Recent reviews by MonsterDunk

Pretty good point and click game, big fan of the art style.Puzzles were good.

Only downside was the tons of dialog (though you can skip but you'll miss the story) that basically put me to sleep because it locks you out of trying to do puzzles/move between rooms while you listen to it, that in the second half or so of the game is like every single room over and over where you're just standing around doing nothing.

Starting with the bad.
-The dialog is boring and useless, the story basically tells itself through the environment anyways.

-The timers feel immersion breaking / out of place and could be replaced with in-world visuals, the room filling up with water is a good example.

-There's no support for widescreen resolutions ie: 1920 x 1200, had to play in 1920 x 1080. The controls are a bit finicky and the movement feels like it has acceleration or something as if its designed to be played with a controller.

-The game suggests you use a pen and paper in real life even though there are methods to pin puzzle objects to your screen and an in- game notepad I feel would serve as a better solution.

-Failing the timer on a puzzle forces you to either take a lesser grade by adding time or quitting straight to the main menu even though you could mid puzzle, just leave the puzzle and easily re-enter to reset it, kinda confusing there isn't a restart button for puzzles.

-I hate the water jug puzzle that seemingly needs to be in every adventure puzzle game or escape room. I'm on the fence of whether this is homage to the genre or just a lazy thing to insert. Either way if you've done it 20 years ago you know the exact solution and it just feels like its in the way.


Now the good parts.
-The visuals style and themes are well done.

-The puzzles are fun with some challenge but not so esoteric that you feel the need to brute force or look up guides.

-None of the puzzles feel like they're repeating themes / scenarios or puzzle mechanics.

-Didn't run into any bugs.

-For $20 I feel a 5-6hr game is worth it but I could understand it being an issue for a lot of users when there is a sea of quality games on steam at that price point or lower with many times that amount of content. I did find myself wanting more at the end but not because it was too short but because it was so good.

In short if you're a fan of the genre of escape room type games I highly recommend it, not that you really have much of a choice in this genre for recent releases.

Cool Ideas, but in practice is mostly a boring slog to play since it boils down to just waggling your mouse all over the screen turning it into a single color ugly mess with no actual motivation to color things properly or make anything look good. It ends up feeling like old Wii games that ham-fisted franticly waggling the Wii-mote as a game mechanic to make it 'unique' but just turned the game into a chore without adding anything to the experiece.

Whilst also being filled with dialog window after dialog window, that you're encouraged to repeatedly talk to the same NPCs over and over, of uninteresting text seemingly extracted from a teenager's text messages.

There might be a case of 'but you didn't even get to the good parts hours in where everything comes together', and I'd say that if it takes that long for a game to click and get interesting it's just bad design.

Definitely not a game for me and probably wouldn't recommend it to a friend unless they had kids that they wanted a simple game for maybe.

A cute game with a lot of potential that comes up short.

I managed to go in blind and 100% the game in slightly over the 2hr mark, which would have been probably even closer to 90mins or less if there wasn't so much time spent needlessly backtracking to talk to NPCs.

The art and sound are very good but, unfortunately that's about the only positives I can say about the game.

The game is mostly walking around and talking to NPCs who inevitably want you to backtrack to another NPC to get an item or deliver an item to and then repeat again to get a reward. The dialog of the NPCs is very zoomer humor based, mostly livestreaming, tiktok, and the like, with some words replaced with vegetables or fruits, which would be a potentially funny one off, but it spans the writing of the entire game and makes it feel like an old contemporary flash game.

The actual puzzle nature of the game is fairly bland and doesn't start to become creative or interesting till the last few rooms at the very end of the game which seems like a big missed opportunity.

As far as the combat, killing fodder enemies is basically pointless, due to the way the character hangs for a couple frames after attacking, you're better off just walking around all of them, the boss fights boil down to walking perpendicularly to them and then just mashing attack after they charge with no real variance there, though there are objects like bombs in some of the rooms but generally are just more hassle than they're worth.

At a price point of $15 (currently $12 as a launch sale), I can't really recommend it, there is 0 replay value here and even the gameplay loop is fairly uninteresting, the only reason I managed to finish it was to see if that eventually changed once more items and puzzle elements were introduced or the game world opened up, as most games with this sort of Link to the Past sort of style tend to do, but sadly that just never happened and the credits rolled.

Feels incredibly shallow and uninteresting to me. Gives me more of a itch.io concept game vibe than an actual fleshed out experience.

None of the humor or jokes really landed for me, though not due to me not understanding them, they just felt ham-fisted in fitting every zoomer and silicon valley reference they could. It just left me feel like I was slogging through walls of text that added nothing to the experience and often felt unresponsive when button-mashing to try and push through it quicker.

The combat felt alright I guess though the weapons don't really give you a sense of anything other than power level which becomes irrelevant when they all have different swing types and speeds and they seemed to blow up or break randomly without any sort of intuitive reasons to why. The item hits all sort of felt like wet noodles to me, without any sort of visceral (I don't know if that's the proper term) feedback to hitting an enemy or making contact with powerful and larger weapons with longer swing timers.

Throwing an item gives you a guide line that is seemingly meaningless to how far you'll actually throw or what kind of trajectory the item will have and with every item felt so slow that the enemies would just mosey up to you completely avoiding it and hit you before you could finish and most of the rooms weren't even big enough for the throw to work properly.

The power-ups or artifacts or whatever they're called also presented a problem for me in that they are intentionally obscure opting to use flavor text for the actual description which didn't really add much to the experience other than obscurity for obscurities sake.

The rogue-lite parts of permanent progression only seemed to be being able to pre-equip a power up if you played enough with it and having a mentor that did something like gave you slightly more money by choosing them after unlocking them through a task.

At the end of the day, nothing is fundamentally wrong with the game, as in I didn't run into any crashes or technical issues and everything seemed to function as they designers intended, I just really disliked the game and after 30 mins I'm tapping out with no motivation to play it again especially if you compare it to the responsiveness and depth that similarly priced games in the roguelike genre have to offer, this just really isn't for me.

Once you have played the first 10 minutes, you have seen everything the game has to offer. If you expect the puzzle mechanics to evolve or get creative, like i mistakenly did, you are in for a bad time. The game feels like it is designed to be a coffee break phone game at work or something and not a game you sit down and try to grind through.

The writing in the game is very dry and very British, but its so British that it comes off as pretending to be British by using tired tropes about tea, queues, scones and the like without ever actually being clever or witty. Though the writing isn't important, but it would, if it were any good, at least serve as a motivator to find new exhibits/islands as its suffers very hard from every island feeling like a different layout of the previous.

I have no complaints about the graphics, they're fine, its basically just trees and rocks but in different visual biomes. Animation seems fine too. Music is mostly ambient and non-offensive.

Were this a game on my phone I would feel fine about it, however, as a PC game I cannot recommend it as any minor issues I have like the lack of variety or evolving puzzle mechanics are glaringly obvious in a longer play session and I have no motivation to continue.

The story campaign is fun, decently written.
The heroes all feel and play different and have decently interesting skill trees.

The rest of the game is an unapologetic buggy and unfinished mess.

>Performance:
Expect to crash every few missions on most PCs, sometimes the crash will hard-lock your computer and require a manual restart.

The frame drops are all over the place and don't seem to correlate with increases or decreases in action and the same with crashing, I've crashed standing in the hub, mid-mission, loading a mission, mid-cutscene, and even at the start menu.

I initially thought it was my PC but a simple internet search will show dozens of different theories with complicated process of how to dig through in-game settings, .ini files and gpu settings as well as other stuff to band-aid things to get to a point of slightly workable(wowee, it only crashes half as much and the frame rate only tanks to 40 instead of 20!). You can also see any big streamer or Youtuber running $10k PCs experiencing the same issues left and right (some of which are laughably getting paid sponsorships to play the game, which seems like a really bad PR decision when its known across the board to have all these issues and it ends up being what you're displaying to the masses).

Unlocked skins will randomly disappear and become re-locked, even ones you directly buy for money. As well as currency and items will randomly disappear such as the credits which are a long treadmill to unlock skins/emotes/etc.

You can frequently glitch through walls/floors, in the higher level HARM room specifically you can fall through the fall and infinitely fall and permanently brick your game till the developer finds a fix.

Speaking of which, there is no requirement for online outside of a first time connection when starting the game for the first time, however its clear based on the multiplayer aspects, the rotating missions and community challenges, that there is a heavy online focus. However saves are not cloud-saved and are completely client side, so if you lose, things bug out on a mission or get stuck somewhere, your only option is to delete it (along with any purchases or unlocks) and start over since without the cloud-saving nor online aspect there is no syncing with any servers.

>Gear:
The gear was promised to give tons of build diversity and lead to deeper customization, but in practice you're always better equipping the one with higher item level and 90% of the time it just adds a randomly status effect to some attacks, changing your actual play-style isn't much of an option as most enemies fall into a rock/paper/scissor style combat where you are forced to engage them in certain ways. Sometimes gear adds an extra button that's just a buff.

The game does not have gear scaling based on held gear a'la Destiny, so the dropped gear is dropped based on the level of your equipped gear so even if you wanted to utilize the specific effects on your gear you are almost always better off just equipping the highest level piece to every slot.

>Level Design:
Most of the Campaign feels fresh as you play it but about 2/3 of the way you start seeing the same areas and once you're in endgame / multiplayer you realize its the same 4 or 5 mission layouts (as well as the same exact 4 or 5 buildings) of control the point/s, kill 4 glowing things or kill the villain.

Which brings me to my next point, there are 3 villains in the game Taskmaster and Abomination who you encountered in the beta and are in the first 20mins of the campaign and MODOK the big bad of the story, there are no other Marvel villains in any other part of the game, so you will be fighting henchmen 99% of the game and endgame, outside of villain sectors where you will fight Taskmaster or Abomination.

>Gameplay:
As I've said above the skill trees and play of heroes is competent. But, the game seems to scale difficulty based on increasing projectiles, and the game has no i-frames on hard knockdowns so you can just get infinitely stun-locked very frequently. You want to pull off cool combos but you need to dodge constantly since a large portion of attacks are un-parryable, and god-forbid you get hit by an attack that causes a suppression debuff which drains you ability to dodge or sprint (as well as draining you energy to use your cool super hero abilities) leaving you open to continuing to get hard knocked downed by a barrage of projectiles.

The AI is dumb as a brick, Hulk seems to be about the only somewhat competent AI in combat the others you can frequently spot standing around while they're surrounded by action or in Ironman and Thor's case hovering in place while enemies swarm and explosions go off in their face. You also will not be able to use the AI to open any areas that require breakable walls, stealth switches or hackable terminals, sort of leaving you with Ironman as your only play option as a solo player since he can open most of them while others can only open one type of area or in Captain America's case, he can open none of them on top of moving way slower than everyone else through the sprawling maps of nothing to get to objectives.

The camera is all over the place, and you'll spend just as much time pushing buttons to fight as you will trying to whip the camera around to see what you're even doing, which won't matter because theres 10 drones and henchmen shooting projectiles from behind you and only 3 of them are indicated, but they're only indicated that is a ranged attack and not if its a single shot, slow moving projectile or barrage of gunfire, so good luck rolling the dice on your dodge timing.

>Multiplayer:
The multiplayer match-making doesn't work at all.

Open mic is default and you need to dig into menus to enable push to talk. There is no global voice mute so you have to every missions manually mute people one by one if you wish. There is also no text chat or pinging system in the game.

I'm sure I've missed things in the long list of blatant problems with the game (and I'm sure people will complain about cosmetic prices and corporate sponsorship tie-ins where you need to buy their product to unlock something in game, but those don't even become an issue till all the glaring issues are fixed).

The game itself is a good base, if all the tech issues get sorted out and there is like an year or so of content updates with new map layouts, new enemies (especially Villains, which in the Marvel Universe there's countless major and minor ones available that they chose not to put in the game for some reason leaving you feel like your a superhero janitor doing the work that SHIELD henchmen should be doing most of the game), better gearing options maybe something like unique or set items that make you feel like you got something more than a higher item level with random traits of the previous item you had and maybe some more heroes to play, then the game itself will be great.

But right now, unless you have the money to throw away on a ~10hr campaign (that you cannot replay at all by the way) and tough through crashes (that reset your mission progress back to the beginning of the mission at times no matter how close you are to finishing, even if its a cutscene post-mission) and glitches that you typically see (and expect) in amateur early access games then I cannot recommend the game in its current state.

Never heard of this game, bought it on a whim from the new section because the screenshots looked interesting.

Normally I'm not into point-and-click adventure type games because they're either so brain dead that I'm basically playing a visual novel or so obtuse, like old Lucas Arts games, that I'd just end up looking at a guide at every other puzzle, however the difficulty in this game is just right in that I had to do some thinking and trial and error but I resisted the urge to hit the hint button and eventually figured things out in a way that felt rewarding.

I'm beyond impressed with this game in terms of story telling, art direction and game design. What a wild ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ride it was from start to finish, the plot never felt stale or dragged on to long at any part of it. I found myself starting it out of boredom at like 12 am before bed and ended up staying up for 5 more hours because I couldn't put it down.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough to people who are fans of point-and-click adventure games and even people who are traditionally not into them. Steam has a generous refund policy and I think, to whoever is reading this, that it is at least worth that gamble to just try it out to see if it gets its hooks in you (Spoilers: it will). I think you'll find yourself, like me, pleasantly surprised and constantly wanting more of the story and new content the game is throwing at you.

Basically is a clone of slither.io type games but worse due to a gacha system and buggy controls.

Usually in games like slither / agario the size of the player roughly indicates strength and you're also able to try and out maneuver, however in this game there is a permanent progression system (which you can skip though real money or playing a ton) which massively changes the strength of your crab making the size/growth sort of irrelevant.

The game also equipment such as hats and skill points which also can give you massive power imbalances permanently.

If you die you can use an expendable lives resource which drop rarely (or surprise you can buy gacha pulls and gain them) and you retain your size allowing you to respawn relatively close to who killed you and keep running back at them.

The weapon system in the game is pretty broken as well, they're supposed to be somewhat of an equalizer when something is bigger than you but instead they basically give you a guaranteed win if you have a better weapon/shield.

The way combat works in the game isn't through out moving or outplaying someone else, you literally click on them and it auto-follows and hits them and proceeds through a randomized dice-rolls of hits/blocks/crits/flips, which in turn makes it really easy to team up with friends and dominate a lobby since you won't be accidentally attacking them and the names aren't obfuscated and the playerbase isn't large enough to make queueing together hard.

The end-screen of this game also suffers through moving you out of the action back to a leveling/rank system, blasting you with a bunch of lights and stats and then forcing you to the menu through 2 or 3 loading screens before you can then go back 2 more screens to queue and then load the entire game again and inevitably end up in the exact same lobby you were in since there usually isn't more than 1 active anyways.

I cannot recommend this game at all and with whats in the game already its structured to be a guessing game of who poured more time/money into the game to be stronger as you get bopped by someone who is microscopic to you and you sit through 30 seconds of loading and clicking before coming back and getting insta-bopped again and being prompted to put more coins into the machine.

A bug ridden mess. Multiple game breaking bugs at launch, tons of annoying non-game breaking bugs, some even reported as far back as a year ago. Also, the online component reads as if complete amateurs slapped it together, bug fixes making things worse, server down times lasting multiple days.

I cannot in good conscience recommend a game like this and from a development team who clearly does not respect their customers enough to put out a quality tested product.

Many will say things such as 'they're a small team', 'they didn't expect this many players' and 'X game also did something bad'. All of which are not valid excuses for not being able to do any market analysis or even see their own sales numbers, or the blatant disregard for widely reported bugs, and historical evidence of things happening should cause advancement and forethought into releases not create a standard of how low you can go with quality at release.