Recent reviews by Druanach

The gameplay is extremely repetitive and boring, with barely any strategies to employ. Positioning doesn't matter, avoiding enemy attacks doesn't matter, which weapon you use doesn't matter, as all you do is shoot enemies while approaching them to finish them off in close combat to heal back to full health.

I stopped playing when I unlocked a weapon that would cause enemies to drop armor when defeated after using it - which would have made the gameplay not just even more boring but more tedious as well as now you'd have to press another button on each kill, again with 0 strategy or tactics involved.

Much weaker than the previous title. The puzzles are easier, and they are not connected at all (which was one of the greatest part of the first game IMHO).
Also, there is TONS of walking. I feel like over half the game is just walking around, especially when doing the monuments.

The flashing ads during gameplay are extremely distracting, and they are plastered everywhere on the tracks.

Driving (with a keyboard) feels a lot smoother than in TMUF/TMNF though, and the new mechanics are great too, so if you can deal with the ads (or pay to turn them off I guess) it's probably an upgrade, otherwise I'd suggest sticking to old TM.

Great puzzle game, just like the rest in the series. This one even has a random puzzle generator, and more importantly, user-created levels, so there's no shortage of puzzles.

Beautiful game with a nice story and challenging combat (depending on the difficult setting of course).

Ignore the rest of the review if you don't intend to play on the hardest difficulty setting - for a casual playthough, those points will hardly matter.

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I played on master difficulty, which for the most part was a really good challenge (much better than Elden Ring, whose entire difficulty steps from the awful controls).
There are however still issues with the controls, probably because they are dumbed-down for controllers.
For example, to use a rot arrow (one of the abilities in the game), you need to perform the following actions, exactly in this sequence:
1. press and hold the aim button
2. press and hold the light attack button
3. press the rot action button
4. wait for the arrow to fully charge
5. release the light attack button
6. wait for at least one or two frames
7. release the aim button

Doing any input in the wrong order, or holding a button for a frame too short, will fail the ability and do nothing or even waste an ability charge. Also, you must not press any other button either (except for movement keys), or you exit aim mode and thus cancel the ability.

There's also no input buffering whatsoever, so pressing a button even just a frame too early before an animation ends does nothing. And you can't solve this by just spamming buttons, as you need to hold most of them except for light attacks. This is for example very noticeable during the second to last boss fight, where the boss is stunned for just not long enough to land a charged heavy attack if you don't start the attack frame-perfectly.

Furthermore, even with target lock-on disabled, the camera and character will still often turn towards another target when you kill a mob, or rarely after shooting an arrow at a mob without killing it. This jarring change in perspective is annoying, though rarely much of an issue.
The camera also turns extremely quickly, even on the lowest mouse sensitivity option. If there's lag (which there is a lot, no matter which graphics settings), the camera turns even faster and often skips around.

Also for whatever unfathomable reason you cannot activate stuff using your rot (your "minions") close to your character. You need to be at least about 2-3 meters away from something to activate it. This is particularly annoying in fights when you want to destroy one of the flowers when one opens up mid-fight.

Eh, I don't get the hype. It's supposed to be a hard game, but it just isn't. Compared to Terraria (on master mode + For the Worthy), I'd say Terraria is about twice as difficult - mostly because Terraria requires actual skill and positioning to evade attacks. In Elden Ring, you can just activate invulnerabilty for free with barely any cooldown, trivializing almost all enemy attacks.

Most of the difficulty I've experienced has been purely artificial, e.g. due to the horrendous controls, or due to unnatural attack animations where jumps are arbitrarily delayed so you can't intuitively time your dodges. Fortunately, AutoHotKey could solve most of the control issues for me, but not being able to turn my character with the mouse and instead having to rely on the buggy targetting system that forgets its target randomly (or switches targets when the mouse is moved ever so slightly) is the biggest problem. Fortunately it works almost perfectly in bosses due to the usually flat and clean arenas.

Most bosses die to about 10 attacks, which negates any kind of intended skill requirement - getting those 10 attacks in is usually trivial and you never really take more than a few attempts at a boss.

Story and quests are horrible. There's barely any storytelling going on, and quests require a guide to have a chance at completing them. I finished the game and have no idea why anything happened because nothing is explained, just stuff getting namedropped left and right.

A minor gripe is the NPC's talking animation which is just a single loop where their mouth opens and closes regardless of what they are saying.

Overall I'd give this game a 5/10 - fun to play a bit until the controls get too annoying or it becomes too boring.

Downvote for the minigames with awful controls

This a very non-idle idle game - constant clicking is required at the early stages of a run to set up everything (again), and since some resources grow over time, even more clicks are needed to assign the newly added resources until they reach their cap.

The second level has no music, just random noises (and most importanty, no beat).
This turns it from a fun rythm game into a stupid press-button-when-screen-flashes game.

I don't get it, just making proper music for all levels would have made this game great but they chose not to (the music for the first level in particular is great!). Using custom music fixes this, but still a thumbs down for this inane decision.

Some first impressions that make this game look incredibly bad and basically remove any incentive to play further:

- items need some desciptive tooltips. I don't want to have to pause the game to look up what a weapon does in a guide/wiki before I buy it. This is an action game, and any action is ruined by pausing the game every few rooms (also the weapons don't even show a name so you need to try and find it by how it looks - seriously why?!)

- Why are there track(s) with no beats? That not only makes the game much harder to play for no reason, but also simply sounds extremely bad. That already ruined my enjoyment of Crypt of the Necrodancer which is awesome except for that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ mushroom level with no beats...
This is doubly problematic because apparently the tracks can be at different speeds (even within the same room!), which you then need to figure out visually when the beat is missing.

- Massive lag spikes. I started a challenge, and immediatelly the music sped up massively while the screen froze and I could hear myself getting hurt extremely quickly. Most likely due to loading of models that were not pre-loaded like they should have been, plus some weird coding that made the game run at insane speeds while the models were loading (instead of just lagging like every other game, which would have been jarring but not have cost me the run for no fault of my own).