Recent reviews by gatr

Lots of typos and frankly still not a complete product but I think it's a (mostly) faithful representation of MMO healing. This is a game about getting angry at people for standing in damage while you outdamage the DPS (I say this in an endearing way)

Targetting is weirdly unresponsive. It's hard to click on friendlies in the party screen, there's no highlight whenever you're mousing over a targetable entity, tab to switch to enemy works for the *first* guy after targetting a teammate, but you have to like double tap to switch to the next one?

I'd appreciate a way to micromanage specific units because it's more often than not only a handful of characters that are standing in damage, and it would endanger the entire team if I had everyone move to the same spot so a few could escape. Also, buff icons from subskills should have slight differences from the skill icon itself so I won't be confused about, for example, whether I have refresh applied on me, or if refresh is making my next heal over time spell free. Owlcat's games have this super simple "Icon + Talent abbreviation" thing that would immediately make things much easier.

I generally think modern roguelite metaprogression is at best just pointless busywork. This is no exception, and there's not enough to upgrade in this game for anything other than spell unlocks and inn slots for it to even matter. Eventually you run into the Blue Prince problem where you're pretty sure you need a specific roster to clear a certain level (or maybe that's just the first lavaland boss being overtuned) and I would rather spend all my permanent gold on forcing the roster I want rather than, say, buying +1% permanent crit chance (an upgrade which caps at 5%, this is a good thing, though personally I think the option shouldn't even exist)

If you want an MMO (minimally multiplayer offline) experience that's more social, try Erenshor.

It's glaringly obvious that this game should have more options available. There's all these items you can buy from both legal and illegal sources and it's up to you to discover whether they're actually usable or if you just spent $100 on something that literally only exists to tell you "you should try snooping for this place's sales ledger." Top result on google insists the game tells you that your character has apparently sworn off using guns, but I never saw this, and if your character had that kind of moral code I feel like the inventory screen should be yelling at you about it.

I feel like my verdict is "If you want to procgen detective just play Space Station 13 or 14." Sure you have to interact with actual people on an internet connection but if the perp had, say, gloves on, you can a) at least find the glove fibers and b) actually do social investigation beyond "i saw this person where they live or work." Sure there'll be zombie outbreaks or terror attacks where you literally just cannot do detective work, but frankly, this game doesn't always let you do any detective work either, when the perp leaves such an impossibly low amount of evidence you're just twiddling your fingers waiting for them to kill someone else and slip up this time. I guess I respect the idea that NPC murderers can be imsim vent goblins too, but a 20 year old *atmospherics simulator* has this beat.

Also this game runs like complete ♥♥♥♥.

Grain of salt because I'm not like a HOMM expert or anything. I lose in HOMM3 on normal difficulty.

I'll start with the positives. The pixel art and animation is pretty good. Some things are taller than they should be but not far enough that it blocks things from view. This game feels a bit more friendly towards like casual random map play because you can focus on a build order based on what resources you can actually flag, instead of being completely out of luck because, for example, you're a crystal-reliant town and there's no crystals on your side of the map. I like stack size limits, it never made sense to have 50 dragons or 123513 skeletons in the same hex.

I don't like the momentum buff (bonuses to speed and offense skills) you get for killing a stack, I feel it makes fights more snowbally in a game that already is very snowbally.

I don't really like the "command" stat that limits the amount of stacks a hero can have - it's cool that you have a mulligan when you level up and get two bad skills, but the maps are just too small to ever fill up on slots. I believe it exists to stifle magic users (each stack generates mana whenever their turn comes up) but thin formations are easy to kill and a dead stack generates no mana. It makes the necromancer faction incredibly awkward as, after a fight, any of your human units that died get reanimated as zombies, but they're a seperate unit type that you can't draft from a town and they're quite bad, so you have to leave them behind.

Every bit of narrative in this game is either written in the tone of 😎 or 👿 and it gets on my nerves. It's in an uncanny valley that *kinda* feels consistently amateurish despite the fact the words are constructed in a competent way? It gives me the vibes of how every lore tab in Vampire Survivors feels too self-righteously serious after Jim Sterling had their way with them.

The units have questionable balance. A full stack of unupgraded tier 1 rats beats a full stack of tanky, infinite-retaliation tier 4+ blessed bones easily. What is even the point of infinite retaliations in a game where the number of stacks you can have is limited to like 6 if your skills are decent. It often feels like some units are just noob traps, in fact it's the reason why it took me two tries to actually give this game enough of a chance to talk about it - how was I supposed to know the necromancer faction isn't actually supposed to use skeletons

Also in the DLC they added the HOMM3 harpy hags (a melee unit that can fly in, do a melee attack with no retaliation, and return to their original tile) but with infinite range and tier 7+ stat block, in a game where a) units need to *have* their turn to generate mana, b) have fun trying to kill a tier 7+ unit with damage spells, and c) a shooters' non-optimal range reaches *optimistically* halfway when fully teched up in the army of a hero who has all the range skills. This wasn't even another player it was just a random troop guarding a thread farm, and I don't own the DLC. I didn't have any thread income that game.

traditional roguelike that really allows for modern roguelike ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. this is like being a high level wizard in DCSS without the CBT of actually becoming a high level wizard in DCSS

i'm pretty sure there's no metaprogression in case you were worried about the last bit of that first sentence

Better than before, but there's still pressing issues. For starters, I'm pretty sure the game still installs to boot drive appdata. I'd also greatly appreciate a windowed mode.

Exploring feels a little better in 16:9, but a lot of the game still feels designed for portrait. If your mouse at any point touches a button on the UI your keyboard controls start to navigate between buttons instead of moving, which is very bad when you're trying to run away from an unwanted encounter.

A lot of town interiors don't have landscape backgrounds, so they feel cramped, and the battlescene has a lot of dead space on the sides whenever your party's not doing something. They feel very far away (especially compared to mobile) since your party display has to be taking up 1/4 of the screen at the bottom.

For now I would still recommend the game on mobile, if you're not scared of really buggy games or fundamentally repulsed by gacha. It's very generous for a mobile gacha game, it's just also very hard. You'll feel right at home if beautiful women often call you inadequate.

Your dead heroes will never disintegrate if you let them regenerate fortitude before you revive them at the temple. It's just a little choice between timegate and random chance you have to deal with if you mess up.

I like idea of the gimmick, where pirates can respawn, but every pirate is close enough to a trash chute that it didn't matter. The demo should have had much less disposal so we have to deal with them respawning or making noise in our inventory.

Payday 2 pager drops would be a great idea; for starters, maybe any enemy that falls in combat automatically loses one charge of their walkie talkie and/or starts a minor alert, if they still have it, and you could pickpocket it to prevent this.

I'm putting aside my own complicated feelings on survival craft games to say that the crafting timers add literally nothing to the game and you did the cardinal sin of top-down games where tall decoration on the bottom of the screen can and will entirely conceal things. tutorialization is passable except for the part where you neglected to tell me that a) you do not start with a way to make wood planks, b) when you say to "go explore" you didn't actually mean right now, because there are no wood planks to be found in the place I just came from, and c) there are wood planks in a little starter box already on the train for the purposes of the tutorial. that was frustrating

the madness -> horror currency is certainly an idea. it encourages exploring thoroughly and dangerously by gradually hiding your inventory slots, making them unusable. this is an interesting idea. however, its implementation seems to hamstring the progress in singleplayer compared to groups and seems abusable in a grindy way I haven't tried because it seemed really boring (entering a location and just going AFK waiting for madness to increase)

all in all i think this WILL probably be fine for someone who's not me. personally i was bored out of my mind but i see the potential for someone who enjoys this exact style of ARPG gameplay and wants the specific addition of their own base to survival craft from. but right now there are glaring issues that need to be addressed

quite good but I would like a lot more clarity in unit stats apart from ⚔️ and 🛡️; for starters, base health per unit, total stack health, movespeed

It's a short experience but makes every hour count.

It gets mileage out of its small enemy roster by putting you in new scenarios with them and/or giving you new tools to experiment with. I wish they'd gotten even weirder with the encounters though - near the end it got a little samey, and I wanted to see more of the rolling brawlers.

It's very welcome that shields are actually viable melee weapons. You carry a shield so you can have the fast parry animation, and then you just go to town on their face with it once they're on the floor, it's so funny.

On that note, some weapons simply feel too short. Weapons with the standard reach rating of 100 can barely reach the first boss. Weapons shorter than that have trouble attacking enemies that are knocked down, which is kind of counterintuitive. You'd think knives and fists would be great in a grapple, but it's often better to not knock down your enemy after a parry since you can actually reach them while they're standing.

I'd like to preface this review by saying that anyone who feels the need to point out they're not a furry is a coward, and not special.

ATLYSS has MMO progression balanced for a singleplayer/peer-to-peer package, and it plays kind of like if Spiral Knights had a Risk of Rain -> Risk of Rain 2 style redesign. If you're okay with games that are light on story and you like grindy games I think this will be a solid pick in the future when it gets more content. Right now, there's actually not much going on and you'd really just be getting into it to try/prepare different builds and - I dunno, hoard consumables like transmog stones and respec books.

Even so, with this game being early access, very incomplete, and in active development, I have concerns about the future of the game's progression. Currently you can fill out your hotbar with maxed out skills by level 22, 10 levels after you choose a class. (yes, this game has some of the early game borderlands problem.) This took me about 6-8 hours for each class. Either this game is going to be *extremely* short, or we're doing the Modern Day Roguelite Thing where you just scale things infinitely in boring ways to deal with infinitely possible growth, or everything past "the early game" is going to be balanced around being at a max level of ~40-50, or the current skill maximums and available options are slated for expansion when we get a dungeon that doesn't have a max monster level of 20. I would like to be optimistic for the latter 2 options. I would not stick to a game that chooses either of the former 2.