Recent reviews by Zoru

I... Can't recommend this game. The name calls toward Vampire Survivors. The gameplay and the ads call toward starfox 64 and hits neither.

Technical gripe: the game did not recognize my XBone controller off the bat, so I was already off to a rough start. Also, the tutorial and menus, once set up, don't use button icons when telling you which buttons to press.

Second, people excuse bad early gameplay with "but it's a roguelite! you're supposed to git gud, roguelites!" no.

Vampire Survivors (which this game is clearly copping off of with its title) drops you off and you're immediately swarmed by enemies. Your character just shoots and you don't have to worry about overwrought shooting mechanics or anything like that, just character placement. Then vamp Survivors scales up from there.

Star Fox 64, on the other hand, drops you right on corneria with a first mission that's half the length of this one, and follows a pretty basic arc, like all its levels do. The base speed in SF64 isn't traded for shooting either.

Currently the game sits in an awkward and kind of actually-bad twilight zone between being a roguelite with upgrades and trying to be an arcady shooter, and the devs are focused on content that only matters if you actually play the game for >2 hours.

If it was closer to downwell or SF64 itself, where the upgrades were diegetic and didn't interrupt flow, or the game was faster-paced and the upgrades mid-mission were used as a breather moment, it would slide down easier.

The introduction of the StS-style map does have me wondering whether there's actual creativity going on in whoever is leading the design, because if there isn't, both vampire survivors and sf64 do what this game is doing but better. (hint: nix the upgrade menus and always rely on physical upgrades the player can pass through and pick up without stopping gameplay- you can even do an "upgrade package sent!" bit)

"it's a roguelite" should not be an excuse for turning off your design brain and stopping already-slow early gameplay with non-diegetics.

This is probably the worst good game I've played in a long time. I recommend playing it if you enjoy schizophrenic gameplay experiences that like to stab you in the eye socket while whispering temptingly in your ear what the game could have been.

Several time I've shouted in frustration because the game just wouldn't let me ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ complete tasks. It's like if your mom kept telling you to do chores but midway through she interrupted you and told you a different one was more important and then you'd be GROUNDED if you didn't get them done.

God I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate it.

I think the game's cool.

I've given it a few hours of play the last few days.

I think the game is fantastic, though the C# layers it uses are ancient as hell.

For linux users, I have yet to get it working in Steam Play // proton.

Shapez is a fun game, a good take on the factorio-style genre that's emerged in the last few years. I really like what Tobias has done with it up to this point.

However, I would offer this critique: The difficulty in the gameplay doesn't exactly scale well. Everything is some small mis-mash and mostly-linear scaling, but then, in order to get past level 12, The shape + color combination requirements are MUCh steeper than any other level jump up to this point. I would far more prefer if the various levels built off each other more directly.

Keeping in mind the high frequency of updates, I definitely recommend this game for the 3.99 it currently costs. I would really like a more even difficulty curve jump though, as that level 11 to level 12 difficulty jump nearly made me quit in frustration.

To add more context, the latest item requires being able to combine more than 4 concepts in a way that's not immediately intuitive.

3/4 of a circle, with a square piece, all combined, then a circle stacked in the middle that's been painted white. Stacking circles like that hasn't been demonstrated before, making white will have been new to the player. The leap forward required to make that jump is kind of ridiculous and made worse by the fact that you don't have blueprints until AFTER that level.

Frostpunk is interesting at first glance, but the mechanics are paper thin, and it basically rides out exclusively on its premise. IMO there's not enough depth to its gameplay to play much longer than a few hours. You can make it harder, yes, but that merely extends the suffering.

I can see people enjoying it for ~20-30 hours. You'll get more depth / fun out of playing Rimworld, however.

If you're a fan of playing Minecraft in peaceful mode, and just wanted a bit more depth, this game is for you! Factorio is a deceptively simple game in that it seems complex, but is at the same time super simple. The core mechanics of mining is similar to just about any survival game, but quickly scales far beyond any survival game I know of. It's as if you blend zachtronics' infiniminer with a 2D minecraft, with baddies and everything.

The learning curve is in waves until you're able to request via logisitc robots everything be delivered to you. That said, its fairly accessible to the user despite the user interface and tech information from in-game being non-friendly. Set the enemy area size to none when you start your first game and just dink around. Unless you die to critters, or get run over by your automated train, you can carry on with factorio games forever.

The only thing I wish (beyond a more intuitive interface) is that the game be in 3D instead of 2D.

This game has the difficulty of dark souls, the loveability of Katamary damacy, and better beats than ddr. Buy this game.

In Short: The crippling flaw of the game is the absolute lack of any steam workshop support. The maps are moderately interesting... other than that, it's an fps with tower defense mechanics. If you're looking for creativity, don't waste your time. If you want something to do to chill for an hour or two, it's pretty cool. If you buy it, expect about 6 hours of game time from start to finish if you do it right. For the same price, though, you can find other games on the store that are more compelling.

The health for enemies increases per wave, but it doesn't translate evenly for the towers, either. So you're stuck with 15 towers that have a limitied atk power, but the enemies are absorbing your bullets. In late game, only the Focus towers seem to do much good.

Tower defense: The levels are confused and can often be difficult (hard is not bad) if you don't follow specific patterns in the game. (lack of ability to try different layouts with even success makes it more rails than id like)

The developers do a decent job with Sanctum 2, the characters in the game use some stronger language as they get shot, etc. If it weren't for that, it would be 100% kid-friendly, as everything has an unrealistic cartoony style. This ain't graphic, really.

The FPS aspect: It's quite dynamic, though the player gets stuck a lot and you have to either suicide out of it, or rocket-jump out of the place... There's a lot of bugs with the networking. I can tell when someone's trying to join as the game slows down dramatically when they try to.

There's decent amount of work, but it left a lot to be desired, like this review. It has the formula for a decent game, but there's more polished games (though probably not too many of the Tower Defense FPS mix) on the market.

Game is fun, but on all the high settings possible, and even with higher gamma, the game is too dark sometimes. My flashlight would go out and it was literally all black on the screen. Yes, I recommend it, but this 100% blackness during certain parts of the game without my flashlight needs to go.