Nylige anmeldelser av Ciaran

It fully lives up to its reputation. Best puzzle-focused action-adventure game experience I can recall in my 30+ years of gaming.

Play it for the story. The story's great, free, and completely unconnected to any gacha mechanics or spending necessity. Truly, I feel like the writer for the main story of this game deserves to be working on a product that takes their quality of work and their skill at weaving a dramatic war tragedy more seriously.

Everything else in the game is pretty soulless. Especially once you've hit the level cap, you're always fighting the same handful of enemies, doing the same grind, being forced to engage with the same rotating events that have no value in the narrative (and often aren't even written to be very consistent in character voice or remotely on theme to the rest of the game) for scant resources to make any sort of hint of meaningful progress or growth. Standard mobile game drip-feed garbage, desperately putting the push for player spending before the quality of player experience.

There's something telling about the most recent holiday event asking new players to invite back all the old players that dropped the game, when it's only 6 months out from release. My greatest hope is that when it eventually becomes unprofitable enough to be shut down, they make an offline port, as some of the more progressive mobile game developers have done. It could have been something really special, after all.

I found that this was a pretty solid indie rpg with a fun story told over two sequential playthroughs.

I feel that the strongest aspects of the game were its storytelling and the puzzley way in which you interact with everything to discover secrets and impact the world. On the more critical note, I think the core systems design of the game are somewhat shallow and can at times be quite monotonous (combat), or outright not fun (fishing). By the end of the second play, I managed to discover all secrets and defeat all combat challenges, but the fishing log was just not something I felt was worth completing.

Barring some of the more involved optional encounters or secrets that are clearly not intended for (or explicitly disallowed on) the first play, the game is actually quite compact and a comfortable length of around 10 or so hours per playthrough. Even doing all that extra stuff, it only took me 30 hours to 100% the game across both runs.

I've seen that an update was released to give more detailed clues on the various puzzles and secrets, but I didn't personally see much that wasn't clearly laid out for the player on the default difficulty. There were a few instances of situations that I expected something more to, but never found myself stuck or at a loss for how to solve a puzzle or find a secret. In fact, the only secret that I missed on my first time through was just due to my own lack of attentiveness on a particular list of names.

All in all, a relatively fun experience and one that I felt was worth the money spent. I really enjoyed the realizations at the climax of each run of the game, and how the dialogue was mostly rewritten for the second run, providing a very novel experience.

Despite the charming aesthetic and inoffensive core gameplay loop, I really can't tolerate the incredible amount of trivia unrelated to anything in the game, none of which has any manner of learning opportunity whatsoever, and the seeming majority of which result in immediate failure of whatever side quest or stat gain opportunity without recourse. Nothing pulls me out of engagement with a game more than the game effectively forcing me to stop playing and google something in order to succeed.

If this is something that is also a bridge burner for you, dear reader, I would advise you against purchasing. If that is not bothersome, you probably will enjoy this game just fine!

Though I don't think the game is necessarily bad, this is very much not a game for me.

This game embodies all of the (in my opinion) worst aspects of old tabletop RPG play (strict encumbrance, time-limited adventuring day leading to fatigue, camping with random encounters being the primary form of recovery, daily limited skill/spell usage, etc), which makes the game feel more like a survival-based dungeon crawler than a heroic adventuring game where you rise from rags to riches. In addition, the Pathfinder system's insistence on nickle-and-diming your way up through tons of individually insignificant buffs/debuffs to get any meaningful impact on play is also something that I just plain don't think is fun.

It's a bit of a shame, because I'm super on-board with the themes of the game, and I really love character and team building, but I hope this serves as a word of warning (however late it may be) to anyone that is also not a fan of these sorts of gameplay mechanics.

After pouring 150 hours into the game and progressing through a little more than half of the content of this game, I am rather split on whether to recommend this game or not. It's clearly a small developer on a budget, cutting corners where they can, and ultimately overestimating their own abilities. That said, the core of the game does manage to be just barely fun enough to keep stringing me along. Ultimately, after really breaking down what I think are good and bad design decisions, I've decided to settle on a negative review.

First, let's summarize the things the game does right:
- Combat is quick and brutal, leading to shorter time spent in stages than your average cover-based tactics RPG. This is largely because cover doesn't reduce damage, but rather being out of cover enhances damage received. As a result, enemies that are flanked or engaged in melee will often be obliterated very quickly (usually in a single attack).
- Classes and the mastery board is a great system for encouraging significant build variety while still operating within restrictions. The differences between classes themselves aren't huge, but when they are combined with the various mastery setups and set bonuses available, there emerges a wealth of depth for anyone who is willing to puzzle out their ideal setup.
- There are multiple avenues to acquiring specific items, equipment, and masteries through crafting, purchasing, and enemy drops, with a wealth of stackable boosting options for getting the crafting resources, specific drops, or just money that you may need. Player convenience was definitely taken into account, though some of these methods for boosting specific gains are gated behind story progress (more on this later).
- You've got a lot of options to turn off various audio and visual elements or display more info to your preference. I highly recommend speeding up animations and turning off the dynamic camera zooming stuff. In a game of this genre, it's going to get old seeing the same half dozen or so attacks being performed thousands of times, and they clearly understand this.

These are all highly valuable things that keeps the game enjoyable at its core, and I think the game could have been a real top quality game if not for the negatives.
- The pacing of the game and its story is GLACIAL. Absurdly slow. I have done almost no grinding whatsoever, and have only managed to progress through 4 chapters (8 stages each) of content, along with the various side quest content presented along the way. A big part of the reason for this is that the game was intended to have episodic content, with the entire arc of this game's story being only episode 1 of many. Instead, as was explained in the April 18th news update, they're stepping away from this game to make a sequel set in an entirely different region of the world. This really puts on display a lack of foresight in both visual design, scope, and progression elements. For example:
- - There are UI elements that explain a ranking progression system that doesn't exist in the game yet, and now likely never will.
- - There are some districts that have bonuses for five jurisdictions within the same district being under your control, yet you only ever get a maximum of four official troubleshooters, so you're never able to get more than four jurisdictions under your control.
- - The progression of unlocking new systems and mechanics does not account for when they are actually opened up to your usage, so sometimes you'll get beginner tutorial missions 50 hours after you've already been engaging with a system.
- The level of expected grind to even just get all of the masteries (the core element of character building) or unlock higher tier crafting recipes (the most reliable way to get quality gear for your level) is really despicable. There are numerous instances of specific bosses gatekeeping masteries, which then either have to be farmed for their drop or farmed for their troubleshooter progression to unlock the researching (crafting, basically) of their mastery list. Either way, there are methods to help aid in the farming, but the expectation is still that you WILL be farming if you want their stuff. There's really no excuse for forcing people to replay missions in a game that is already expecting such a heavy time investment for just story progression alone.
- Gear has procedurally generated affixes, further encouraging a mindset of grinding out the "right" gear. Considering that the various classes and mastery sets have very clear differentiation of roles and specializations, why is it acceptable to include equipment that doesn't also just support this design? All that this equipment does is fill your inventory with trash that must be either sold or scrapped for crafting materials. It does not support the genre or gameplay in a meaningful way.

All in all, the game is a grind and feels unfinished, but at least the fundamentals at the core of the game have some fun to be had. It would have benefited greatly from doing away with all of the grindy systems and side content, and instead focusing on shorter, snappier story content. Their characters are interesting and the world has the potential to be rich and lively, if not for the slow pacing that drags it down. Here's hoping the sequel takes some of this into consideration and comes out all the better for it.

This game really surprised me with how fun it was. The combat is extremely "tactics lite", for lack of a better term, but the battles are pretty short and snappy, making it never quite feel like a chore. Character progression is pretty simple and intuitive as well, with a mix of external (active) and internal (passive) battle skills that level up through combat, items, and meditation. You also can gain special traits that grant all sorts of passive bonuses via character creation and in-world achievements. You level up via story events, combat, and meditation, and can raise your primary stats once every ten levels. Simple stuff.

The things that stood out as exemplary, though, were how the game handles things like travel, exploration, martial and political factions, and storyline engagement. There's an incredible amount of freedom in how you can engage with the game, and yet it has managed to "cut away the fat" from a lot of these pillars of play. There is no tedium to travel, and you can easily recruit animal companions to make cross-region traversal completely a non-issue as well. Exploration isn't an arduous experience of trying to find all of the hidden things around every nook in each stage, and each scene (and their secrets) are very intuitively laid out, or have maps and hints to guide you appropriately. There are tons of recruitable characters and factions you can join, many with their own small storylines to pursue at your leisure. There are dozens of endings and in-world achievements, most of which are quite easy to obtain and will reward extra player options on future plays of the game.

And even though the game is so easy to engage with and puts player agency and freedom first, the stories it tells are surprisingly varied in tone and structure and seriousness. It's been a really engaging experience, diving into this game. I expected a silly little martial arts tactics game, and got nearly a hundred hours of excellent wuxia short stories. Big thumb's up!

If you've never played Monster Sanctuary, and you love creature collectors, absolutely play this game. It deserves just about every word of praise it gets in the reviews. It has a great aesthetic built into every aspect of the game, puts player freedom first in the game's progression, and has a lot of features that clearly are designed with consideration toward making the player experience convenient to let us focus on the fun.

That said, my thumb's up on this review has an asterisk next to it, and my opening line is not subtle about why.

If you have played Monster Sanctuary, then you may still be able to enjoy this game, but you likely will be underwhelmed at the exploration, the combat, and the team-building strategies present. I've given both the Anode Heart demo and full game an honest try (at least 10 hours of play each), and although I recognize the many small improvements to the standard creature collector formula, it's simply not on the same level of fun or engagement as what I've seen is possible with larger changes to the core systems standard to the genre. I likely won't be finishing this game, though not because it's bad in any way, but simply because my own expectations are too high.

I've got a lot of mixed options about this game, though my opinion is overall more positive than negative.

The great:
- The game feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fantastic. Super responsive, which is crucial for such high-octane mech combat.
- Boss design and level design are at an all-time high in diversity. There's a lot of really fun and creative ♥♥♥♥ to experience.
- Creativity in building your AC is not only encouraged, it is almost required in order to tackle the various challenges the game presents. And the freedom to customize is, as always, as user friendly as it can possibly be.
- Replayability is clearly important to the game's design. You have effectively 3 different playthroughs of content. Although not all content is different from one play to another, there is constantly surprises and new things in store throughout each of those three playthroughs.
- The voice acting, mech designs, and overall aesthetic design is very clean and memorable.

The bad:
- Meaningful differences between weight classes is at an all time low. Both mobility and survivability are not significantly different between the heavy and light builds, because of the focus on learning and dodging boss patterns and the enforced reliance on healing via repair kits.
- Two major playstyles have been functionally deleted from the game (dual blading and sniping), as the game arbitrarily does not allow melee weapons or shields to be ambidextrous, and there simply aren't any gun weapons that can hit anyone effectively beyond 350 meters in distance. It seems like they want to enforce closer range combat in general, likely so that players have to actually engage with boss mechanics.
- The difficulty spikes in the game are pretty severe. Most stages will see even new players plowing through on their first or second try. Coral tech bosses will often require significant numbers of retries to learn boss patterns and/or alter builds to find a "right answer" to the boss mechanics.
- Multiplayer is in a particularly sad state after how much effort went into it in the 5th generation. There's no co-op play, the PvP netcode isn't very good, and there's no incentive to keep playing PvP at all. Also certain extensions completely invalidate the stagger system, which makes actual PvP really weird.

That said, the thing that matters most is that PCA officers canonically wield melee weapons in their right hand, so why can't we? The technology exists. Don't ♥♥♥♥ me like this, Yamamura.

Unfortunately, the game is currently in a state (Version 1.10) that I wouldn't consider fun, yet.

The game has some technical issues, with crashes happening in menus every so often (which almost always results in lost progress due to the way saving works), and it seems like any time you swap your current squad enough that it shifts the enemy levels, the entire game starts lagging massively (guessing ~15fps or so) until you relocate to another screen. I'm sure those issues will get worked out eventually though. The bigger issue for me was the drawn-out and stagnant feel of the game, lack of information on battle options, and lack of strategic depth to combat.

To address the first point, I spent my ~4 hour playtime trying to expand my ability to harvest resources (via upgrading tools), fighting battles to grow my team and the strength of my monsters, and progress one of the initial 5 main quest points. Despite the 1.10 patch making early game monsters easier on the resources/currency required to revive (recruit) them, it was incredibly slow paced and always felt like I was waiting just as much as I was actively playing. I was hoping the sluggish sense of progression would be offset by the battle system, which looked like it had some tactical elements going on, but it could really use some revision in its current state.

First big quality of life necessity that would make things better is to include information on what all of the character and space status effects actually do. Most of the skills say nothing about what the conditions do at all, and even when you are afflicted with a condition, I couldn't tell how to see in plain text what effect it was having. There wasn't even a help menu option to go over them. When some skills do absolutely no damage at all, and you're spending 7 MP for a status effect that has no explanation or standard gaming precedent, that really doesn't feel worth wasting the ONE AND ONLY skill slot you have unlocked at that point.

Second, being limited to a single skill slot really limits strategic depth at the start, and makes battles so absolutely routine that it's not engaging. Having two type affinity charts is nice and all, but when you have only one skill and no ability to change it outside of infrequent save points, that potential depth is squandered. Also, I would like to suggest that giving a quick visual indicator when selecting targets with a skill to see instantly whether something will be effective or ineffective is something we need in the modern day of game design. Encouraging people to memorize two separate type charts is really archaic when you can just have the highlighted space with the relevant monster just be highlighted a different color based on effectiveness. Lastly on these quality of life suggestions, please make skills auto-target a space that will hit a valid target instead of always targeting the top-left-most space. You're requiring more button presses than is necessary, and it's a trivial thing to put into the game. If not that, then at least allow for the player to undo commands, so that any potential mis-input can be corrected.

Finally, the value of strategic options seems wildly unbalanced. Not even the skills that you can attack with, but the actual tactical value of positioning itself. Front row gives you increased damage and pretty notable sustainability boost via MP regen. The back row weakens you considerably and gives a completely worthless amount of HP regen. It feels like it must be 5% or less of your max HP that you heal. My average monster HP at that point was 300-700 and I was still regenerating single digits most of the time. The Rest option also regenerates HP and MP, except only the MP seemed like it was at all impactful. I tried once to heal up someone from half health to their full value by putting them in the back row and having them exclusively select the Rest action for 10 battles straight. They managed to get to a grand total of 3/4 of their health, sustaining only the occasional hit. They would have sustained less hits by just staying on the offensive instead. Then you get to support skills that only have seemingly a 50% chance of hitting the tiles you're targeting, and it's just kind of like "Why are there even any options besides offense at all?"

All of these issues keep the game from being fun, but they very well may be fixed one day. Hopefully the game will reach a state where progression feels good and combat has the tactical value that they pitched in their video and home page.