Recent reviews by def__init__

It's a good game. Looking at my review, I've played for 7 hours but I feel a deep connection with the game and it really left an impression on me. Felt like there were a couple of emotional moments. I'm uninstalling the game though. It doesn't feel replayable enough to keep playing now that I've beaten it a few times. Ultimately, it's because the game makes me more depressed rather than feel better. I don't want that feeling in my life.

Some mechanics are really nice:
1. Stars and crystals are two ways to progress through the game, and you can make some conscious decisions here.
2. The mechanic of seeing chests coming up and being able to plan for them is a great mix of RNG and strategy.
3. Nice mix of weapons with some powerful rare cards
4. Progression felt good and not unfair as you unlock more cards and powers.

Ultimately, it prioritizes aesthetics over gameplay and feels unfinished in parts:
1. I can't say I ran into many bugs but I ran into a very annoying one: You can't swap post-game upgrades when playing on a keyboard, which is a massive oversight. You can't see the powers you have for next game to plan a strategy.
2. Slow cutscenes and an unskippable one towards the end in every run. Really adds to the ambience of the game the first few playthroughs, but after you've seen them a couple of times, they're really slow, without substance and not interesting enough to see every time.
3. Later levels get ridiculously easy and it doesn't feel like a big reward when you've spent many levels refining your deck. Most games set you up against a final boss so you can really test your deck.
4. The mechanic for side rooms is a little annoying. It's interesting but it would have been nice to have paths you could choose rather than just the same things every time. Monster Train lets you see which bosses are coming up and it really makes the game replayable and gives you more confidence in preparing your deck.
5. There are not many synergies between cards. There's less of deck composition and more of "get as many of one card as you can". Synergies can help combinatorially multiply the number of possible strategies. Magical powers could help with this too making some new strategies viable. Enemies that drain your will are very annoying and it doesn't feel like a tradeoff and more like you have to kill them, because there are a limited number of ways to get more Will.
6. Magical powers unlock too slowly. And I haven't seen all of them, so maybe some of my comments get addressed but I'm done with the game now.

Game is ok. On sale, it's worth it. 18$, I'm not sure given I don't feel like playing even 10 hours of it.

The good:
* Alan Watts fits the mood of the game
* The polygons are gorgeous
* I like how after a point you can just let the game play itself and just watch.

The bad:

Overall, this game needs polish. I'll admit I don't know exactly how to do it, but that's what would elevate this game into a classic. Even the most positive reviews for this game played it for 5-10 hours and this is really sad considering they all loved the game.

* You don't need to add animations for everything, but they should make sense. I liked some of the concepts, like grass growing to move, but the flip flopping animals is just out of place. A gentler rocking animation would be so much better. It's a jarring start to the game and is jarring even later when you have been around the universe and back. Just replace that and a lot of the negative reviews here would go away.
* Navigation is kind of a pain. I wanted to explore around the universe to other planets and stars but that's not possible to do. you have to go to the sun and then pivot around to find a planet. It's a pain.
* The flocking and dancing mechanics do nothing for the game. No gameplay associated with it.
* It was a pain to find thought bubbles and then get in a position where you can click them. Possibly can be done better, like autoplay when I'm close enough.
* Why is there a transform feature? A teleport feature would make sense. Just take me to where an Amoeba is. But transform is just super out of place and breaks my immersion. Maybe it can be a bonus mode.

How to fix it

* This game needs to be fun to look at in autoplay and it isn't. Focus on autoplay and focus on increasing how much time people spend with the game. It should be nice to sit down and just start at. Add more Alan Watts lectures. Just play the entire lecture while autoplay is running.
* Add more "delight". Add more small animations and details. For example, add some beautiful fire animations to the sun and occasional flares and sunspots. Planets can have asteroids crash into them now and then. Animals should randomly cry out or start fighting or playing.
* Add more interactions. Insects eating grass. Pollen flying out into the wind. Fish eating other fish. I imagine they thought about things eating other things and decided against it, but the world seems very sterile when everything just kind of moves around and does nothing interesting.

I haven't played the earlier Civ games but it looks good, plays well. every CIv is different enough for there to be some strategy. I've played through the game start multiple times, and getting through the Ancient Era into he Classical era and then the Medieval Era is fun, but I get bored by this point.

Cons:
- Fighting with units is pretty boring and repetitive
- At some point you end up with so many units that it becomes a chore to play the game out to the conclusion. I don't enjoy endgame that much and victory comes as a relief. I'm only winning games for the achievements, not because the last few turns are tense or whatever. Some games / game genres nail this. In Dota-likes, you have to take the ancient down and chipping away at it each time you make a successful push to the core is exciting. in Civ 6, victory takes sooo long and you can see it coming. The last few turns I just end turn until it's finally over. And I don't like domination for this reason, your troops don't get powerful enough or autonomous enough, you have to wail away at the city center with six units max.
- I haven't really played with planes and drones. it feels like there could be an entirely new layer of depth with air + land units and I don't know if it's done well. Can any units damage multiple tiles? Combat can be very satisfying in turn based games, it isn't here
- Unit upgrades don't feel very good. I don't like either upgrade path a lot, maybe because I can't directly tell how combat strength will lead to victory vs loss. I think that unit vs unit combat could really be revamped to be more entertaining (through gameplay changes, not animation etc). Maybe unit combat strength could be more clearly displayed on a unit? Might make my play more strategic?

Don't get the wrong, the game has a LOT of bugs. On the surface, it's really polished, but the kinds of bugs they had makes it clear that they haven't put proper thought into the design of the game. Still, I like the overall philosophy of the game and i've had a good time playing it. I hope they continue to patch balance the game so that it's actually viable to play long term.

Graphics: 8/10
Sound design: 10/10
Music: 7/10
Story: 5/10
Gameplay (gathering, crafting): 8/10
Gameplay (combat): 8/10
Gameplay (loot and progression): 4/10

TL:DR; Like Slay the Spire with tower defense. Lots of clan combinations for variety. StS is a survival game, and this makes me feel crummy sometimes.In MT, you make game breaking combos and decimate the bosses, except they scale exponentially too, and you can lose if you mess up. This makes it very satisfying to win but very challenging at the same time. DLC is a must, the infusion mechanic literally exponentiates the number of viable strategies.

I don't know why this game isn't more popular. I have never found a game with as much depth and replayability as Monster Train. It's like Slay the Spire + Tower defense. I like so many things about it:
1. Combination of 2 clans: You end up with 36 different overlapping card pools. Each clan has 2-3 main mechanics. Healing is primarily an Awoken thing, Spell damage is primarily Stygian and so on. This restriction also adds a lot of variety. Some runs, you will know you have no way to heal, but some runs you can go all in on tank and spank. Masterful game design.
2. Game length: 9 rounds, Each is 15 mins at most. I finish most runs in 45 mins.
3. Auto combat: The tower defense style means you don't need to painfully target each attack. (unlike Slay the Spire, which gets tedious)
4. Daily Challenges: For even more variety there are mutators you can apply to every run. And there are daily challenges with leaderboards. I have probably been playing 2 of these, the one without the DLC and the one with DLC almost daily for 2 months.
5. You can share seeds, adding a community aspect to the game.
6. Card design: I think the clans are done well. Maybe there is room for improvement, but there are very few cards that are powerless.
7. OP by design: Instead of trying to balance the cards, you win Monster Train by making an OP deck that can dish our thousands of damage in a turn. And there are many ways to make OP decks. I don't know if this was intentional, but it makes the game really satisfying. Your goal in every run is to exploit some combo and go completely out of control.
8. My recommendation would have been tepid for just the base game, but the DLC lets you infuse units into each other and exponentially explodes the number of viable strategies. Insanely good game design.

Cons:
1. Lore; There is some Hell vs Heaven lore going on but it's not super clear and not super interesting.
2. Too many bells and whistles. I like the variety but there are so many game modes. I would like to play Hell Rush, but there are often not enough people in that mode. There could be ways to fix this, e.g. have a global hell rush every 15 mins. I'm happy to wait that long to get a full lobby. Another thing is the covenants, you basically play only Cov 1 or 25, but the levels in between are just progression stages.
3. Limited variety in enemies, bosses and events: There are enough artifacts to keep runs interesting, but you start to realize that each ring can only have a few enemy types. The pool of bosses is limited. This is probably necessary to keep the game balanced w.r.t. your power level in each ring, but it feels a little too predictable after a while. This is not a shortcoming of the game implementation, but of the overall design. It'll be tough to add more enemies while still maintaining balance, and I don't see them doing it. But looking at what they did with the DLC, I wouldn't be surprised.
4. Limited variety in events: Some events like the one with the blacksmith or Dante are really fun, but you run out of events long long before you unlock all clan cards. I think this is actually a major shortcoming of the game, and realizing this was the first time I felt dissatisfied with the game.
4. Shard mechanics in the DLC are a little unclear. There seem to be 4 levels of threat, but I don't know what they do and this makes planning harder. I don't want to memorize impact of taking shards or looking it up on the wiki. If they made the impact more transparent, it would add another layer of strategy, and could resolve my complaint about lack of enemy variety.

@Dev: please put some more effort into this game. This has so much potential!
Regarding the advertising, call this game early access if you want. Its disingenuous to ask people to pay for an incomplete product.

Perhaps you don't understand the significant difference between "mostly positive" and "overwhemlingly positive", from the point of view of both steam's algorithm, and for the user. All you need to get rid of the negative reviews is to add a "training mode" where you can mouse over kanji and see a card showing the description.

Pros
- Nice soundtrack
- Does contain all the kanji it claims to

Cons
- No tracking of what you learn. If you could just keep stats on which symbols you got wrong, that alone would make this game worthwhile
- The game needs atleast an endless mode. Where it redraws the board and doesn't repeat kanji until you get through all of those in the set.
- Typos in game

You can't use this game to learn but you can use it to solidify what you've learned.

I'm putting down a yes because its usable as is, but the game is sorely lacking and should not have been published like this. I hope the dev pushes updates soon.

A cute RPGMaker game to learn Japanese. Would be nicer if it taught vocabulary as well, but I can see this working. I already know Hiragana, but I hope the developers make a kanji game in the future.

Love the concept. The UI is bad, but I would be okay with it if the game was balanced. Starting scenarios are far too random. In the same scenario, sometimes I started with a $10Bn deficit which was manageable and fun, but several times I started with a >$40Bn deficit which needs almost all turns until the election to just correct, changes take too long and I found the game too difficult to be fun. Perhaps I need to change some parameters to make it work, but I think it is just bad game design overall. Really wanted to like this game

Emjoyable retro point and click adventure game. Minor frustrations when they want a specific action for a , but overall well designed and sound is really well done. Took me around 10 hours overall