Recent reviews by blitmap

I love this game. I've spent hours exploring the amazing map in this game. I can see it's still early access, and I'm having a great time.

However, one thing gave me the ick: Every time you capture a Pal there's some info text about it. One of these is for Bloncherry, or one of the adjacent Pals to Bloncherry. it's the (dinosaur with a blossom on its head). The capture/info text said something like, "It smells so beautiful and pure before it is captured, and then the scent changes."

I couldn't figure out why this bothered me so much, but then I realized it's just misogyny in disguise. It's like saying a woman is innocent and pure until they are paired with someone, and then they've lost value. I'm toootally reading into it, but I strongly believe this is a metaphor for women being more desirable if they're virgin. I think it's pretty awful they put something like this a game for (teenagers?). It perpetuates stupid beliefs, and I couldn't believe it when I read it.

This text is creepy and wrong, and I'm not sure who let it get into the game.

This is a really special game, but it looks like the community is dead. It *looks* like this because the default search options in Multiplayer are trash. By default, it will only look for dedicated servers and those that have enough slots. About half the time I go in here, I look for servers to join because I love this game, and I see an empty list.

They need to fix the terrible search menu, and use better defaults. As it stands it looks like the game is dead/abandoned until you uncheck the weird options. I don't know anyone running a dedicated RoR2 server. Most are personal.

Also after the Survivors of the Void update the game load from start is a bit longer. It's a tad annoying but I usually sink hours and hours into a run, so an extra 15 seconds isn't going to bother me. It's a small regression.

Recommendation: Change the server search GUI options to show the most servers so people get the impression the community is still alive (even if you can't join a passworded server you don't know, or there aren't enough slots). The blank list by default is hurting the game.

Some things I've noticed since the Big Update:

- Sometimes enemies spawn before you've risen into the play field. (race condition?)

- There was an achievement for the Spellblade for 25 melee and 25 magic I believe. It tripped early at 24 melee and 23 magic. I believe this was the odd bug I saw.

- Sometimes a projectile is fired before the round ends, and breaks a barrel after it ends, but the barrel is empty so there's no item for a 'ball in play', essentially. (race condition)

- Luck seems to have no affect on barrels. Barrels are almost always the explodey enemies.

- I have no idea what resource gain does. I feel like some of these stats should be explained in a help menu. Does this get money faster? Or resources for some other stat?

- There was a typo in one of the mouse-over texts for an item. It was something like "nearbey". Just run a spellcheck over all of those and find it.

- I finally figured out how to make everything explode with a Crosstornado in a helix formation, with the big cannon gun in between (adjacent effect shared). I added several piercing items and everything explodes, constantly. It's awesome. However, I noticed the Crosstornado effect didn't apply until the next round (adjacency evaluation issue?). It didn't begin doing that until the round after I placed all the items. There's a Crosstornado bug somewhere.

- If you're purposefully trying to avoid the boss in the last round and go after enemies, there's no boss healthbar to pay attention to. Need this.

This game is awesome. I've been pretty obsessed with it for a few weeks now. It feels really rewarding to figure out a new formation (tetris-like) that extends weapon or item effects wider/larger. The game SORELY needs an endless-mode. I haven't gotten all the achievements, and I need to unlock 1 character - maybe a cheat mode does exist but I haven't seen it. This game would be SO MUCH more fun if you could enable:

- Endless rounds, go until you die or quit.

- Make rare weapons appear in any round buying stage. It's frustrating that the Crystal Staff and others only appear after like level 10 or 15.

- Let you expand the size of the grid to any size. Or a boundless inventory, so you can just create clusters of items without being space-constrained.

The Future:

- This game desperately needs to become a procedural dungeon crawler. I loved the Big Update but I felt like the new map effects weren't really reaching what we wanted. Give me a dungeon with rare weapons appearing in random rooms, or rooms you must fight toward through several others. Give me several boss characters in deeper rooms or levels (Enter the Gungeon style).

- The game maker has this other game: "Apocalypse Party". They should take these characters and weapons and items and just put them in that game. Call it "God of Dungeons" or something. I want to do these builds in co-op with friends.

I really like this game. It's very addictive and I have already sunk 14 hours into it. It's worth more than $4.

To be clear, you do not control attacks. All you do in this game is move around evading monsters. You only control the movement.

I wish - when you pick up an item - it hinted at what it's evolved form might do, and what other item would get you there. For example: The Cross evolves with the Clover. I wish a message popped up after you pick up the Cross like, "I hope you get lucky with this item..." or "This item has brought many warriors luck."

Also, I wish you could hit Escape to look at your stats, and mouse-over the weapons you have to see their individual damage or cooldown or area of effect stats. You only found out the damage-per-second for each weapon when the run is over.

There should be an achievement for getting the evolved forms of all 6 weapons, and an additional achievement for 7-out-of-6 (evolving Peachyone & Ebony Wings merges them together, giving you back a weapon slot).

I wish you could abort a run. Sometimes I've already put together the right combination of weapons so I'm unlikely to die for a while, but I know because of my loadout I won't be able to pickup the last weapon or powerup I need to evolve everything. I need an easy way to Escape + Abort Run.

Would love an endless mode. :-)

After a while you accumulate Gold to purchase modifiers from the main menu. This is like, adding +10% speed for each rank. One of those is Curse, improving the health/speed/etc of enemies to make the game harder again. I wish these modifiers were separated out so you could play Dommario (slow character) against just fast enemies.

I love this game, and I know it's going to be one of my favorites on the Steam Deck. If the devs add more monsters and weapons I could easily see this being a $15-$20 game.

One particular thing I really like is how the game continues to be challenging even after you've mastered the first several stages. As an example, you initially fight the Fury Sister called Megaera. At some point when the game decides you're having an easy time, you start seeing Meg's sister's - the other Fury's fight in her place with different styles. It wasn't _MUCH_ more difficult but I liked from a replay-value point of view that the game continued to change.

i started this game after an exhausting day at work. I played for 6 hours. This game was bought on a whim because the graphics looked nice and it was cheap during the Summer sale. Holy cow I am floored by the polish. For being a simple puzzle game I don't understand why the graphics are so refined, why so much effort was put into the writing, and how they found such a great voice actor for the main character you interact with. I never expected it to be this good.

I tried to race through the puzzles as an "I am smart!" competition. They're really creative. You have to illuminate certain posts in the right order, or understand that pairs are linked together, or complete both colors. The ones that really got me were the drawings on the floor where it's saying you can only make a connection between these posts, but not those over there.

I got stumped and I went looking around. I found just the right level of storybuilding detail tucked into the smaller rooms of the ship, and I spend 2 hours just reading through logs and emails to understand the crew.

This is really cool game. It is absolutely worth playing, and the devs should be very proud.

I like this game a lot. The replay value is in the art, music, and lore. It's a beautiful, beautiful game. The guns can vary by how much damage they do, the size & shape of the bullets, the animation while firing, the design of the gun, the speed to reload, the rate of fire... there's a lot. You wouldn't expect to be so entertained by just "a lot of guns" but I keep replaying because of how creative the devs are. I even love reading the description/lore of the gun.

I love that the devs are willing to put things in the game that seem OP or ridiculous. There's a micro-transaction gun. There's a jetpack. The jetpack has unlimited fuel. I love the jetpack because you can clear chasms in the floor without dying because you jumped too soon. It's insanely useful when moving around in a boss battle (you're faster). Things that feel unbalanced become reasons to keep playing and keep coming back.

That said, there are problems. It's frustrating when there's an enemy off-screen that you can't yet see and their bullets/projectiles come whizzing into the viewport with no time to react. If you can see the enemy around a corner I don't mind that they start shooting before you've turned the corner. It's different when you can't see the enemy offscreen but they've started shooting.

With the recent patch you can now hop over tables, but it doesn't look like you're jumping over a table it looks like you're levitating over a table. It feels like a quick, rough patch meant to make users happy. It's such a minor thing but it seems rushed. If you hop over a table you will 'slide' across it in the direction of your hop until the table ends. I died when I jumped over a line of tables going off-screen, and when the screen panned over I slid off the end of the table into a pit of death. You can't interrupt your slide and dismount in any direction. I have slid along 6 tables into oncoming fire which I could have avoided if I could interrupt my slide. This is so minor to complain about.

This game requires a stubborn gamer. You will die MANY times. There are things that feel cheap: I defeated a gungeon boss and was presented with a chest. The chest turned out to be one of those creatures disguising itself as a chest and attacked me. I died very instantly right after finishing a boss I had died to many times before. That sucks.

There are many, many weapons/items. Some of them are duplicates. There are 4 different heart containers that add an extra heart to your health but they have different names and background descriptions. I don't mind this because even though it does the same thing, the lore is interesting.

There are hidden rooms and secrets to the gungeons, but there's very little telling you how to be curious about this and find them. In a gungeon room there are lots of destructable items like books and things on tables. When you hop over a table or shoot over one you're destroying these items and the pieces go flying. It's clear these pieces and bits are meant to be a visual distraction so it's harder to stay focused on enemies and their oncoming bullets. In a future patch I'm hoping you have to spot scrolls or books on tables and you can read from them to get clues about secrets around the room or tips for other areas (like a certain mining cart room in Gungeon 3?).

The expected skill level for this game is very high, and you learn better ways to play by dying or watching Youtube videos.

I really do love this game for all the frustration it gives me.

PS: It feels like they developers are actively listening to and making changes with the community. I love the engagement of this team.

PPS: I keep wanting to say "the game is too hard!" I still play even though I die a lot. Sometimes when I'm stuck on a boss or I can't figure out a secret I go look on Youtube or talk to friends about it. I love that the game is so hard it's making me engage with others or look online. It reminds me of when I had a Gameboy and a Gameshark in the 90s. Whether you're playing legit or getting help from friends, it's entertaining and I keep playing. Maybe the difficulty level is perfect because of that.

PPS: Much appreciation for the Linux support! I miss Overwatch but the replay value in this game is insane.

The devs keep changing too much in this game. I've been playing it for more than a year so I don't understand why it's still "Early Access". You invest hours in this game trying to earn the right parts for your bot (if you're a free player) - and then they push out an update that ruins your strategy. It's rarer and rarer that I have fun. I keep getting frustrated and then coming back thinking "well maybe one more shot at it..."

The only time I had a consistently fun week with it was when they finally decreased the power usage on the Tesla weapon I enjoy. Then the next update they nerfed it to do less damage. And it's really strange because this weapon was introduced a long while back as the "close range, heavy damage" weapon. Then they introduced the Ion Distorter that does waaay more damage. With the Tesla you have to be physically touching the other bot to damage it - I don't know why they made it weaker.

Then they updated it to give an advantage to bigger bots, while penalizing smaller bots. I had maintained a very small bot so I could evade easily - now mine doesn't do much damage. All that work I put in to carefully place shields so it was very compact... just not worth it anymore.

It feels like you get routinely penalized for working within their rules - because they change the traits on items so often. Even if I were a new player and had no idea what this game used to be - I think I'd still hate the continous, sweeping changes.

It's not fun - don't invest in this game.

PS: Crossout is a much better Robocraft. Go play that.

I became aggressively addicted to this game until the final round or so - I couldn't figure out a way to beat it and I gave up. I can honestly say I really loved playing this. I loved the soundtrack, I loved the art, I just felt that it was a very polished tower defense game. I am glad I gave it a shot.

I love this game - I agree with the feedback on the DLCs, though. Expansions shouldn't cost that much for what little they provide (imo).

THE BIGGEST ANNOYANCE: I reassign W/A/S/D for panning up/down/left/right, etc - but there is no function you can assign to Q or E for rotating left/right around what you're looking at. These keybindings (I feel) are quite common - the game normally has the arrow keys doing these things. It just feels uncomfortable to me. :\