Seneste anmeldelser af Rinne

A lot of games lately have taken old games and remade them or took an old series to make a new "old" looking game and many of these have felt like cheap nostalgia cashgrabs. This game does not feel like that. It is a solid game with a lot of detail put into it's references.

At a gameplay level, it's not the most complex of beat-em-up games around, it's difficulty isn't that high either but it is very in-line with the older arcade and console games in the series difficulty-wise where clearing the game itself isn't too bad but doing it with as little damage or as fast as possible is what you come back for. That and it has the more modern feature of collectables and missions to do each stage. If we judge the game on that, a gameplay aspect alone and void everything else this is enjoyable for fans of the genre; even if they have low knowledge of TMNT in general (A friend of mine I played the game with knew little of the series but still enjoyed the core gameplay.)

Graphically the game has it's charm. It takes the Pixel-Sprite aesthetic to capture the era and while simple, the visual clarity is great and it's very easy to see the characters motion as well as breakable objects as well as traps and attacks with no issue. The CRT and CRT curved filters are little heavy-handed and go too much for me, but the VCR filter, even with the occasional wave distortion looks great. Visually the it might not be the most impressive game out there but for the style it's better than a lot of other games that try a pixel-sprite style.

Sound wise, it's OK. Sound effects and voice acting are good, you can tell who is supposed to be who, the hits and tings are all to an expected standard. The BGM is enjoyable but I do prefer the REMIX style, making the songs feel more with the early-90's feel to fit with the rest of the game over the 'original' BGM for the game. The cheers of the catchphrases during the level for clears and bonuses is an enjoyable touch and really adds character and very fitting of the era the game is a throwback to. I am not too keen on the opening remix, it just sounds off to me but I can understand that it had to be a remix and they couldn't just use the original too directly.

Now the real question on Nostalgia- Does this feel based on the original series.
A huge part of the game is just how much effort the team put in squeezing in references and throwbacks to the original cartoon. Each level, each 'new' enemy and boss that popped up was a huge blast of nostalgia. The first few levels throw usual stuff at you, expected bebop and rocksteady bosses. But then it starts throwing boss characters at you that you really had to watch the original to know or remember. I knew it was going to be a treat when one of the early bosses was Rat king was when it really start to hit the nostalgia. Having the last boss before the Kraang and Shredder bosses being Slash was always a nice throwback.
As someone who had grown up watching everything released, the cartoon, all the movies, the abomination of the 3D series and only dropping off during the late part 2003 series the game is full of so many references that I'd completely forgotten some of the characters and jokes until the game itself brought them up. It's rare that a game being a throwback to an older series goes into such detail with it's references so it's really an absolute gem in that aspect.
Honestly; I wish more games referencing older IPs put even half the effort this game does.

Other than it being a bit grindy to level up the characters individually and the CRT filter being a bit too over the top, I have no real huge flaws with the game that stand out. It's a great, decently lengthed arcade style beat-em-up game full of nostalgic flavor. If you love beat-em-ups and turtles this is a must play for sure.

To sum it up simply, It's a game that was way too ambitious in what it wanted to do and constant drastic changes during it's early years and terrible choices in it's later years left it in a state that's just unfortunate of a game that could have been great. This will go into more detail about my thoughts on the absolute mistreatment of the game but that is basically it summed up in a TL;DR
-
Launch was met with incredibly hype, it's visuals were great it was story focused, but levelling was not quest focused. Progression was a little on the slower side but it's flaw was it's class system. Ambitious as it was, it was an utter mess and with how long it took to level class levels, you would spend 40~ hours into a character only to realise it doesn't work and you have to remake. Many people dropped the game originally because of how unforgiving it was.
Despite these flaws, if you managed to make something that gelled it had great promise and it had a fun community wanting to give it a chance. 7/10 just for how unique it was and the potential behind it's few flaws
-however-
To remedy some complaints they had of it being too grindy a few months after launch, they shuffled EXP gain around. Now grinding on field maps was utterly inefficient the only way to level at a decent pace was to do quests and farm daily entry-limited dungeons. This didn't change the game much, it just pulled players from some farm maps to dungeons. IT was more or less the same game.
However as the population dwindled they moved dungeons from being in map-relevent locations; which was good for social as people would talk/vend near the entrance to each dungeon and make groups like that, something it inherited from it's spiritual predecessor that was a keystone in it's popularity. They changed it to a single NPC in the starter town and all pre-dungeon socialism instantly died. At this point people barely interacted with each other outside their own guild cliches.
Part of the games soul died with this. If you didn't already belong to a cliche it was much harder to find anyone to talk with and the MMO part became noticeably more single player.
-
Not happy with this change, around a year they completely went back on this and gutted all EXP from dungeons making them effectively useless to put more exp into the main story quest to 'speed up levelling'. This had a terrible knock on effect of all early game story content giving way too much exp that it was easy to overlevel and it became better to just skip content. This is a trend that would continue with every update. Game was in it's absolute worst state with no real endgame to compensate the rushed levels.
-
IMC did not and still have not fixed the levelling problem. Rather than make it fun, you go through the main story and each area is fairly levelled to give you a slight challenge and enjoy the growth of your character they doubled down on skipping as much early game content as possible. Rebalancing monster stats, quest bosses that would take a few minutes to kill and could kill an inattentive player not dodging the very telegraphed attacks now died in three or four hits making them no more challenging than regular mobs. It was done to 'help' players push through the early game but instead it made the game incredibly dull and mindnumbing to push through as you are one hitting monsters several levels higher than you. Which wouldn't be bad if the EXP gained from story quest was so highly scaled you outleveled the story incredibly fast.
This is unfortunate because the story and main quests areas for the first 150~200 levels are much better designed than anything later on. The game rushes you through the main quest story- a very lengthy story that was designed to accompany the player as they leveled up and pushed hard to rush the player to an arbitrary level that was not high enough for endgame or the last parts of the story, but high enough to get you 'close'.
Around 3 years after launch this was at level 300 before the game pace slowed down and nothing showed it more than monster HP. It jumped from 20~30k average mob health to 500~600k in one huge jump. It wasn't until this point that you knew if your build even worked.
-
Finally, years after launch they addressed the elephant in the room and one of the main problems they had with keeping players. The mess of a class system. Initially it was a choice of three base classes then every 15 levels you could pick a circle from any class that's unlocked. As you reach higher circles you unlocked newer classes. This had the unfortunate effect of gaining 15 levels and not have any useful/relevant classes for your build. The change to the class system overall was a massive boon in how enjoyable mixing and matching classes became. Instead of picking classes piecemeal and having to unlock 'later' circles of each class you was given everything all at once all those high level classes you had to wait for you pick right off the bat. Balancing issues aside the system was much better; and if the game launched with the class system like this more people would have stuck with the game. They also introduced a mechanic to freely change and swap classes for playing regularly which was another huge boon to the massive amount of potential builds. All those who had quit in the first year and near launch because they made bad class builds and had to start again? If the system was at launch would have just used that option to change class and stuck around. The class system rework fixed one of the major issues of the games accessibility. If it wasn't for all the other problems the game was suffering by now, it would have been the best era of the game- however it was still plagued with a terrible levelling experience but at least now the game let you change your build on the fly so you wouldn't waste days grinding just to find you can't do anything late game.
-
I haven't kept track of updates over the last two years, but all these issues stem from the same source. IMCs inability to decide what the game wants to be.
It launched under the promise of being a throwback to old MMOs; a focus on the main story and character progression. This is why the planned max level was originally so high- Levelling was the main goal of the game akin to it's spiritual Predecessor ragnarok online. In that game once you hit max you mostly played to get equipment to do bosses, play for GvG or grind for hats.
You can see in most early forms of Tree of saviors life that it wanted to do the same, with it's wonky group PvP and guild war system, the HP heavy bosses that encouraged you to party to beat and it's variety of rare drop head accessories. They also talked about how they wanted the player to have options for levelling in the development blog; you could grind or do quests and both would be viable to level. The scope of the game was to give the player freedom to build their character however they wanted and to level however they liked.
Instead, they scrapped almost everything the game had been hyped and built up to do and made it yet another themepark treadmill where they outright let you make your character start at level 400, grind the last few dozen levels then enter the infinite instance -> get gear -> use gear to beat next tier instance that plagues nearly every other MMO. Almost everything novel and unique about the game was thrown aside to fill the need to copy everyone else.

This is a game that had ambitious ideas, stumbled at the gates and instead of sticking to it's guns and trying to fix the main issues people had which were all related to how long it took to progress in the class circles, how complicated the system was and how unforgiving it was for mistakes. And instead ditched everything that made the game unique other than it's visuals.

I wasn't expecting much from the game and it's games intro/tutorial didn't really move me all that much. However once it got going it was a ride I didn't want to get off. Which the only unfortunate thing is that it is possible to finish the game in one sitting if you dedicate an evening or such to it.
The difficulty is pretty low, even the 'tough' minibosses just stand there and let you cheese them with skills. The stage bosses however are pretty well designed challenges and the final boss on hard is outright brutal so that makes up for it.

Overall I would say this is less a game you play for it's gameplay; even though for an RPG-maker style game is quite polished, it's a game you should play for it's story. A story that could of worked absolutely fine (I'm erged to say would work better infact) without the RO references in the characters. Although I am willing to bet a lot fewer people would even take a look at the game without the reference.

Side note; love the changes to Senia's sprite and portrait in the menu after using her fourth skill for a while. He didn't have to do that but the fact it happens adds such a minor but important touch to it. Big budget games miss doing it sometimes so the fact it's happens at all was a nice surprise.

*Hyun-Ae scares me.

Fun distraction for a short time. A fair amount to do and the update adding a new area really added a lot to it.
Splitscreen multiplayer was a great addition since now you can plug in two controllers, turn censorship on and distract your 7 & 9 year old siblings an entire weekend.

Now just to see if they add more areas and features or online mutliplayer (laggy multiplayer isn't an excuse not to, minecraft gets away with it. Lag-caused bugs are also hilarious too.)

Fun little action game. Nice BGM, Bosses that you can't just power your way through and a decent learning curve.

It's great for people who dislike being scared. It's only really scary from halfway through chapter 1 until after the opening of chapter 2. After that it's less scary and more weird and creepy.

Still fun though 3: