Recent reviews by IonDrako

This game is almost fully Early access but they didn't sell it as so. It clearly lacks many features that either should have been in it at a 1.0 launch or are half done in the files but not available in game.

Not sure why they didn't launch in early access since that's what this is.

An overall flat experience of an idle game. Interest in unlocking ball types falls off after you realize how little that actually matters, I finished the prestige tree before getting to the final 2 ball types because they aren't worth grinding the gold for when you can just let 6-9 or so ball types autodrop and clear boards afk for prestige grinding and especially when getting the prestige points and filling the tree feel necessary for getting enough gold to even unlock them.

Prestige tree wasn't exciting to go through really. And the final grind for the last 2 achievements take so long despite essentially already hitting the end and just needing to wait for your money to go up high enough to check off the last 2 things. Like you finish off the prestige tree and have multiple more hours of just waiting for gold to build up to max the last balls autodrop and hit 1qd gold. You may be able to slightly speed it up if you feel like turning all autodrops off and manually doing a shoot sweep on the board every 3-4 seconds for hours on end, which yeah screw that. And there's nothing else in the game currently, no interesting payoff for maxing the tree since that just sets off your hour long final grind, the last ball is the best one but at the point you reach it who cares.

Like I probably wouldn't have bothered writing a review but with better or more interesting idle/incremental games being available online for free I kind of want the ones I pay money for to have more going for them then basic/flat incremental game progression that finish off in an unfun multihour grind for the basic currency to finish off a couple achieves. (Currently still in that final grind btw)

I didn't expect it but it's honestly a really solid game despite it being early access. (my play time is currently low due to time schedule issue with the people I'm playing with but we all plan to play more with how much it impressed us)

Core of the gameplay is extremely similar to Risk of Rain 2 (spawn, kill, get money, open chest, grind stuff you don't want, etc etc). That said this has meta progression in a tree (quick to fill out) and some character specific bonuses along with augments via the awakening system during a run that add to or alter how some of your skills work during that run which adds a good chunk to replayability to the characters.

You can also trade around your items in multiplayer inbetween rounds which feels nice to fine tune build since you have a time stop inbetween room after each stage with a newt style shop and some target dummies. And this is a small thing but it has a decent run history tab where you can see everyones statistics and items (can only see your own augments though). Multiplayer was also smooth in my experience.

Map design is all around solid and fun to look at, enemy design is good as well. Playable character design seems really solid too, after they get out the 6th character I really hope more get added either base or in dlc along with some unlockable alternate costumes for the characters would be a nice addition down the line.


As far as cons go maybe I haven't gone far enough but there doesn't seem to be a final boss/end of a run outside dying(they just updated a way to end in while they work on a final boss) and many characters can fall off pretty hard as relying on stacked item triggers seems to be the main way to scale damage in a long run. There are also some translation quirks like on/off being open/close in the settings. Some of the new notifications in the codex wont go away.

Most of that I think will get fixed since after early access launch they've been putting out patches like crazy so far and the devs at least seem to care about this game. Actually looking forward to how the finished product turns out.

There are a lot of issues with this game that made me pretty much hate it by the end.

The base characters and story are fine, can technically go through it without knowing much the of Uta story and be ok but some stuff makes more sense if you do know the Uta story stuff. Though in a not knowing the story situation the ending really sucks.

The base combat is pretty by the books for 3d rpgs with the only semi-unique addition being an action wheel that is hit or misss (big miss with it not having some stagger lock resistance. If your characters do get staggered by a group of enemies there is a non-zero chance they can stagger lock you making it so you never get to go again until you lose the fight. It's rare but I did have it happen once.)

Graphically it's fine, not amazing and kinda similar to 3d rpgs made in the ps3 era. One exception is town npcs which end up looking straight out of some ps1 or ps2 era game.

Ran into major and minor bugs and glitches, stuff from cutscenes visually freezing and audibly stuttering to a ladder animation not ending, me getting back on the ladder to try and fix it only for the game to hardlock and require a force close. Also game seems pretty unoptimized, without a semi-fix from the forums just being in some zones stutter so bad it can induce headaches.

This is a bit of a nitpick but enemy variety is actually really bad, except story bosses and like 1 lone exception in the last zone most enemies are seen pretty early into the game with everything afterwards being recolors, resizes or both. Even the optional super bosses are just recolor/resizes of enemies you've been killing the whole game.

And my biggest gripes and honestly the reason I'm not recommending this is a couple things compounded.

1. So many things in this game have required small animations that need to play to do stuff, like jumping down a 1-way ledge requires an animation of walking to the right spot and hoping down. A ladder requires a walk up and fade to black animation to get on it followed by a climbing animation. and you do these things a lot, even more when farming materials in certain areas (also areas like the mine the game has you go through multiple times that has multiple ladders you need to climb which really adds up over the course of the game.) Also the pacing of some cutscenes, in an early part of the game you go to a desert, get a cutscene walking in, the walk to a building and get a cutscene of the building. After getting a sandstorm cutscene (that also has a shorter cutscene that'll play every time you trigger the sandstorm after the first time) and finding 3 statues that have mini-cutscenes for each one you go back to the building and do 3 more mini-cutscenes doing 3 actions (one of which is the only use of the jump in the game) afterwards you get a cutscene of a door opening, walk into it for a load screen into a cutscene which leads to a boss that goes into a cutscene, then you walk a little bit to a plaque which then has a cutscene, then you walk a couple more steps and then get another cutscene. This is probably one of the worst offenders of this but it made me pretty off put at the time.

2. This has aspects of the previous section but the final zone you go through called the Mausoleum, while cool in concept as a big space of interconnecting bio-spheres you go between with different tilesets and enemies the zone itself almost made me quit the game outright. Basically every door to another sphere has a cutscene that always plays usually then into a load screen (not a long one but still) and some spheres can be rotated to connect doors to other spheres but the first time you rotate a sphere (like every sphere that can rotate has this the first time you do it) you get a long cutscene of the sphere disconnecting form other spheres then zoom in to see it rotate from inside and then doors lighting up if they connected with a final zoom on the "switch" that just moves back to a default position. Every other time you rotate it you just get the spin and then the zoom in on the interface thing.

Alone these wouldn't be that big of a deal but unfortunately you got through these zones multiple times, with some paths being multi-sphere length dead ends and have to fully back track, along with rotating the rooms multiple times. Also one of the lowest achieves for the game is filling out the ABLs and the reason for it is a couple require materials from enemies in the Mausoleum and these materials have super low odds of dropping. I took multiple hours trying to get singular drops from enemies and it involved going through a 3 sphere path, then back tracking all the way out and going back in again which involved seeing door cutscenes and load screens 10 times per route and you only get to fight 1 of each of the mobs with rare drops per this cycle.

To add to that the game has insta-kill for enemies lower level than you, specifically enemies 5 levels lower that your parties average level and you need to get a field preemptive strike on them to trigger it. This of course has the exception of "big" enemies which are just scaled up enemies that no matter if you're 10-50+ levels over them you are forced to go in and manually kill them which added to the time because every one of the rare drop enemies were "large" types. You should really be able to auto-kill large enemies at 10 levels over, it's dumb not being able to.

Much to what the game is it's very obviously the teams first attempt at a normal 3d rpg and it shows. And despite buying it on sale (~40$) and spending like 40 hours almost 100%ing it (I way over grinded and wasted time, some of it was also just leaving the game open) it didn't really feel worth the money spent, the good aspects were overshadowed by the bad for me and by the end I just wanted all the cutscenes to end so I could close the game and not look at it again. Hopefully if the team does make some form of a sequel they got enough feedback from this to fix everything but there's no telling.

I just can't recommend the game with how it felt for me while playing it and after finishing it. There's much better 3d rpgs out there either through visuals, or functionality and many that are either cheaper or go on sale for cheaper than this one does. It really feels like a 3d rpg from the ps3 era and not something that came out within the last couple years.

This game is extremely basic as far as an idle game goes.

I will say the artwork is actually pretty good overall for the various slime mobs and what have you.

That said the actual game is not there for me. I've played I don't know how many idle games and the thing that actually keeps me playing one is wanting to know what the next unlock tier is or what comes next and that is just missing here.

The core gameplay of Samawa Idle is kill mobs via click till you unlock a tower, still kill via click until the tower actually does damage (usually around having 2 towers) and then continue like that until you're far enough to get "essence" from ghosts to then turn into skill points after a prestige.

The towers upgrade for just damage, you have 2 rng modifiers you can roll per tower when they hit lvl 10 and 25 that have a rarity that affect how high modifiers and how many modifiers show up but they're mainly just damage increase with maybe a resource up, attack speed up and possibly crit or chain/pierce/bounce chance but you don't want to waste time rolling for a high tier one because they just go away when you bump the tower tier at tower level 50. At level 50 of a tower you pay to bump the tier which makes you choose a tower to replace what you had but it's still just a choice of 1 of the 4 towers (no evolving tower paths or anything) and the damage and price per level up goes up. You have a total of 3 tower slots.


The "bounty" system which is a more active play system is basically worthless, the gold reward is fine but only if it's at least rare rarity (because everything can have rarity in game) because at least rare tier gives more gold than the amount the basic enemies in a stage drop. The other 2 bounties are just ones that do damage to mobs but are overall just worthless especially when your towers are going. Should have been like timed buffs to tower damage or attack speed or like double click damage or something along those lines.

The "shop" isn't really a shop but a player leveling system kind of. Kill mobs to get xp to roll a dice on the same type of modifiers that are on the tower modifier things (pierce/bounce/chain/crit/etc) which last until you prestige.

The prestige system is there, you make a currency that you get access to after prestiging that then can be turned into skill points to spend on a skill tree. Skill tree has some generic buffs and then specializing into the 4 tower types. All the towers have like 1 more thing they can do through the skill tree that's all % chance to trigger that does more damage than the tower's basic shot and different towers can get bonuses to specific resource gains when killing with said alternate move (arrow tower gets more essence when killing ghosts with arrow rain etc etc) which just messing with it a little seems like a massive time sink that I just don't see why I'd bother trying to fill out since there's nothing to work towards outside filling it out for the sake of filling it out.

And that's basically it for the game as far as what you do in it unless there's something way further in but it really doesn't seem like it from what I've played. Kind of surprised it has entirely positive reviews right now with my experience of the game.

There's a lot of aspects of the game I don't enjoy but there's honestly not an alternative to what the game has to offer. Wish the devs would do events and changes for fun on occasion rather than it always being for a challenge.

Honest review though it's not a game I would recommend flat out, the game is complex and confusing, you almost need 3rd party tools to make it not be as annoying to play and once hitting the base end game content (maps which are really considered the starting point of a character by most players) you'll almost need to spend money on stash tabs (recommend waiting for a sale which happen often enough)

I've tried to get numerous friends into the game and have failed. It's pretty anti-new player on the learning curve as the game really doesn't tell you many things that are important in the game. Not to say you can't have fun playing through the campaign as a new player, just that that experience while fun for a new user it really isn't how the core game is really played once you get into the thick of it.

So yeah it's a free game, try it if you're interested and have fun with those first couple runs where you'll probably be chain dying to later act content but maybe enjoying the journey. String on a couple friends to make it a bit more enjoyable at that stage and be done when you want. If the game continues to interest you after that point as you learn more, look up guides and use all the 3rd party tools the game has then rest in peace, the game has claimed another.

I hate this game but can't fill it's distinct void with anything else, I hope others wont get addicted to it as I have.

Really can't recommend the game.

Most of the game is good to be honest except one thing. How the core gameplay of a rougelite is handled.

I personally had no issues with controls or anything and the art, story, characters, etc were at least good. But the core gamplay loop was lackluster. Usually in this type of game it takes quite a few runs to even get through a boss since that's the nature of the genre but I fully beat the game on one character my first time through.

Now the 3 real issues with the gameplay:

1: The character progression is boring, grabbing whatever the upgrade stones are called let's you improve one of your abilities but unlike most games in the genre it doesn't give options to augment how they work, it's just a straight damage up until it hits the max allowed.

2: The Item/artifacts in the game are again boring, you have 4 types. % chance trigger on hit, % chance trigger when hit, % health healed when specific element/ability hits and % increased specific element damage. It's all always worth picking up but adds nothing to the actual gameplay of the game. Because the % chance to trigger on hit items deal their damage based off the move that triggered them you're better off just kiting and hitting with your strongest move when you can and hope for triggers. It works on everything in the game.

3: The permanent progression in game seems to be items you pick up over the course of playing a character (up to 4 it seems) and they are just boring small number increases like 3% chance to crit and that type of stuff)


And then according to some people on the forum the game seems to be abandoned so any hope it get's better seems iffy unfortunately. So I didn't expect it to be Hades or Children of Mortia levels but the core gameplay could have at least hit the same quality as the rest of the game (the artwork, characters, etc)

Pretty solid and straight forward rpg, The characters and story is pretty good in my opinion. It does have it's own issues here or there but overall it was a decent time with classic rpg grinding and questing.

Most of my time playing was 100%ing the game in one run outside of the expert difficulty achievement with a little bit of the time being from me leaving the game open when doing something else

Antichamber is in my opinion a fun puzzle platformer. Now it's puzzles aren't the generic type and with basically no direction you wander through the mind boggling maze that is the map layout with tricks and hidden things everywhere. You learn how to solve the puzzles by playing eventually leading up to the end. If you hate getting frustrated at puzzles or hitting dead ends etc don't get the game but if enjoy tough puzzles and figuring out labrynths try the game.

Most games I would pick apart and at least give a few bad parts but I honestly fully enjoyed this game and despite not ever restarting and replaying the game I have kept it installed since I got it. This is usually something that would come to mind first if someone asked if I had a game I'd recommend them so I decided to recommend it here as even now I love this game.

Also I understand it's not everyone's thing and some people are bound to dislike it but I'd say get your own opinion playing it instead of taking someone elses opinion if you can afford to.

If you don't plan on throwing money at the game or cheating to complete it then don't waste your time playing it.

I used the offline jump back and forth years to try and beat it, and after going for over 1000 years total in offline time (going about 60 years at a time upgrading everything and restarting when it got slow just like normal play) I gave up. Mars being the easiest to fully complete, moon being the second to finish near where I gave up and earth being no where close to being completed it's complete crap.

If someone planned on beating the game by playing it normally with no plan on spending money it would be in their family line for tens of generations trying to beat it with no avail. So seriously there are way better idle games that are actually possible to beat and aren't as money ripoffs as this so look elsewhere in my opinion.