Recensioni recenti di Matt

First impressions so far are that this is just another off-the-shelf MMO that's not going to last. It's not just because it's Korean, because Black Desert had me hooked within the first 20 minutes and I've put 5,000+ hours in. With this game, I see nothing interesting in the combat (why haven't we moved past tab targeting in 2024?), a full calendar system which means you're going to be expected to plan your life around hourly events, separate servers preventing you from playing with your friends even though they'll inevitably be merged within 1-2 years when the playerbase drops off, and the classic KR enhancing system where you have one piece of gear you upgrade with RNG stones forever.

I think the game does one thing right so far which is to buck the tradition of forcing you to decide on a class (your weapon is what decides your stats and abilities) but I have a feeling this is just a momentary illusion of choice and as soon as you get to any reasonable level it's going to be prohibitively expensive or inconvenient to switch to another weapon.

Overall I'll give this a fair shot but right now I'm not impressed with the initial gameplay of running back and forth from quest NPC to quest NPC with useful tutorials and game information way too sparsely sprinkled in there.

Sorry Matt, you're an OG from the Flash era and I enjoyed all the time I spent with your games on Kongregate, but the performance of this port on my machine is bad enough so as to call it literally unplayable and I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone. I get near-constant lag spikes and FPS drops down to ~3-10 FPS--in a bullet hell game where pixel-perfect reaction time is paramount. Even with full cheats enabled I'm stuck on a level and can no longer progress because there will be multiple seconds in a row where I have to watch the game turn into a slideshow. This is with all the recommended settings of the game, too--meaning no full-screen usage, anti-aliasing as low as it will go, and the resolution not what I'd like it to be.

I haven't been this awed by a puzzle game since I played Portal for the first time. The most amazing part to me is that every puzzle so far has felt completely manageable; I could easily see a world in which these mechanics feel too overwhelming or have too many steps to be able to really think about a solution but it has never gotten to that point yet.

This game is a clear clone of Tap Ninja (one of the only idle games I play because I like the dopamine hits but can't stand being forced to babysit a game) but the developer has obviously learnt lessons from some of the mistakes that game has made and is very active in the community to address bugs and feedback. Common pain points with the other game like only being able to switch pets once per day are alleviated in this version which lets you switch every 4 hours, with cooldowns bound to each pet slot rather than your account. There is no demand to spend premium currency every week to complete the event. Offline progress is good and ascension can be done every couple days even just opening the game a few times per day rather than once a week like with the other game.

I look forward to seeing if the dev has any distinguishing features planned for this game in the future or if they will continue the unexpected oxymoron of outshining Tap Ninja from under its shadow.

You'd think it'd be hard to mess up what is perhaps the lowest-effort type of game there is, yet this "developer" managed it. You can't zoom more than two bumps of the scroll wheel before the image gets extremely pixelated, rendering it impossible to make out anything. There is additionally no saving of any kind--if you pause and go to the settings menu, perhaps to see if there's some sort of antialiasing option, you lose all your progress.

This is the pinnacle of F2P gaming. There are so many places that a game developed today would have "encouraged" you to spend money--for instance, by restricting the number of items you could craft at once without buying more slots--but this game just...doesn't. Everything is obtainable in-game if you have the patience to farm resources for the players who do spend the money to keep it running, you're not in competition with other players so them P2Wing only helps you as you get carried through missions, and it's got the perfect amount of meta progression and currency systems to make you feel like you could spend your entire day playing and still be making meaningful progress on your account.

I have no idea why I tried for many years to get into this game and it just never stuck with me, but if you're into games where you hit enemies like piñatas until loot explodes out of their corpses before you extract and repeat, it doesn't get any better than Warframe. Sure it's all just a Skinner box but the weapon and frame designs are so nice and movement and combat so fluid that it never gets old.

Was okay until the recent update which screwed over players who hadn't leveled all their classes to 50 beforehand. You now need to grind an additional 3-4 years (not an exaggeration) to get those classes to the same place they would've been if you'd finished them before the update. Really hope they take a look at what they've done.

EDIT: The game continues to get worse and worse. it used to be pretty casual but now they're stuffing it full of daily and weekly events. Progression in this game is not just locked behind RNG but time-gated by a weekly shop offer that is the only semi-reliable way of getting one of the materials needed to upgrade your gear (this offer is itself subject to RNG so basically every week you have a 25% chance of getting the item you need to progress).

This isn't really an action roguelite even though it might appear that way on the surface and is tagged as such. This is simply a chill, turn-your-brain-off inventory management game where you happen to watch your weapons kill enemies between management sessions. You are almost never in danger of dying on any of your runs and unlike action roguelikes such as Forced Showdown where your movements and attacks actually matter, here you just dash, dash, dash until the level ends. Despite its simplicity, it somehow feels much more engaging than a game like Vampire Survivors where you just passively choose upgrades and try not to fall asleep for 30 minutes. The inventory management adds a nice layer of being forced to decide whether you'd rather combine your three crossbows into a single one of the next tier which will return you space for other gear, or if you'd rather keep the higher overall DPS and increased number of potential lifesteal procs from having multiple weapons. Stages only being 30-60 seconds long (with there being twenty of them in a run) helps stave off the boredom that can arise in similar games.

The game has potential to be an interesting take on the Suika genre but in its current implementation is a little too frustrating for my liking. I understand the developer wants it to be more challenging than relaxing given it has the skill-based element of calculating the launch, but when you lose, it doesn't feel like an issue with your planning or gameplay but rather factors outside your control. You are also left with little opportunity to learn from your mistakes because getting back to the point you lost might take another 15 minutes of methodical play which might again turn out to all be for nothing.

The crux of the problem is the way the loss detection works. In many stacking-type games, there is a period where your tower must remain stable before the level completes successfully (to prevent you from just spamming blocks to create an unstable tower that only fulfills the win condition for a second). This game needs something similar to but opposite from that--a period where you must remain in a losing state in order to actually lose. Why? Because currently, if one of your planets pokes out of orbit for even a split second, you instantly lose the game. This is problematic because:

• Planets are rather wobbly and jostle around a bit after being impacted by another planet before settling into their final position.
  
• The gravity is very floaty and the planets are very bouncy. Even with excellent precision and a strong sense of the level of power needed, it is impossible to hit a given location exactly on the dot without a bit of rolling--in fact, much of the game is based on knowing where and at what angle to hit a neighboring planet so that your projectile will end up at the right location. This problem can mainly be observed when trying to land on the far side of the orbit.
  
• Merge behavior is unpredictable. When you combine planets, they will sometimes merge explosively, flinging nearby planets (especially small ones) into orbit and ending your run before you even have time to realize what happened. This one feels the worst of all because merging planets is the entire point of the game so to be punished for doing exactly what you're supposed to do makes you ask what the point of wasting your time is.

There are several changes that I think could be made to improve the feel of the game without significantly lowering the skill level. I certainly wouldn't expect all of them to be implemented, but some combination of one or many would be great:

• Only count planets out of bounds if they're connected to the ground through other planets. This should absolutely happen and would fix the issue where planets getting randomly launched due to a merge would cost you the game.
  
• Add a brief grace period during which planets can jostle around before a loss is calculated. The developer has indicated he feels this would make the game too easy, which I respect, but I'm still leaving this here just in case he changes his mind and decides to test it out in the future.
  
• Increase the gravity and/or friction so that planets don't fly around or bounce off other planets quite so much.
  
• Increase the radius of the orbit to add a little more wiggle room for sub-optimal stacking.

Could be a fun idle game but no option to disable the headache-inducing rapid flashing effects.