are? Don't anyone else, but me want to express complex thoughts, emotions, feelings? Is it only me who can appreciate beauty of decaying world without wanting to draw a penis for giggles? I appreciated game's art for what it was and felt it as self-sufficient, but developers proved that they couldn't just create a pure game. A pure idea where they try to put you the day after tommorow of civilization going extinct.

I was also disappointed by creators of this game. In their artbook, they cannot create such a world. They simply lack the capacity to imagine world such as this. In their artbook, developers state that they put ideas simply out there to be explored. They throw various thoughts and ideas to just ponder about. It is like trying to create a metaphor from everything around you. Oh, you had ate an apple. You know what? There is a deep meaning there. Apple grew from Earth and you ate it. We are all connected and stuff. This is the level of intellectual pondering we are engaged with. These artists cannot create coherent world, they borrow everything from Giger and they cannot add anything on their own. They simply lack capacity in creating a different kind of world with its own logic and rules. Everything we see in this game are there just as an open question. Nothing has any meaning.

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This game set up to do one thing and it does that one thing very well. You see game like this several times in a decade. Something which is well executed and does something genuinely unique. It starts falling apart at the end and developers were incapable of giving you anything more than empty pondering. However, if you have patience for games such as these and have imagination to immerse yourself into this world, I highly recommend it. There is nothing like this in gaming industry which would match the idea and quality of this game's execution.

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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.

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Juxtapositional title highlights what I felt about this game. It had so many flashes of brilliance, but it never really worked up to pay off. I felt so many times in this game that quests are getting interested, I'm getting invested into the world and then it just...gives up. Either quest ends, never develops further or it reminds us that it is just a game. Starfield is one of those bad games which you love to play, because there is something good in it.

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The internet already had covered this game to death. So coming in late to tell everyone that this game isn't good had lost its charm for me doing such reviews. Usually people don't know that their favourite game is bad and I come to rescue in explaining exactly why their childhood game and taste in games is bad. Preferably, they should feel bad about themselves too, because why not?
https://youtu.be/TDO1jnWK7_I
I started writing these reviews, because I felt that very few people understand what a game review is. It is covering aspects of what is good, exciting or bad. Game reviews usually were just a meme, paid chill reviews, a list of what person liked or disliked. The most advanced ones were just descriptive ones, telling people what gameplay is like rather than providing deeper understanding by telling me how good of a game it actually is. Even most famous youtubers were nothing more than entertainers, presenting game in its best or worst light for clickbait and laughs as they are entertainers first and game reviewers distant second. With Starfield however its shortcomings are finally known to the public. It is weird feeling when you don't have to play latest AAA game and enlighten people that its gameplay isn't good or that writing is bad.

The core issue of this game is that gameplay is very simplistic and what is there, it is covered in a layer of interface hassle which gets in the way of enjoying the game. The amount of interface menus and loading to get from one planet to another is massive. There isn't anything to create an illusion that you are in the same universe. There is loading screen to get into ship. Then waiting to get into cockpit. Then loading to travel to another system. Then more interface to place where you want to land. Then more loading the planet. And eventually you can't even fly around and are getting dispatched at a random place with no interesting terrain features whatsoever. Then you have to spend most of your time running through empty places if it is just a minor planet.

Leveling
• With main quests you only spend third of your time traveling on foot. If there is a big question then at least you get into a long shooting mission which again doesn't have any depth in it. Items doesn't create unique builds or make you feel powerful. Skill tree just makes you do the same thing better which is as boring as it gets. Game doesn't do anything more than to scale enemy health. Game has a lot of crafting and building systems, but they are as useless as in any such game.
  
  Crafting
  
• You need to go over a headache of acquiring common, but specific materials. You won't remember what you need to get most of the time and everything you make is meaningless and unnecessary in your main quest. Even something like weapon mods are useless as weapons quickly gets outscalled in levels. Base building is equally similar hassle. You need to spend a lot of time manually placing buildings and bases. Leaving your indentured servants (followers) in your outpusts working to produce more materials for... Building more buildings. That is it. Entire thing is pointless and you have to force yourself to do it. It even gets unnecessarily complex with transportation of various materials from different outposts. All of this effort in producing xp and money, making scarce gameplay systems even more redundant.

This game has that Bethesda factor where you get immersed into their world. However, here game always drags you out when you start getting immersed. I did enjoyed unique atmospheres on different planets. Sadly, game doesn't do anything with it. No storms, no heat, nothing.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3324582818
I loved some quest, at least initially when they lost their steam. There was a terramorph questline. It was awesome each time when you were introduced to them. First fight in a colony. You land and you can see that there is something very wrong there. Then you meet survivor who tells you about the monster which you have to sneak around. That was fun quest. Further encounters were also fun in the city and when you were assaulting original city lost to them. Sadly, when you are start getting immersed, something breaks that immersion. Terramorph program is a secret knowledge which you have to go through each factions to get their agreement to open up old database for them. So, you can imagine how your immersion gets broken when you can chat an NPC about it. Or likewise, assaulting capital infested with them. Only to realize that you can just...fly out of airport over the entire city and get back to your starting location in just few minutes. This game wants to get rolling with amazing quests, but it always fall flat on its face.

I did however enjoyed lockpicking minigame. It is actually smartly made minigame and iti s better than usual. You have to pick entire lock and have limited amount of keys. You can use several types of keys to lock a lock, but there are several layers of it and if you use wrong solution, you might lock up further down the line. I enjoyed calculating optimal locks three levels down from what I needed now. Always trying to minimize keys which I was using, only using up worse, most specific keys to unlock the lock. The only issue with this minigame is that you can't go back if you mess up. You have a very expensive "redo" command which costs you an entire digipick. Alright, but one attempt costs 1 digipick already and nature of a lock might mean that you made a mistake at the very beginning and need like 6 such digipicks to fix your mistake. And there are just way too many containers in some areas locking up insignificant stuff. So it becomes tedious in trying to unlock all containers in hopes at getting something actually valuable.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3324585883
This game isn't a complete failure as it did managed to gain small, but persistent fanbase playing it. Sadly, from recent expansion it is clear that Bethesda doesn't see anything fundamentally wrong with this game and they are doubling down on their mistake. Lets pretend for a moment that people working at Bethesda can for one brief moment regain their sanity. What they should do in order to improve this game?

Seemless world
• This one might be impossible due to how engine works. If it would be possible, making player witness physically how he travels through the world would make a world of difference. If it is not possible, making very elaborate loading screens is crucial for game such as this. It is all about immersing player into its world even if that world isn't the best.
  
  Expanding and locking factions
  
• As you are dimmensions changing traveler, it is the best setting to lock quests behind faction alignment. One playthrough would only allow you to experience only what one side has to offer. Bethesda should work on expanding every faction with more quests and then locking said content between your status. For example, if your work for Vanguard, when you are being pulled by cops and you get into the scene when commanding head of police states your record, he should come to the line where it states that you belong to a faction which is incompactible with his questline and say: "I see that you work for government special forces. I'm very sorry sir for this misunderstanding. Have a nice day". Implication being that nobody would want to mess up with secret services while being nobody, he would pressure into becoming a double agent as normal.
  
  Interactions such as these are easy to add and relatively light on developmental resources. You would just have to go through your list of key encounters and add a little line of dialogue there and here with some script extensions. It is an easy job which any newbie developer could be tasked with. Something simple like that could add a lot of fake depth to the game, but it won't ever be done as leadership simply isn't talented enough to even attempt doing it.
  
  Weather system
  
• This game desperately needs to be more dynamic. Now every planet is the same. Planets and moons without atmosphere can remain static, but planets do need to vary. You need to see storms, rains, wind. All of these simple factors could create an immersion that you are in a living world without being that hard to implement. Weather is afterall just a filter setting, adding something on top of everything what is happening in game. You could even get more advanced and introduce more dangerous weather phenomena which would affect your character. Some of it already is in the game like gravity or radiation. However, it is very basic and could be expanded. How about adding wind? Storms? You could visit same base in a sunny day or in a hellstorm where you can see only 30 meters in front of you due to how severe storms are on that planet. Little things like that would add a ton of atmosphere into making you believe that you are on a real world and this game really needs that.

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Starfield represents the saddest part of the world. It seems that Bethesda genuinely tried their best and are incapable of doing any better anymore. As I grew up, I only saw legendary studios peaking and doing worse and worse. At first I thought that it was evil leadership not giving them resources. Then I realized that they had all the time and money in the world to make game bigger and better. Then the sad truth had hit me. Those developers never understood what made their games great. What their audiences wanted. People who did probably left the company and ones who stayed are now out of touch aging men who want just to gather fat paychecks while doing nothing at all. Sadly, this is not the industry where that is possible and we are bound to see Bethesda die slow death as everything becomes just worse and worse with them.

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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.

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In this game you have to guide the most clueless tribe of Dodo people who do their best to die. They eagerly set up their villages in front of tsunami and volcanoes. If that fails, then they just establish their village inside of an active volcano before preparing to destroy the entire island. And you the poor spirit is expected to somehow ensure survival of those people those extinction is long overdue.

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First of all, this is not Black and White game. This is a small, experimental, indie project and it shows. It is a physics based game around few short levels where you are gradually introduced to few new powers and then rinse and repeat doing same stuff in increasingly more difficult levels. Controls in this are unintuitive, camera is clunky. If you fail, you have to go through boring cutscenes. and restart the whole level There are plenty of little annoyances like that in this game.

It often felt that I would win this game despite it. Like I had broken something, abused it, went in a way I should not had. There is this feeling that game breaks under your own playing. Physics based games can introduce such a feeling and this one certainly does.

A good example is at the last real level in a volcano. It is split between active volcano which lava you always have to manage and raining which floods everything. Well, my people had failed to get water shrine nearby nor I understood their mechanics at the time. Person just couldn't reach it and thus my village would get flooded. However, people wouldn't die, because usually they are programmed to die when they reach sea which game never recognized as open water. As a result, I would pour lava on top of it and would raise my village ever higher. Thus I rotated over an hour in a cycle of my villages dying and then re-establishing themselves ever higher. Eventually water level reached so high that I could just use all exploding plants and just barely open volcano edges for water to pour out. So, I built my villages just barely above water limit and they started surviving. However, then volcanos started appearing all around me. I thought that developers intended this as a hard kill on a player due to his slowness. However, lava started pouring out as it couldn't get much purchase in all that deep water in a volcano and it was far easier for it to pour outside of it. So, this big twist was broken from a get go. It is both fun and it contributes to the feeling that of unique sense of brokiness where you had beat the game, but it felt like you weren't supposed to do it this way.

This game looks better than it plays. Graphics are beautiful especially considering this is game from 2011. Concept is cool, especially from back then when indie gaming weren't a thing. Sadly, good points end right there. Game has a myriad of gameplay issues.

Lava Mechanics
• Lava is problematic in this game. It is supposed to be an infinite flowing river which you would need to redirect and to manage. Since all other sources of elements are infinite and dissipate into nature, lava should be the same. However, it is programmed to leave rock beneath itself where it solidifies. The problem is with its poor implementation in this game. First of all, lava solidifies in its own river. This means that no matter how you try to shape its course, it will always spill over its bed, causing endless headaches. This doesn't make sense, because lava is moving, it is hot. It needs to cooldown in order to solidify. As a result we have unrealistic volcano behavior where it disposes a lot more rock than they would do in reality. Its routes contantly changes over the course of a match and it becomes a pain to handle it.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350282699
  The second issue is that it fills up seas way too quickly. Even if you redirect it into the ocean, it will fill up bottom of the ocean very quickly which is silly. They should be a lot more stable flowing when you make a path for it to flow. It would fall into the ocean to slowly form a new ground while momentum would prevent it staying on the mountain. It also shouldn't solidify while there is lava flowing over it. This change is natural and logical, but sadly it isn't in the game and we have unrealistic and annoying volcano mechanics to deal with.
  
  Surprisingly micro-intensive
  
• All of these things contribute to a game where you surprisingly have to move fast and do a lot of clicking. It isn't relaxing God game. You do not feel powerful. You cannot reshape land to your liking. It feels most of the time as a desperate race. You are trying to prevent disasters. Then trying to get bad AI to grab necessary items, traverse through the map. It feels more like an RTS in its gameplay than god-sim game.
  
  Devoid of divinity
  
• You want to reshape the world, but you lack fine control to create something beautiful. You can only do very rough adjustments. Pouring a lot of sand is your most powerful ability. That is it. You don't really have time or need to irrigate land. You cannot make map pretty nor have any need to do so. It is just a rush to the end objective before game breaks under its own physics.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3350288859
  Godlike Challenged
  
• Sadly, in this game you always feel that you can influence so little. Your limits even when powered up with special abilities doesn't feel impactful. The amount of dirt, lava or water you can gather pales in comparison to a torrent of those elements pouring in constantly. It gets so ridiculous that you cannot stop the river for a person to cross by draining its water manually. It gets simply ridiculous and it then creates an actual gameplay issue. Due to the amount of material constantly flowing into the map and your limit capability in handling them in a time sensitive environment creates a gameplay experience which is all about micro-management and constant rushing. You rush to divert lava. You rush to raise barriers. You rush to stop fires. Game is all about fast clicking where it shouldn't be and thus it reflects a fundamental failure of a game design. Game fails to engage player at a meaningful level with its gameplay mechanics and thus devolves into constant micromanagement forcing you to rush through mundane and boring stuff which then makes up majority of its gameplay experience.

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While it is a nice little experiment which is worthy of play if you found yourself interested in such a game, it cannot stand on its own merits as a good game. Physics are not worked out well. There is lack of mechanics of what you can do in this game. Game is short and unrefined. I found myself more annoyed at various elements in this game than satisfied by it. It is a good experiment and a novel game, but it isn't a good game by itself.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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...

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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.

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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.

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It is a not a bad game, but it is meant to such a small niche of hardcore players that it will be a bad game for anyone else, but them. Considering how this was THE PLATFORMER back in the day and its marketing trying to hit the wider audience, game falls short on being great to everyone.

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...if you are considered as expert in this game. Seriously, completing this game alone makes you an elite game. You prove worthy of your mantle. You accomplish something which vast majority of gamers will never achieve nor has the stomach to try. And then developers add asinine achievements like completing the whole campaign chapter without dying... Or speedrunning every level and getting even better score than A+. I would say that such achievements are insane, but a surprising amount of people have them and a lot of people can complete campaign quickly. It is a game which is very receptive to skill and learning. A lot of levels become muscle memory. However, the fact that people get so obsessive, so dedicated makes me question their mental status. Maybe they would be better used by the government or aliens for some higher purpose, taken in a middle of a night and sent to an undisclosed location with other Super Meat Boy masters or autists to make great works for whole humanity. Maybe they could invent infinite energy source and to motivate them we would give a legendary golden pen which only one will ever exist or something.

The controls and controling of meat boy is bad in this game. That is very surprising coming from such established and beloved title. However, when using Xbox controller which this game never fails to remind you to use, you encounter some issues which I did not with keyboard. When using controler, there is a frame delay on everything you do. If you want to shift direction, meatboy seems to have an additional frame where it stops, turns around and then moves. It feels really bad as you expect movement to be snappy, but its animation of turning around makes game feel irresponsive.

There is also a massive issue with controllers when it comes to making an assisted jump. I had to use conveyor and for the love of God, I couldn't figure out how to get a boost on a controller. I tried for dozen minutes when I accidentaly would get few shots where I accidentally succeed. With keyboard I didn't had any such issues even if it was less comfortable to play this way.

Another issue which I had with controllers is that there is a delay when you press an action and Meatboy doing something. This is part of an issue with this game's nature and inherent limitations of technology. I have fancy wireless xbox controller. However, that wireless part had introduced delay in a game where you actually have to perform in half a second intervals if not less. Even wired keyboard sometimes leaves things to chance and causes you to die despite doing everything fine. That delay on a controller absolutely kills this game and how it feels. Since it is such pixel precise platformer and how much developers push controllers despite them being god-awful way to play, I will have to deduct points for it.

The final issue is being applied to both control methods. The issue is that Meat Boy feels sticky on the surface. Sometimes it just fails to jump when you told him to. This is especially problematic on vertical surfaces when going off surface. There seems to be an issue in inherent delay between information being processed by CPU, it then needing to receive inputs from me and those inputs having to travel to CPU and be registered in a game world. It seems that in that gap between some inputs can be lost and this results in a feeling that Meat Boy didn't do what he was supposed to do. What developers needed to do is to create platforms slightly longer, but keep it invisible in order to account for interface lag.

I do have a lot of things which I didn't liked. This game for me ended more on a tedious side where I was happy that I was finished with it rather than feeling cfor more of it.
https://youtu.be/5Vy3Hh9Dqco

Pixel Perfect Jumps
• What annoys me is that this game loves to give you pixel perfect jumps at random. You can play through entire level and in order to properly beat the very last part, you have to make a very precise jump. This is where I had encountered issues with controllers not being precise. Even keyboards are lacking as there isn't enough time to do some jumps and game feels like it is left to chance if you manage to make a jump or not. That is very disappointing coming from a supposedly skill based platformer.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3322970948
  This is just a second alternate level...See how long it is. And a lot of jumps here must be pixel perfect. There isn't a slightest leeway for error in multiple areas here.
  
  Lack of Balance
  
• The problem with Super Meat Boy is that it isn't a game with tight balance, rising difficulty curve and well thought out levels. It is none of that. Levels can be very difficult or trivial depending on which character you choose to play. Super Meat Boy is fast and he just trivializes levels where speed is of upmost importance. However, in levels where you need to jump, maintain height or to do complex jumping, he is really bad. Some levels become either very easy or very hard. This is why scoring for levels is completely wrong, you can easily beat it far above A+ or to not even get close to that. Same for level difficulty. It varies widely and last chapter isn't even the hardest. From such simple platformer, I had expected the opposite. Air tight balance. Masterfully crafted levels and difficulty curve. Perfect controls. These are qualities which I had missed in this game and why I went with a negative review.
  
  NPCs - RNG elements
  
• Another thing which annoyed me in this game are NPCs. This is pixel perfect platformer where people git gud through muscle memory and experience. Adding various monsters in this game who doesn't follow the strict pre-determined path is very annoying. You can do the same thing and monster can get you or you can escape it. They are also a wild card in any encounter as you might lose their aggro all together or keep them through the level. They do not fit at all in this game and fortunately developers agree too as they dropped them in later levels. I was relieved to only fight pre-determined patroling monsters or to be shot at. Those things are completely predictable in how they behave. Various terrain hazzards like saws are the best, because then it is all up to you. You can't blame RNG for screwing you over or erratic behavior of enemy NPCs. I do view this at attempt of adding more variety to Super Meat Boy which wasn't necessarily missing and as result game quality took significant hit as those are among my least liked levels.

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Super Meat Boy isn't a bad game. It is one of those cases where it advertisizes itself wrongly. Insane Steam achievements really set up the tone. It is a product for a very niche audience. Game has a lot of personality and content. It is awesome game for them. However, as one of truly modern PC platformers, it has surprising issues. Starting from fundamental problems with controls and movement of your character which is just undermine the entire game to whacky difficulty curve which can lead to a lot of frustration. It was a nice game, I grew a lot by playing it. I became god at platformers when previously it was bane of my existence thanks to Super Meat Boy. It is just that as a game it falls short to anyone other than people on the government's list.

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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.

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This is actually surprisingly solid game in its own right. It is like a wanna be Mount & Blade, but with magic and just fighting. It has a solid combat system where it feels great to bash enemies and each weapon feels distinct. Game is simple and works well despite its boobs and tight asses.

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Game could be its own Mount & Blade type game. It has a world map, plenty of locations, enemies, RPG system. It is fun enough just to grind battles and raise level of your character and your minions. The most developed feature of this game is its ability to make screenshots. There are pretty models with a lot of environments, clothing and poses. There is pretty robust photo mode in this game too. This is why community manages to generate so many good looking screenshots of this game. This part of the game is seemingly overdeveloped compared to the rest of the game.

Sadly, this game was abandoned despite its massive success. Developers never seemed to figure out what to do with their game or how to develop their game. Their progression with the game was slow and they focused on adding various rooms for making screenshots. There is a high abundance of environments and environmental objects together with wide selection of clothes. Developer seemingly didn't knew or was capable of fixing, improving gameplay and finishing their game. Thus, they eventually gave up and failed to sustain players interest.

There are few key areas which are in need of an actual improvement before the main launch. A team which knows what they are doing could fix it most of it with a few big patches.

Unbalanced
• The first issue is that game RPG systems are grossly inbalanced. Some traits are necessary to pick like XP gathering one at the start. Other traits only give half of point worth of HP and are redundant as you can more effectively put points to survivability. Then other talents are way too powerful like chain combos. You encounter a lot of bullet sponges which you could DPS for minutes. Unless you take few points in extra chain combo damage and then they just melt. Likewise, you cannot get ever enough Rage with some weapons unless you invest into few points of extra Rage generation and then it will be constantly overflowing with it. Game RPG systems are vastly unbalanced.
  
  Dumb AI
  
• AI needs some work. Your minions will just attack anything in sight which leads to them splitting up from the army to engage enemies on their own in a distance. Your sisters won't use health potions or healing spells. Likewise, archers will not try to keep distance and move away from the combat. Or they lock up unto enemies and try to fire on enemies on which they don't have line of sight. This game needs some wide brushes to fix its allies.
  
  Unfinished Game
  
• Game still is simply unfinished in many regards. For one, while your sisters can use spells, you don't see their mana or health. Your talent tree is full of redundant talents, quite of few of them aren't even working. Then there are various items with bonuses which you cannot have. Like for example bonus to lighting damage when you don't have any lighting spells. Likewise, there are talents for poisons when there are no poisons in the game.
  
  Performance Issues
  
• Game constantly stutters. It is always noticeable and it generally runs poorly. Game needs some serious optimization work to be done before main launch.

Gameplay would had been vastly improved if it tried to be more like Mount & Blade. We already have minions. We already have settlements. We already have sieges. What this game needed was an ability to command and manage your hordes and additional sisters (succubi).

The first is rather easy. Game needed a simple command system where you could order your troops to do certain things. First, you could order them to follow you or to attack. Then you could add various groupings and movement control. For example, an ability to make a control group just for archers and to order them to move to advantageous position. Finally, you could make units to make formations like spreading out or clumping up with inherent differences in their targeting where the former would prioritize tagging units which are not yet in combat and latter would prioritize picking on closest unit nearby. This way you already have so much depth by adding so little!

The second missing part is minion management and overall meta progression to make it feel more meaningful. You have sieges. You have more battles than you can ever hope to fight. What you need is an ability to keep purchasing units and sending them on a mission. You need an ability to select enemy army. Select your own minion army which can be lead by one of your sisters (succubi) which would add various bonuses to your army. Then such armies would clash. Your army would experience loses which would cost time and gold to replenish or they would win and would bring treasure back to you. There are also sieges in this game and you need such system to independently level up minions outside your retinue. With this system you could level up them and add them to garrisons which would exert control over the region. That would prevent spawning of enemy armies in a region, but would make it susceptible to constant sieges.

See how easy it is to make a great game out of it? Developers were unable to see what was needed to make it all fit together. With an year of further development you could had added those systems and made refinements in other areas, making this game complete.

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Abandonment of this game is particularly sad. You could understand Mr.Nobody with a game in which nobody is interested that he will cut loses and do something else. However, this game exploded. It got massively popular. Developers made a killing on it. They could had easily supported and made a good game out of it. Sadly, they weren't smart or talented enough. Maybe they didn't had virtue necessary to create something worthwhile. Whatever the case, developer chose to flee from their success. Probably it was just another mistake in their long road full of such mistakes.

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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.

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Minion Masters is a game which came at the right and time and place. However, shortly after its success, development of the product went nowhere. It only introduced bloat to the game, balance became questionable and features got removed from the game rather than improved. Over time, its competition outmatched this game in every way.

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https://youtu.be/H-fWef4_GXE
After game got popular and pretty, its development stagnated. Developers were spending resources in features which they removed like PvE. A lot of effort was spent in things which doesn't produce return to the gamers. Gameplay only got worse, its systems only degraded with time. Big tickets items like portability of a game took ages and it is still not here. Minion Masters is a perfect example of what happens to successful games when developers have no vision, passion or dedication to work hard towards their project anymore. They got successful after working hard and then they got complacent.

A game with a decade long development has a PvE system which seems like a bad joke. It had far better PvE back in a day which got removed. Then years after years we were receiving more and more cards, but game never seemingly got finished. Its store got downgraded. Now it seems like a prototype. Its release on other platforms was very painful. It took ages to get released on Android. Game is still not available on Iphones and forget about steam deck or other platforms. Worse, it was downgraded during transition.

Game has laughable PvE system at the moment which seemingly was done overnight. You are fighting bots with random icons and thematic decks with ever increasingly ridiculous multipliers. In the end, you get overwhelmed through spawn. Rewards are also laughable. There is no context. Just pay for the content which was seemingly done overnight.

Developers had a lot better and more fun PvE mode. Sure, it needed more work and wasn't really all that good. However, it tied nicely to the primary gameplay loop. You play PvP and get resources. Then you get tired, you go to PvE meta progression mode and get more rewards and take a break from stressful PvP experience. Why it got removed is beyond me. Through all this time Rumble got developed and now there is a game which offers far superior PvE experience.

Through the years developers kept adding stuff to the game. New cards, new factions. On its own it was fine. Back then problems were slowly accumulating like balance issues and getting too much free value from too much card text. However, developers seemingly never done anything to address game's balance and at this moment, it is ridiculous. Opponents can easily get 25+ mana pushes out in one burst. Cards have like dozen effects on them. On the field, everyone is glowing with myriad of particle effects. Minions freezing up randomly or are shining in various colours. I was completely lost to all of what and even as a game's veteran who now spent over a dozen of hours playing this game, I just scratched the surface of how many ridiculous cards there is.

All of this creates a terrible experience for an average player. He is getting constantly beaten by BS combos. He doesn't feel that game is fair. This then results in people thinking that game is pay to win. A desire not to play PvP and try 2 vs 2 or Draft. Game matchmaking system is as basic as it gets, it matches you with people several leagues above or below you. Otherwise it keeps giving you bots. So, the experience for remaining players is bad.

Sometimes the winning move is not to do something. In this case, gameplay got degraded with changes. In game interface got worse. You can no longer press in game shop. There are in game codes on your screen for some reason. However, the biggest changes were to gameplay. Size of an arena got lowever while mana rate increased. This means that gameplay got a lot faster. A lot less strategic. It matters a lot less now how you push enemy or how you respond with him. I usually win now through just outspamming him with rock/paper/scissors gameplay. If my deck archetype happens to counter the enemy, I easily win. I get an early advantage and I keep on getting better trades. Back then it was a lot harder to do, because if you would had committed to a push, you could had found enemy minions placed around you. Taking out backline while tank ineffectually was left alone. Then enemy would counter push with cheap cards like Scrats or Chargers with ram. Expensive cards were a lot rarer and they could afford being more powerful, harder to stop. A single push could had ended you. Nowadays game seems watered down, you are just spamming mindlessly lanes.

Different game modes also were never worked on or expanded. 2 vs 2 is as basic as it had started. No separate balance to ban some problematic cards there. No different rules. It is just one arena and one giant bloodbath. Draft however is in far worse position as you can just reroll cards which you get. This results in decks where players get perfectly constructed decks with which they steamroll draft. There is no that chaos, improvization which draft should give you. Game mode misses the entire point and is unattractive to players.

One of a key problems which this game has is that it fails to reward players in a satisfying manner. Prices are often high. Rewards are feeble. However, you are getting them through your nose everywhere. This creates a situation where developers do indeed give generous amount of content to players, but it is difficult to appreciate it. There is a little bit through achievements, through store, through quests, through levels, through season pass, though grinding, through PvP ranks through PvE and maybe somewhere else. Game does give you scraps, but it fails to make you feel good about receiving it.

Minion Masters had failed utterly on having its own progression identity. It rewards you everywhere, but rewards are heavily skewed towards people who win often thus making rich, richer. It is also not clear what a player has to do in order to progress. He is not being motivated to engage with a content and rewards are a mess. They are spread everywhere and there isn't a consistent source of income for an average player to log in and progress towards something. Heck, you don't get season pass progress for losing or even quest progress if you don't play in a specific way which you might not like doing.

After ten years of development, this game feels thoroughly unfinished. That is an impressive achievement on its own. All of its systems seems like being the first working prototype for internal development. Even in game screens have some informational codes for developers... Lets start from the shop. Nice icon on the arena got removed and instead we got a row of stuff which refreshed each day. You cannot even take a closer look at a lot of items which they want you to purchase. Then it is presented in an awkard line, wasting most of the screen's space and making you to scroll through button presses.

Or how this game rewards cards. Previously it had awesome spinning mechanic. Sure, it got predictable after a while, but it was still enjoyable. Now you just get your reward immediately. Like, why remove such a great feature? Clash Royale makes a big deal how you open chests. Rumble has a separate screen to show minions leveling up, gathering stars. It is all the part of overall package and here are these developers who choose to actively make their game worse...

Game will soon count a decade after its release. However, it is in objectively worse state than it was during release. During this time we had only seen release on Android. Where is iphone release? Why game is not on Steam Deck? There were so many platforms for this game to expand on, but developers never really strove to expand their audience.

What is the future of PvP? Developers are just adding more stuff on top of the pile. It is already a mess. Will they introduce seasons to rotate some cards in and out? WIll they focus on balance, reworking those cards?

What about game modes? A good perpetual game depends on various game modes to balance players around various type of content to keep it from getting bored. Game always had great potential, but it doesn't really motivate players to play 2 vs 2 or draft. Those game modes never received developmental attention. What about PvE content? Is that sorry excuse for PvE is the best what company could do? Why all got old content got removed?

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I already know the answer. This project is heading nowhere. There wasn't a firm hand with vision and a whip which would force developers to work. They got lazy and distracted. They are focused on their new game. They wasted years on this game and used it as their piggy bank. Now as they finally ran down it for all its worth, they are scrambling to make a next source of income. I do wish to see more great games from them in the future, but after seeing what they did to this old classic and in that sorry state is their next game, I do have my reservations.

Lets tip our hats to this once great game. It is still playable and enjoyable, but it is nowhere as good as it once were. Its competition had surpassed it. Clash Royale has a better PvP balance. Rumble has far superior PvE content. Play those games instead as this one offers just inferior version of those experiences.

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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.

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I always dreamed about Warhammer tabletop on PC. However, there were no games for the longest time. Recently, such games started to emerge, but they often would muddle their gameplay, introduce elements which weren't in tabletop and thus preventing me from experiencing just pure gameplay. This is the first such game and it highlights that tabletop just aren't good games.

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This is a simple game about Warhammer tabletop. It has a lot of races and campaign copied from Slay the Spire. It has army builder, skirmishes, multiplayer and painter. Game is everything what I wanted from such a game and I couldn't realistically expected more. Hence game accomplishes its vision even if that vision isn't great.

Tabletop games are like phone games. Good phone games do not translate to PC and it is true for PC games. Different capabilities, different designs, different expectations. All of that adds up to the fact that a game which you could enjoy on a phone would not be engaging on a different platform. Same stands for tabletop games. Certain magic is lost if you are not rolling dice with some smelly nerd for hours. Making painstaking moves with miniatures which you spent ridiculous amount of effort, money and time on. Thus, such games serve to teach a player with a game and its mechanics, but are not worth playing long term on a PC, because what is the point?

Game mechanics do work. They create some sort of gameplay for sure and that is a praise coming from someone like me. I had seen many game systems which do not function, even from well established and dominant market titles. That is a win in itself. Unfortunately, what is there leads to poor gameplay experience. Part of that is fault of tabletop from which this game draws inspiration and part of it is game's fault.

Gameplay Fog
• The main advantage of taking tabletop into digital space should be its clarity. Sadly, this is the lowest possible attempt at making said game easy to understand. All this game did was to bring in game links to wiki. Opening windows in browser while playing is always a very bad idea as it detaches yourself from game in order toread a small novel for a small thing which might not be explained there. Game could had been much better in this area. Tutorials, pop ups could had helped in making simple rules easy to understand.
  
  Also, what is the hell going in combat? It is all such a mess. Why I roll so much? Why my units die, but sometimes do not die. Why they roll for routing? Will they ever return? The entire in this game isn't clear. You just roll the dice. You have a general idea what is happening, but it is difficult to see and understand what is happening. Modifiers and rules could be explained better. This entire interface should had been a lot clearer as it now seems like a bare minimum attempt at making an interface.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3279733280
  In this screenshot, you can see how obtuse this game is. What is power/defense? What I'm rolling for? Countless keywords and I'm still clueless how charging into a forest with a flying unit is beneficial to me.
  
  Clunkiness
  
• Game is simple, but is clunky. There is no reason not to give people tools to known distances. Afterall, in tabletop, players exhaustively are measuring and arguing for every millimeter. So, this digital adaption misses the point. In this game, you cannot see what a range of a charging unit is. You cannot know if your unit is in charging distance, a massive oversight for a game which does all its main combat via charging. You also cannot undeclare charges. Something which would not exist in tabletop as an issue, somehow managed to become an issue here.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3279734100
  This is where I got my flying Orc commander charged by footman. A pretty nonsensical outcome which I could had avoided by having information about charge ranges. However, something which is bread and butter on tabletop is missing in this game.
  Wrong side of simplicity
  
• This game is a copy of tabletop and those games tend to be inherently simple. That is part of their charm. However, in digital media, all the systems on top of it are equally as simple in a bad way. First of all, you cannot make good use of your gold. There are set amount of shops where you have a chance to buy an unit. You must have a certain amount of gold which is high. It prevents you from spending gold as unit upgrades, while useful are generally a trap.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3279730847
  You can see it from this picture. I had charged with my chariots a squad of crossbowmen. However, my superior quality chariots somehow are losing to ranged unit on open field. WTF? Why? How many HP they had left? Why such weird gameplay balance?
  
  Then there is just general lack of gameplay balance. You can gather gold after battle, but it is a miniscule amount. Then you can skip an unit upgrade to enhance this miniscule amount gathered. Elite battles are way too hard, considering this game is made around not incurring loses. In general, campaign layout is very boring and campaign is not well made. You will be doing alright until suddenly you won't be doing fine. You will face some unit which will incur heavy losses on a single squad. That squad will take several battles to get to full strength. However, game doesn't relent nor it gives you the ability to lick your wounds. This results in gameplay where you win a battle, but lose the campaign several turns later. That is the worst kind of feeling which game could have.

It is finally the game which I always wanted to play and it sucks. However, it is the only such game in this particular niche, so if you ever feel like you have to scratch the itch, what you going to do? There is no real alternatives to this game. It is well enough put together without game itself being an issue. In the end, it is free. It is worth a try if you have an interest in it.

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.

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Idea of this game is interesting, but it falls in execution. Its systems are boring, its gameplay is repetitive and shallow. Game is good for several hours of fun, but it doesn't justify its high price for worthwhile content it has.

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Imagine a roguelite where only 1/3 of players had completed a single run. Would you think that is a successful rogue-lite? A game about repetitive gameplay loops which is ought to engage player by making him want to complete many more runs in the future? Imagine those statistics for something like Vampire Survivors! There is no doubt that Despot's Game fails as a game and it follows the trend of other games of this studio. Nice ideas on a surface, interesting presentation, fail as a game completely.

PVP
• This game has an interesting system where you send your party which survives to compete with other such parties. However, system is left unsatisfactory due to its execution. It automatically places you with the best players in the game which results you into being steamrolled. There is nothing you can do. This is just not fun feeling engaging with a part of gameplay where you cannot do anything at all to influence your odds.
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3273816825
  
  So many choices...
  
• Game tries to spice up its dungeon with stories and events which gives you bonuses or negative effects. While those little stories are well written, the problem is that player cannot know the outcome of his choises. There can be very powerful boons or detrimental effects under those choices. It adds nothing to the gameplay outside of RNG. An experienced player will memorize all the choices. As for a new player, the optimal move is to open a wiki and read the right choices every time one even pops up. This utterly destroys gameplay. This studio is known to push such systems and in other of their game which likewise, annihilates gameplay and in that game. It is a general trend with this studio. Nice ideas on paper, utterly horrible implementation.
  
  Imbalance
  
• What is of a game, it is imbalanced. Dead easy rooms combined with DPS check rooms. This is one example of a room which can bleed you humans:
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3273820606
  There is another with cabbages. These difficulty spikes come out of nowhere and usually they won't cause you to lose. However, they cause you to lose experienced humans and sometimes their equipment. Losing something important through attrition might be as well as game over as this game is solely about scalling out of proportion for auto-battling against other people. It will never be fixed, because hardcore gamers (and developers) already scalled past any room being a challenge while most people will have to experience how imbalanced this game is.

Auto-battles all have one inherent problem. It is supposed to be about influencing battles with your decisions, but in reality you cannot see what the fuck is happening. It becomes one giant incomprehensible mess. Outside of most basic of interactions like super-duper tanky tank being at the front, you cannot really influence game a lot with clever positioning and choices. Just take one look at it. A horrible, polluted mess which just spews particles all over the screen:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3273814899
Entire gameplay of this game signifies this problem. Placement of your troops, choosing which upgrades to get doesn't matter at all. It is all about meta gaming. Getting broken mutation which just multiply your humans power. In the end, you get cheap upgrades which 2x their health and this causes battles to be incrompehensible mess of statistics. At that point, you are not actively playing as getting most broken combos available and failing the game in 5 minutes, because RNG didn't gave you the optimal start.

It is a game with a great atmosphere and an idea. However, it fails at its execution. There isn't a single thing which is wrong, it is rather everything is wrong and it creates a feeling which pushes away you from a game after the initial hype wears off. Game would be fun for several hours, but at this price point, I cannot recommend it.

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.