Recent reviews by MrDrayth

Sequel to a game I'd heard a lot of good things about, Elona. A bit difficult at first, but it's a roguelike, what do you expect? It's got solid systems, a bit of chan humor without going full cringe, a solid art style and is cohesive all around. If you like your typical turn based grid movement kinda games, as well as deep and varied skill systems with the option to fight, sing, farm, or trade, this is a really good choice for the price, a steal on sale.

I'm giving this a positive overall, but make sure you read the caveats. TL;DR: Great for the first 11 floors, still recommend it for those, but trips and falls flat on its' face at 12, HARD. Anakin Skywalker would go on a youngling slaughtering rampage.

The Good: Excellent factory game for the first 11 floors. In EA, it was one big open world map; I did not experience this, but they have a way to "downgrade" the game back to that version if you do in the Discussion forum here. Now, it's 16 floors that're fairly good sized, with different unlocks and hidden chests and veins and whatnot spread throughout them. Unlocking a new floor feels like a reward to explorers like me. There's also occasional Metroidvania vibes where you have to revisit older floors once you unlock stuff on a later floor. Everything felt smooth and progressive as I played, and the Story isn't that bad, it had me hooked, with lots of little bonus lore blurbs in the codex. I REALLY wanted to see the rest of the story, however...

The Bad: Let me start by saying...when I first unlocked the 12th floor and was greeted by a huge, sand-filled area, I was like, okay, sure. Then the game tells me I no longer have access to my Power Generation on previous floors, forcing me to set up new power gen from 12 to 16. Okay, sure. Then I plop down my first Sand Pump to give it a shot.
Now see, some of the hidden chests in the prior floors contained Top-End Fuel, Pure Biodiesel, the best you can make. At that point in the game, I had barely started making unrefined biodiesel, 2-3 steps below that, and certainly hadn't automated it yet. At this point, Unrefined Biodiesel would last like, 10-15 mins minimum in the hungriest machines, hours in others. I put a Pure Biodiesel into the Sand Pump...and it was gone within a couple minutes. THE TOP TIER fuel, eaten relatively fast. These things CHUG fuel and CANNOT use electricity.
So that's kind of a bummer, but I soldier through it and build a Biodiesel farm, using manual hand-crank generators(since there's no water to use waterwheels on after floor 11); my thoughts were "I mean I guess it's a unique challenge to test our Automation Skills". I can feed 2 of them with a full-size automation setup going, having to run back every hour to ensure power stays running to the threshers & crafters.
Did I mention the Sand Pumps remove 2k Sand but it refills forever at a 1k rate? Because yeah, if you stop, it just refills. Or if you placed the Pumps in a spot that doesn't go to the bottom, it halves the pump rate or stops completely.
Fast forward like 4 days later and I finally empty Floor 12, and all I have to show for it are a couple of small story snippets and the ability to mine Scrap for Gold now. And 2 MK2 storages full of Sand.
Now if this was a different challenge per floor, or only on the last floor, I'd still give this a 100% Glowing review. But apparently this continues on every floor, and the Sand Refill rate goes up to the point that you need almost THIRTY Sand Pumps to keep up with the refill rate...and that's BEFORE the last 2 floors. No variety whatsoever...I really don't want to spend the next FEW WEEKS babysitting power generators and making sure my 4,000 fuel factories are running just to see what's at the end story-wise. Really ruined the end for me.

This was surprisingly deeper of a game than I expected. Reviews turned me off initially, warning of limited Energy, but I've yet to run into that problem; and even so, there's two other game modes where you don't use energy and can keep playing (though with a separate set of levels for the units there, unrelated to the Gacha pulls ENTIRELY).

Coming from War of the Visions, and as a fan of FFT, I can actually recommend this as a fun game, and can tell you that, while the gacha does help in the Fool's Journey part of the game, unlike most gachas, it's not required. They give you a solid team of 4 and 5* units for free + upgrades for them along the way. I'd ALMOST say it's almost as generous as FFRK was.

Also, Tier Lists are completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ worthless for this game, don't even TRY to use them. Units I found that were low-ranked on them turned out to absolutely DESTROY for me, and unexpected combos like Col's double-turns + Inanna's Extra-Turn result in taking out an entire team with a single unit in a single turn, if you know what you're doing. Aka, TACTICS actually matter in a TACTICS game, not just raw strength Lol

The absolute best Final Fantasy. The absolute best SNES JRPG (or at least tied with Chrono Trigger & Secret of Mana). The absolute best game ever made short of FFXIV Shadowbringers being a close 2nd. If you never played the original, or only played the fuggin awful iOS/Original Steam Port, you need to play this at least once and experience it.

I normally hate Visual Novel style games. Not enough gameplay, and just a bunch of jpgs shaking around. This one, however, caught my eye with animated scenes in the trailer when I found it in my Discovery Queue. Figured I'd give it a try and...well.

It's actually really good. The story is decent, the animation work is actually really good for a relatively unknown developer, and especially for a free game. The 3hrs I have on record at the time of this review were non-stop playing because the story sucked me in that well.

Obviously, it's got some adult aspects, and that's why I came out so surprised; usually adult games are really lazy with the writing, and barely use it as a vehicle between sex scenes. It drops one on you immediately if you don't skip the prologue, but it's more of an observer role. You have full control to see or completely avoid pretty much any other after that, depending on how you feel about the characters. The fact that "Yes let's bang" and "No go away" weren't the only black or white options especially impressed me, "Yes, I love you...as a friend." and have that actually play out as something more than rejection on the character's part.

If you're looking for something genuienly "Mature" and not just "Adult", and realize there is a difference between the two, you'll probably enjoy this as I did. Take a bow, Classy Lemon, you done justice to the genre of VNs and Adult Games.

People shouldn't be putting up bad reviews for a bug - post about it and see if it's fixed, THEN review. With that said...

I was lucky enough to not encounter any kinda weird camera bugs as others mentioned - interesting little Zelda-esque game. Looks like BotW but plays more like Ocarina of Time/Wind Waker. Movement in combat is a little loose-feeling, but not terrible, and the dungeons being top-down like Zelda 1 was an interesting twist. Everything felt solid, enough that I'm going to grab the full game, I think.

Appreciate the dev actually giving us a solid, proper demo like this to get a proper feel for the game, instead of the usual Bullshot videos/screenshots, and not having to resort to Youtube playthroughs to get an idea. I'll support that philosophy :)

Another game I'd give a recommendation of "Maybe" to.

So I played this long, long ago...like, 2010-2012ish long ago. I'm not much of a PVPer, and this was primarily PVP back then. It was actually kinda fun. It took ideas from MMOs like rogue stealth and ideas from TF2 like medics/heavies and Sentries and made a unique little pvp game out of it. For the most part, I enjoyed it for random pug matches.

It had some PVE in the form of 4man dungeons across 4 difficulties, and 1 time-limited PvPvE "Double agent" mission where 2 of the 6 players were randomly set on the enemy team a la L4D. They were alright overall, did require genuine teamwork on higher difficulties. But the balancing was poor...one enemy can Tractor-Beam you infinitely. Others can ambush and stun you while you're in the line of fire of a bunch of rockets. The bosses are ridiculously tough AND you only have 5 minutes to kill them. One boss is outright broken and very few people have ever beaten her because every few % dmg she takes, she becomes invincible temporarily and respawns every add in the room, including a miniboss and a bunch of extremely deadly player-clone enemies. This happens multiple times and not only does it waste your limited 5 minutes but since they spawn all around the room you can't really hide anywhere to take them out safely, like you did earlier in the dungeon.

So basically, they revived this game to keep their Copyright for it on file. They put up a potato server, a few hardcore players found it purely by chance, and word spread. They've added it back to the store here, but it can't be searched for, so you can download it if you have the link to the store page from elsewhere (maybe like this review).

This game 100% depends on an active playerbase to even be serviceable. We've had an average of 40-100ish folks online before it got put back on Steam, so finding groups for things was a little tough. Make of that what you will. Maybe if we're lucky, Hi-Rez will learn from the response to GA coming back and do some updates to it - making Think Tank not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boss, balancing classes a bit more, removing Timers from queues like the Raids and Double Agent(because it just doesn't work with smaller playerbases or in this day and age), etc.

Overall - it's a very unique game. It was fun in its' heyday even for a non-pvper like me. I still enjoy it, but I can't hang with the hardcore max lvl folks that still cling to it. Give it a shot, if it's still around when you see this and if it interests you.

Chrono Trigger, but Gacha. Great little title, give it a shot :)

So. This game came out as a "Release" around the time I'm writing this. Reviews are very mixed, and with good reason.

So let's start with the main thoughts: This game is very much your standard Colony Sim where you set priorities and they do things. All the systems are fairly solid, and I've enjoyed the game "for the most part". It has decent depth and options, though not quite as deep as bigger names like Dwarf Fortress or Gnomoria, but is simultaneously less annoying than Oxygen Not Included (no silly gas systems)

Some reviews complain about awful AI and getting stuck; I'm pretty sure those folks have never touched a game like this before, because that's normal and something you just have to think ahead about. Prioritize your jobs well, and disassemble scaffolds 1 at a time and you'll never have an issue. (Though let's be fair, the AI SHOULD at least be smart enough to not do something that will result in the unit or another unit being stuck with no exit path)

Some reviews complain about this game not really being ready for Release - Those are 100% true; They only JUST added farming + fishing and Multiplayer a month ago. Neither of which are fleshed out or properly bugtested/tweaked:

1) Farming: Planting Shroom Trees & Cloth-making Troll Tails will generate Material + Seeds. Neither of these is super valuable, but having renewable Charcoal from the "wood" is useful. However... Mushroom Paste, Mushroom Oil, etc is EXTREMELY common in a lot of recipes, and your Mushrooms do NOT generate seeds/spores for replanting; it generates multiple mushrooms, which your Dwarves tend to eat before they can re-plant if you don't Prioritize the planting well. Same for other Plantable things. This is Colony Sim 101, you should know better than to not have a Seed system for every plantable, let alone an extremely commonly-used-but-also-food one. And the things that DO have seeds? There's nothing you can do with excess Seeds. You have no pet animals like chickens to feed. You can't sell them to the Overworld dinguses. You just store 'em or let them litter your base. Which is a HUGE oversight.

2) Lack of Animal Taming - You want a renewable supply of Leather? Too bad, you gotta buy it or leave Rat Holes un-destroyed and deal with constant attacks for meager supply over time. I understand they value the Overworld Trading system as an important part of the game, but I've got more Trade Lore than I'll ever need, and with the over-zealous War system, the bases are destroyed and lacking buyable useful stuff like Leather half the time anyways.

3) Which brings me to...the Overworld system. It feels...tacked on at best. The Dwarves are basically Sweden, staying out of it, while they fight. And they fight. CONSTANTLY. As soon as you start the game, someone is sending a team of enemies to attack the nearest other faction, and might even wipe it out before you can buy anything from them. Sure, it means I can sell them stone to repair their towns, but then you have to wait for buyables to restock.

I saw their Road Map on the reddit, and half the stuff isn't even in yet..I'm sure they have legitimate reasons and/or publisher pressure for going for a Release now instead of waiting to implement more or even refine the stuff they JUST added and is CLEARLY not ready for Retail.

My final thoughts: This is a pretty good game for what it is, I've thoroughly enjoyed it in spite of the above. But I'm still very disappointed in every developer/publisher in the last decade or so that has a "We'll fix it with a Day 1/post-launch patch" instead of the late-1990s Blizzard motto of "It's done when it's done, because we want to do it right" mentality. Blizzard (back then) was respected for that decision (regardless of how fubar they are now lol), and any other dev/publisher that has the balls to be honest about the QUALITY of their game should be respected for that, too.

This is another case where Steam needs to offer a "Maybe" recommendation.

So this game...it's Minecraft meets Roguelike. There is no saving. There is no respawn in Single Player Survival. Multiplayer, I believe you can respawn if others survive the day/night. Personally? I love the idea of The Binding of Minecraft. Unlock random powerups as you go, different every time.

However...being an early access title and small dev team using Unity, there's some work that needs to be done still. As a Solo player, (even though the game is designed for groups it seems like) you're going to have a bad time. The Days are short, stuff doesn't catch fire/despawn/go friendly when Daylight hits like in Minecraft, and never stops chasing you either. Stamina limits your ability to run away and buy time severely, even on easy mode, let alone normal.

Building feels near-pointless - I thought I could outsmart the AI by building stairs into the sky and making a floating house a la Terraria or Minecraft. Nope. AI goes straight for the base of the stairs and attacks it. The Stairs' HP doesn't display as anything other than Full, so I assume they're not really damaging it. I hop down and pick a few off while the rest beat on the stairs. Then I see my ENTIRE floating house explode into a bunch of Wood on the ground, all because they broke the single piece of Stairs anchoring it to the ground. All my stations are still floating in the air, though, lol.

But it's only Night 3, and on Easy mode after a few Normal attempts kicked my ass by Day 3 too, but it seems like Day 3 starts to spawn so much ♥♥♥♥ you spend the entire night kiting 6-10 mobs of various types, all with ranged attacks or charges, and the movement's a bit clunky/floaty so dodging is difficult too, plus the whole Stamina issue I mentioned earlier.

So to sum it up...great idea, still needs a lot of polish and ESPECIALLY balance. Even just making the Mob AI prefer you even with valid building targets in range would go a long way solo + if in a group, lets you have someone draw attention while friends pick off stragglers bit by bit, adds a layer of strategy vs having to hyper-focus on defending your poor destroyable buildings CONSTANTLY. I want to play more, but if I'm being mobbed on Day 3 even on the easiest difficulty (which I'd rather be on Normal), it diminishes the fun way too early. Golems spawn too early, the goblins are pains in my ass, lord help me when the big golem boss spawns.

I'll keep an eye on the game and update if they ever address the balancing of fun vs difficulty