Recent reviews by Fodofox

Absolutely massive - bought the game with all seasons on discount when it returned to Steam. Ubisoft launcher and whatnot is of course a given, but there's so much content, it's impossible to cram it all onto the starting island. Generally, dealing with space restrictions is part of the fun, so I'm not a big fan of the two massive islands for Sunken Treasure and New World Rising, as it technically also gives an advantage over the AI that feels undeserved, but with all the content the game offers, putting a palace and tourism anywhere but Crown falls would be nonsensical, which is a bit of a shame.

Do mind though that most players just treat the game as a sandbox game, with challenges largely disabled and playing on easy difficulty options. I, however, *cough, cough* played the game on Custom Expert Difficulty because I'm above that (*cough*). Ironically, combat and sieging is cheesable, AI doesn't behave human - somewhat luckily - and when choosing Expert AI, they most likely declare permanent war, which will end up helping you because you conquer all their islands guilt-free and ethically sourced. Just make sure not to play on "low influence" because it might take you too long - perhaps unfortunately, DLCs bear a lot of ways to increase influence massively, but I don't think it's something that makes the game unenjoyable, as although more influence gives you faster growth, DLCs add more for you to grow as well.

Really important though, learn how to read the production tab, especially frequently when expanding your population, as it's the only in-game display of how much of one good is requested, as the needs tab of residence only display what they want, and not how much.

The game does a uniquely great job at worldbuilding through the chosen style of storytelling, allowing it to show all the different places with characters that couldn't be more different. I fully agree with other players that this aspect of the game is incredibly well done.

I have played Lobotomy Corporation, Project Moon's previous game - one that is also plagued with poor user experience and interface choices. Also like that game, Library of Ruina (LoR) has not received any fixes for those shortcomings and negligence. This game used to be in Early Access for a year, and that is four years ago by now, yet it is still plagued by issues.

In classic Project Moon (PM) fashion, the tutorials and manual are... designed embarrassingly. LoR is another relic of PM's lack of care for playtesting, something they only started to think about after completely blundering the balancing of a character in their current game and complaints from the community. Unfortunate for us, unlike that one (Limbus Company), this is not a life service gacha game, and will thus also not receive any QoL improvements. Also it'd be nice to actually get to know the exact damage modifiers when it says "endured" and alike, which is even a step back from the previous game (and at least only misleading in Limbus).

During the voiced cutscenes (albeit only in Korean), that are frankly adding a lot to the game and really well voiced, some lines are straight up missing to this day or sometimes talking characters wouldn't be highlighted.

The game "offers" multiple orders in which levels can be cleared. There are multiple, parallel paths that you need to progress through with an equal amount of stages. However, the explanation to counters only appears on a specific stage, ignoring the fact that players could already deal with them (in even a way more central fashion where they're a vital part of understanding the battle: Little Red Riding Hooded Mercenary) - and it'd be banal to fix. The battle in question is actually the righternmost of the 4 levels in the 4 different paths, so the last one would do that would go from left to right, just how most languages (including Korean) are structured. Worse, I've encountered the issue of starting a stage that allowed me to have five Librarians deployed - but the max I had unlocked were four. Let me get to the point why failing stages is problematic later, but for now, guess where I unlocked the ability to deploy five units? Exactly, in the "last", righternmost level.

To initiate a fight, you need to offer a reward for the enemies, basically, consisting of books - those books, you need yourself and they are also dropped by enemies, you get the gist. By leaving or losing, you lose those books, and you get to fight a previous stage again, potentially the battle you just did before. It feels like some free to play mobile game progression system, and not a $30 (!) singleplayer title. At least, if you're lucky enough, you could potentially kill some enemies before that and they might have dropped you some better pages. Some fights are gimmicky and require you to clearly see the enemy behaviour first.
They do give you the option to "auto-battle". Not particularly smart, but is definitely welcome. However, it is not quite done well.

To start a turn/round (in-game referred to as "scene"), everyone has to roll what is technically just "initiative". This roll has to always be done manually, although it could definitely just be done automatically. Why it matters this much? Because it's the same key as for initiating the battle. Don't do it twice and none of your units even fight, which can easily happen at the start because of the disabled input of the Space bar in the first couple split seconds. So you'd have to press Space, then you press P for auto-battle and then you press Space again to initiate it. However, the combat doesn't start if you press it immediately, they made it so you have to wait, before it would react to an input - making the unnecessary auto-battle grind even more tedious that it needs to be.


Because Project Moon should start caring about the things that are the norm for other game studios. This is abandonware and a cash cow at the same time - considering a lot of the story in their current life service game, and especially its gacha characters that people pay money for to get them pulled, are directly from this game. So it should be more than justified to alleviate the quality of the game to where it should be, especially for $30. It's insane that they refused to have a single (1) QA tester and that one year of early access did little to even make one assume the game's ever been.

Auckland achievement can go mini ♥♥♥♥ itself

[Click on "See Full Review" above to have bulletpoints displayed, as steam decides not to include them on the review page here]

The concept, story, aesthetic and music of the game is great - however:

1. There is a blatant difference between challenging design decisions and detrimental neglect.
   
2. UI experience during combat is immensely dreadful
   
3. Depending on machine (doesn't have to be a bad PC, mine is rly good) near guaranteed crashes when the game is saving after a long day.

Now, don't get me wrong, near all the positive points that have been mentioned by other reviews apply; and they do make playing this game a unique and challenging experience that make you redefine the feeling of relief. Ignore any reviews of people who've barely played the game, as I've seen both people calling it boring or not encountering these issues because they've not progressed a notable amount. However, this game has not received any updates for its still ongoing issues; for 6 years, patches only ever included language support tweaks.

Examples:

• You cannot select or deselect multiple specific units, all the game offers is drag select. No basic CTRL or SHIFT selections here.
  
• Selecting units does not show you a list of selected units, and barely provides any visual indicators.
  
• Despite this, you often need to select specific units of a certain damage type for example. No filters exist, it is all manual labour, which wouldn't be THAT bad, wasn't it for the fact that:
  
• When multiple units stand in the same area (which is a given when multiple attack), the HP/SP bars of all but one unit are covered by the latter. You cannot manage stacked units in that matter. The game doesn't even display the "most hurt" unit on its top Z layer either.
  
  • The only way to find out how much HP/SP your agents have is, after every attack, pause the game, click on the enemy (or any other enemy) and click yourself through the agent list. Each department has its agents listed separately on their own page. It does not tell you whether or not the agent displayed is currently attacking the enemy in question. You can also not see whether or not they're in the stack because all the names layer over each other. The only way is to drag select them and then ask them to do a research task, then all of them will be shown by name.
    
  • If the agent tanking is worn out and should move away, but is currently in a stack, you - for previously mentioned reasons - obviously can't select them, you have to find them through a procedure similar to bullet point 4, but instead of clicking on an enemy, you click on a containment unit to tell the agent to work on it, so they move away, just enough so you can click the agent and manually command them.
• If you want to observe the HP/SP of an agent in combat, vitally the one taking the damage, through aforementioned method, too bad. As soon as you unpause, whichever page you were on gets reset to the first one.
  
• The same horrendous visuals also apply to shields, of which you don't know if they are still applied to units in the stack.
  
• (Although damage numbers are unlockable, they visually do not differ whether or not an agent just took damage or an enemy. You have to repeat the previous step after each attack animation if you want to be certain.)
  
• Weapons do not show their range (short, medium, etc.), unless when selecting the containment unit it originates from. If you want to exclude agents with weapons deemed "very short", you have to check each containment unit, write them down, and then check for every agent. This is vital for Helix Ordeal.
  
• The menu when equipping gear is also insane, as if prior to this game there has been no experience regarding loadout menus been made. Instead of showing agents with their equipment, it shows all the equipment and which agent it has (including equipment no one currently equips). There is no way of seeing which agent has not been equipped yet. There is a filter system for rarity, but it only filters specific rarities, excluding higher ones. By default, they're all shuffled...
  
• On the day summary screen at the end, it shows which agent has been promoted or whose stats have been increased. However, the field for the stats is only big enough for the first two digits, meaning is someone got over 100, it starts showing it as 10.
  
• Boss and pseudo boss battles rely too much on doorway or elevator cheese, to the point that it must be intentional. You can't command your units within a room/hallway, so you can only command units to get behind an enemy by commanding them to talk to a room behind said enemy (which can be vital for bosses). It's way easier to wait for the boss to walk to a doorway or elevator and then just dodge by moving into another room.
  
• If any unit changes rooms, they disappear for a while and then pop out at the doorway of the new room. There's no indicator (like a dot) that agents or enemies are currently in "traversal", so if you're looking for someone, suboptimal. You can still select them via drag select if you know between which doors the agent would be.
  
  • The technology would be there, as I was astounded to find out. While fighting Red Mist, during the charge attack in the fourth phase, the targeted agent gets a mark over their head, which will still be visible in room traversal. I kept commanding the unit from left to right while stuck in transition so he couldn't be attacked and killed by the special attack.
• When ordering your agents to attack an enemy and that enemy enters this room traversal, all agents will stop attacking and wait, until the enemy pops out again.

As now established, combat is ass, and some of these things also apply during peaceful downtime. These things mentioned can, in my humble but correct opinion, hardly be justified for difficulty, immersion, or reward. It's a scuffed system that does not offer its own solutions. It's hardship that is not caused by the challenges given to the manager of Lobotomy Corporation, it is agonisingly primitive UI/UX design that the player's cramped hand sweating over the back of their mouse has to deal with.

Now to the reason I got pushed over the edge to leave a review. This game - even if it barely has to deal with many variables when saving (i.e. finish your day) - can completely ♥♥♥♥ itself after a long day. It crashed, the entire progress of the day is gone, and that was more than an hour of stressful work to finish the day with suppressing a Midnight Ordeal for a mission. Lo and behold, when checking online, I found countless reports of this being an occurrence, "especially after Midnight Ordeals" (and it's not a PC issue) - they've had this happen - since the start - an excruciatingly painful crash, as it is bound to happen after the hardest of sessions, and they never wanted to fix it; so here's how you do, actually here's how you fix many issues:

Get Mods

They are not in the workshop, but you should be able to find them with a quick search. According to what I've read, the "Optimization Mod" will get rid of the crashes, so it seems to be fixable indeed...
Furthermore, I utilised "Basemod"'s commands to repeat the day with its successful mission completion, as I did not prefer to try again, as I even did it with no deaths.

Maybe. I got it on a discount. You've probably already read through the positive reviews and were looking for the downsides. It's up to you whether or not you want to deal with these nuisances.

I really wish my review could just have been:
But sadly it's not all that fun sometimes...

They will never fix Turkey...

Keeping it short, it's a really simple game with simple mechanics, yet can be demanding if chosen to be so by regulating the pace at which you play the game, regulating the amount of customers. Althought griding can be pretty repetitive - also considering, you can automate it and money is just a real life time concern, during which you don't even have to play - it is short so it's not ruining your day.

(Just listen to your own music if you don't want to listen to the same loop repeatedly)

I bought the game after considering the reviews on steam and didn't expect to dislike it.

To explain the review specifically, it'd require me to go into the specifics of content that would spoiling too much, so I'll just focus on what I can say.
For a game of its kind, it lacks the depth, engagement - the game makes a disproportionally huge deal of decisionmaking and the consequences in its narrative, which is an absolute joke when looking at the "consequences", which is barely even a working illusion (there is no decision tree worth mentioning - game doesn't even end differently). Despite being a short game, it also feels like it plays too slowly. The shortness could be justified, if it had any real replayability value filled with new experiences..
The story is nothing worth mentioning, besides being really simple and I suppose they didn't focus on making one either, rather focusing on the dialogue, which is incredibly samey samey. There are some moments of juvenile innocence when she talks about things adults may be more knowledgeable about that stick but that's it. Perhaps it's because I've played multiple narrator games in the past and expect more now. It is definitely a game that appeals to people less familiar with "what's out there" more.
I can't get rid of the feeling it's a case of "making the game longer than 2h so it can't be refunded", which frankly is an unfortunate aspect that has to be considered at times. 20 bucks is too much, especially knowing other narrator games, bigger, cheaper - and since this game tries itself at humour - funnier, that don't limit the speed at which you play. Do not that there are no challenges, puzzles and/or alike, everything is spoonfed, interaction icons popping up (you can only go left and right and not miss anything). Not saying that it had to have things like these, but if it's lacking demanding aspects, it should make up for it. I bought this game because I saw some dialogue/events in YouTube shorts - to think the ones I saw were the only "good" ones was pretty disappointing, also considering the other moments were basically the same, but a bit worse.

It sounds like I'm pretty harsh on the game, but I felt like elaborating on these aspects, since I'm already here writing a negative review. The fact that the game plays too slow (and yes, I know how to run, it's not just walking speed) is a bummer.

"What? What does that even mean? You're gonna kill my ♥♥♥♥? I'll kill your ♥♥♥♥! How 'bout that, huh?"

Only shooter where I don't hate all rocks

I hate my life during the time I play this.