Recent reviews by RealBad86

They made Blueprints a research that you can't access for several hours' worth of gameplay. I am not about to put hours of my life into manually putting down smelters you absolute idiots.

This game is an interesting little niche title with some potential, but I have to stress that it is immensely tedious.

The 1920s era gangland setting is interesting, the art style is quaint, the music is thematic and it has all the elements of a tycoon/4x game for people to enjoy. However, getting any of those elements running is a MASSIVE factor of RNG.

First of all, your start location being randomized is a crapshoot. You may spawn in a location with the ability to produce booze that no one will buy. You may spawn in an area with no easy access to materials to make booze. You may spawn without the ability to make booze in the first place. That's just a hard reroll.

Then you have elements like police and rival gangs. If you spawn in an area with 2 police precincts, that's a reroll. If you spawn in an area with a hostile gang, that's a reroll. If you somehow manage to hit the jackpot and get a start that isn't terrible, you might not get a good spread of businesses to use as fronts. That's a reroll.

There's just too much RNG inherent in this game for me to recommend. It's not fun to reroll constantly for a viable start, or to play through only to find on turn 100 your little empire isn't going to make it. This is not fun, this is not challenging, it's just numbers.

Battlepasses are the cancer killing the gaming industry.

No NFTs in gaming. No NFTs in gaming. No NFTs in gaming.

If you came here from SovietWomble's video, let me just tell you right away that this game is not very good.

The game is riddled with poor controls, terrible hit detection, latency issues, balance problems, clipping, and more. The biggest issue here is that the devs have somehow decided to focus their attention on "EVRIMA" which is the "new" work and completely abandoned "Legacy," which is the standard mode the game comes installed as. EVRIMA is essentially Early Access AGAIN, where the devs have started over for some reason and scrapped most of Legacy to just rebuild the game, resulting in even fewer features and a longer wait time before this game is functional.

EVRIMA is an even less polished, less robust version of the Legacy servers. EVRIMA has fewer dinosaurs than even the "Survival" branch of Legacy - no T-Rex, no Spino, basically nothing above "medium sized" herbivores, and almost none of the dinosaurs' special features exist. Even if you play on Legacy, some dinosaurs don't even function in Survival servers, many of them are relegated to "Sandbox" which is essentially just deathmatch all day every day. The terrain is janky, the map is empty, the spawns are screwed up, and god help you if you clip a rock and suddenly your dinosaur's leg is broken, taking actual minutes of your life to sit there and wait while it heals.

The "RP" servers mentioned in the video are strict, but these rules and regulations are typically necessary because the standard encounter with players is "Kill On Sight," regardless of who you are or what you're doing. The community varies wildly from "murder herbivore" to "crazy cat lady collecting all the baby dinos" with servers being run like high school drama classes.

The game has basically zero balance whatsoever, and what modest PVE there is, the AI is rudimentary and untested. NPC velociraptors will run up behind you and stay behind you constantly biting you without you being able to turn around. NPC herbivores will bolt away from you faster than a fully-grown Utahraptor and take multiple bites to kill, never slowing down once. AI can see you perfectly through terrain or concealment and from miles away at night.

It is an absolute chore to play this game and the only upside is "This is technically the most finished dinosaur survival game on Steam." Ultimately, if the devs actually finish "EVRIMA" instead of abandoning it and starting over yet again, it might be worth something in four or five years. The road map has interesting features and lots of promises, but as with all Early Access titles on Steam, these seem like pipe dreams to get you to stick with a floundering project as it slowly sinks into irrelevant obscurity and one day dying without ever hitting that coveted 1.0.

As it stands, this is a novelty at best.

This game is currently an unplayable, buggy, poorly-balanced mess.

If you like the World of 1920+, I am sad to say that this game is utterly broken in its current state. The roadmap promises more multiplayer maps, but the game's just too buggy to recommend. The Campaign is bad, the controls are terrible, the mech combat is unsatisfying, and multiplayer is just a matter of who rushes better.

I would give this game another month or two in the cooker instead of buying it to beta test it and PRAY that the game is improved upon.

Salt and Sanctuary is a game based on a single concept: What if you took the worst platforming from Dark Souls and removed all the good parts of a Metroidvania title?

I need to explain something before I go too in-depth here: I feel like the success of Dark Souls is misunderstood. The Souls series is not good because it is hard or unforgiving. The games stand out in a sea of bland, repetitive AAA titles because they are lovingly-crafted to do what they set out to do. From the ground up every system in Dark Souls was crafted to 1serve a role in the game. Every mechanic in Dark Souls is a piece of a larger puzzle that fit together in interesting or provoking ways, allowing you variety in approach, giving you actual content to explore, and rewarding determination and learning over brute force attempts at beating that one boss.

Salt and Sanctuary feels like it wants to have that idea, but instead of creating systems that serve a purpose for the game that it wants to be, Salt and Sanctuary steals mechanics from other games and tries to force them into a genre that it fails to represent.

Metroidvania-style exploration and platforming is typically done with a well-designed and thoughtful craft in mind. Accessibility is gated primarily by the acquisition of items or movement skills. The desire to explore is instilled in the player by hinting early and often that there will be more to come back to in an area later once they have the requisite item or movement skill. Exploration is also rewarded by the acquisition of items to increase the player's power either directly through power-ups or indirectly through additional drops, experience, or equipment that expands the player's choice in playstyle.

Salt and Sanctuary's exploration is tedious, gated primarily by enemies that always pose a threat, and the frustration of walking back from a sanctuary to retrieve your dropped salt. Even if you should come back to one of the many fairly linear areas with a new movement powerup, your reward will typically be gear that you cannot use, items that server no direct purpose because you have ten stone guides already, or bags of salt, which is just a metaphor for this entire game. Because of the RPG system whose stats directly affect what weapons and armor you can equip, their effectiveness, and what spells you can use, you are often limited to one build, a few weapons, and one armor class that you may or may not be able to even use because of the secondary restriction of equipment weight.

Curiously, while Salt and Sanctuary has a leveling system it appears to be largely inconsequential to the player's survivability, and it tries to again "borrow" the Dark Souls format of having every enemy pose some amount of threat to the player constantly. This imparts a problem in that backtracking - or running back to your death location to reclaim your lost salt - is tedious and always a bother, constantly dogging you with the need to platform while avoiding enemies that can kill you as easily at the end of the game as they could in the beginning. New areas populated with new and unknown enemies fail to entice because the last time you rested at a sanctuary was back in the last major area, and finding a new one in the next zone might mean getting killed by said enemies or dying to a bad platforming jump. In addition, there's NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MAP. Trying to keep track of everywhere you've been, everywhere you've seen something you want to come back to, every passage blocked off due to needing a movement item you don't yet have, just becomes frustrating memorization as every dark tunnel bleeds together until you just say "screw it" because there's nothing rewarding at the end of any of them anyway. At least Hollow Knight allowed you to buy maps of areas without revealing them to you immediately and had limited map markers you could place yourself.

Anyway, back onto the subject of build restrictions. Equipment loadouts are determined by a weight system, exactly like Dark Souls, and it is another system that does not survive the translation to 2D very well. Really, the only option is to slap on a high damage weapon and run around naked so you have the maximum possible invulnerability from your rolls, and your strategy is going to be "roll through enemy, hit them in back" 100% of the time. Your choices for combat are "Are you behind the enemy? Hit them. Are you in front of the enemy? Dodge behind them." In any other 2D Metroidvania game they might have prioritized use of movement skills or a variety of weapons to make bosses unique, but they are not, and the same strategy works against literally all of them. Did you find a new spell you'd like to try? Hope you're a magician with a high enough Magic so it isn't pointless. Got a new weapon? Better hope it's down the weapon tree you selected, and also that your primary stat for that weapon is high enough!

Salt and Sanctuary commits the fallacy of thinking "games were good when they were hard, therefore a hard game is a good game." None of its executions are original, none of its mechanics are unique, none of its designs were something this game needed to have. Instead, this game is a lackluster aping of a false concept - that Dark Souls was a good game because it was hard. When you fill your exploration game with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ death pits and constant backtracking through lethal encounters, it eventually becomes more effort and frustration than fun. If it had one unique idea I might be more lenient, but there is absolutely nothing pushing me to finish this game and I cannot recommend it because there are so many better interpretations of a Metroidvania-style platformer that don't beat you with somebody else's ideas in a grungy coat of paint.

As a game that has failed in three markets already, it's surprising to see people even thinking about paying for it in a fourth.

This "Early Access" title is not a completely working game - it is actually less of a game than when it was released originally in 2014, due to most of its core mechanics being ripped out.

A terrible translation that openly lies to you about game mechanics, terrible dialogue, text, ability tooltips and item descriptions, an utterly stock-standard stand-and-buttom mash combat system, and absolutely zero reason to play it over any of the other myriad FREE TO PLAY Korean MMOs out there, all add up to a game that should have just died.

This game is somewhat unique in that it is a furry fetish-themed game that doesn't come across as too much porn. It is well-written, well-drawn, and includes many branching elements that increase replayability. I have to admit some bias, I usually don't play Visual Novel-style games due to their stigma as being easy-to-make shovelware. This game is not that.

What I liked:

1. The game is a furry project that actually succeeded in being a complete experience, with a high level of quality all around. Plenty of creators have set out to be ambitious and not gotten off the ground for various reasons, but this one actually feels like a game that is complete, polished, and enoyable. I'm not really big into audio stuff but the soundtrack is good, and there is voice-acting (although I tend to play with voices off in these types of games) that seems competent. The artwork is great stuff (volkenfox does what volkenfox does best) and the writing and characterization is consistent (though I have seen a few typos).
   
2. It's fetish-themed. The particular fetishes catered to here are not everyone's, but for people who do like this kind of media, it's definitely high on the scale for representation. The game manages to incorporate the fetish elements into the plot so that it doesn't suffer from the "POOF, now you're different and it's never mentioned again" of other similar fetish-themed CYOAs. However, the fetish-themed content does not feel tacky or self-serving; it's always somehow tied to the ongoing plot. How your characters are transformed or changed is a key element to many of the story arcs.
   
3. It has multiple paths and multiple choices. I still haven't unlocked all the endings or character romances. While I haven't played a lot of other VNs, I have played text-based and picture-based CYOAs and interactive stories before, and they usually have only one or two paths that are significantly different. I haven't played very many VNs, but I know many of them feature only a handful of romance options and sometimes only one or two endings, and this has a TON. Each path feels more or less unique, although see below for some thoughts on repetition.
   
4. The characters are interesting and distinct enough to make their interactions complex and their reactions to your choices more dynamic. I like the crew's dynamics, and the supporting cast manages to be memorable. I do have some thoughts on those below.

My critiques:
**Mild story spoilers ahead**
You should take these with a grain of salt because I am opinionated and speaking more from a wishlist.

1. The fetish content in this game is very specific to the story path you're on currently. Story Path A will always have Characters 1, 2, and 3 experience the same content, so you will always get the fetish content designed for events 1A, 2A, and 3A, unless you make the choice where you don't get that content. It does kind of feel like some characters were designed to have a fetish happen to them, and they very rarely happen to any other character.
   
2. There's a bit of a fetish bias, to be sure - I like TF, TG, WG, BE, muscle, and growth all the time, but the game sticks to very specific portrayals. Only some characters get fat, only some characters grow muscle, only some characters change species. I know this sounds like me going "I'd like some more, please," but really, I would like some more! Where are my herbivores at? So much WG, there's not a single cow or pig TF (that I have seen). Why CAN'T I play as Monkey Mila?! It would also have been cool to see multiple characters undergo the same or similar transformations, such as all of them changing species at one juncture - but I know that's additional work both in terms of art and writing.
   
3. There's a strange lack of "bad endings" or gameover events that result in a sense of permanence - sure, there are failure states, but a lot of them just end and give you the option to restart the conversation that led to them. I actually enjoy the concept, especially in a setting where transformation comes up almost casually, where you fail and wind up turned into something else against your will. I know from a game design perspective having blind game overs is not a good thing, but I think some more failure states might have helped. There are a couple in-game and they're well done, but a few more in some places - such as Circe's Island - would have been fun to see.
   
4. Some of the story paths converge on the same TFs and have very similar themes. Just from what I have played, it's possible to become "Fat Mila" in three ways, "Muscle Mila" in two, and "Angel Mila" in two. Some of these paths even converge on similar storylines, and the characterizations are quite similar. The saving grace is that you have a different supporting cast for some of them, but it feels a bit like time constraints snuck in and "technically multiple paths" is not always the same as "multiple paths."
   
5. Some of the supporting cast members are introduced and then quickly disposed of. I understand that not every character you meet is going to have a deep impact on the storyline, but some of them are brought up and then swiftly exit. As an example, you can meet a member of the Queen's royal navy. She is introduced, postures a bit, and is either told to buzz off or makes an appearance much, much later for a single subplot. For all the pomp and circumstance I'd imagine she'd actually have something to contribute, but there's nothing past her introduction and the one thing she does either slightly later or very later. Spoiler example: Rourkie's crew are introduced as the main antagonists, and then make about 3 appearances in every storyline, 2 of which are the same regardless. Depending on which path you choose, you might not even encounter them again after your second meeting. For a villain he and his crew are pretty one-dimensional, and even though you can recruit one of them, they come so late into the story that they get almost no character development except to highlight how Rourkie is a bastard.

All in all, I enjoyed what time I put in trying to get all the endings, and I'm still missing some of them. I'll probably play them through to completion. Is it worth the experience? I think so. I think it's important, too, to support projects that you feel are a good effort, and this one is definitely up there in terms of fandom projects.

The developer has stated that due to poor performance this game will no longer be receiving additional expansions or content.

The developer failed to make a game worth playing.

They want to blame the users for this.

Do not buy this game.