Recent reviews by 930 Holy Mackerels

As I have said in other reviews, I really wish there was a "Neutral" option for steam reviews, I find the game very enjoyable but there are some things I think really should be improved.

I am not going to go over things that are very clearly not in their finished states (like occupations or how obtaining certain skills like strength currently works) as they are very obviously not done and criticizing them in their current state adds nothing to the review.

There are a few things that I do have issues with however.
Firstly, the entire mechanic of needing to go to the bathroom adds pretty much nothing to the game, you can argue all you want that "Oh its so the player can make fertilizer and it forces them out of their base to find a bathroom", but you can accomplish the same exact thing without bringing bottom of the barrel humor into the mix, just do what Don't Starve does and let you use rot as fertilizer, and the exploration aspect of the game already incentives you to leave enough as it is, and if anything this undermines it more than helps it. At least having a way to turn this mechanic off would be nice as I personally really dislike this since I tend to play games while I eat and I am mildly squeamish when it comes to this sort of thing, but at the end of the day I don't like mechanics that entirely boil down to (Every 30 minutes you must go to this specific spot and wait for no reason).

The second thing is this games absolute bipolar nature when it comes to melee weapons, despite having several perks that incentive's you to play with melee weapons, most enemies in this game cannot be combated effectively with them, lets take one of the earliest 2 enemies you will fight for an example.
The dog... thing? cannot be kited, even if you visually dodge its attacks it will almost always hit you, and if you try to wear armor to mitigate the guaranteed damage, you are just further solidifying that its going to happen because of the severe movement speed penalty, so if you go light and fast you are punished because being fast is just not enough, and if you go armor to counter this you just get hit more since you can't run away.
The soda machine robots are even worse since at least the dog has a chance to miss, this guy doesn't and will stunlock you until you die, even if you have a friend kiting it the moment you smack him you take damage as he is turning around (even if he doesn't visually hit you, again...)

The enemies in this game are designed to punish melee combat and force you into using ranged combat at all times with no exceptions, which would honestly be fine if the game didn't have perks and items that clearly indicate they want melee to be an option, but then why design enemies in this backwards ass way if you want players to have a choice?????
I get that not every enemy should be approached the same way but having literally one enemy in the game not hard counter melee is absolute nonsense. (Talking about the weird spike guys).

And you can say skill issue all you want, its probably true but just remember this:
Games should have a good first time experience or you will not retain players, and while this game does a LOT right (I won't go into that here, other reviews do it much better and I wanted to focus on what can be improved here), this game has a huge miss when it comes to melee combat and how its balanced.


Another thing (this is honestly just a nit pick and isn't very important) is the cooking, its in its early stages I get that, but its not very interactive, the most interaction you will get is by making soups or stews which funny enough segways into my primary issue with it and that is the recipe system.
It sucks.
Firstly, I say this with nothing but love in my heart; but there is no reason to force your players to look at a wiki to find out what recipes exist, trial and error would be FINE if it wasn't for the fact that messing up even one thing not only doesn't give any feedback for WHAT was wrong with it, but gives you an item back that poisons you if you eat it (I know the tooltip says it "MIGHT" make you sick, but either this is a lie or I am just super unlucky).
Having no freedom in what you can cook and how you can cook it is in my opinion at least the worst way to design a cooking system, not only is what tastes good 100% subjective and different with each person, but it stifles any creativity in what you want to make to eat, if I wanna make tomato soup with little potato chunks in it, I should be able to do that and not get literal poison back for trying to be creative.

If you want a tip on how to make this work from a balance perspective, just assign a pre-determined value to each food item and make basically any combination work, you can still follow logic doing this (such as needing salt to make tomato soup actually... you know work), and it would probably be best to have seasonings be a separate category entirely for this since that opens up a whole new door for how you could interact with a cooking system, but ANYTHING is better than just having a static spreadsheet of "This works and only this works". This is a game all about using scrap to make weapons (at least in the early game) so why does this not extend to cooking?

In spite of what I have said here, I do enjoy this game quite a bit (really hoping for that occupation update soon <3 ), but these are some of the aspects that I found displeasing when initially playing the game for the first time (seeing as I played over 7 hours in my first session, I would say its enjoyable), so do give the game a shot and probably read some of the other reviews too if you want to see what the game does well.

TLDR:
Melee balance makes me cry.
Let me disable toilet needs (it adds nothing to the game).
Make cooking interactive and let me make what I want to make.

Edit: I forgot to clarify something rather important: The primary reason that the food being poisonous when you fail to make a valid recipe is bad is because 99% of the time if a player tries to use this system and fails 2-3 times and repeatedly gets something completely unhelpful, they are just not gonna interact with the system and continue just making simple food items using the grill, this is ESPECIALLY bad when soups and stews give a buff that is very essential later in the game as that extra stamina reduction helps you run away from enemies you can't fight (If you know you know). I hate to compare this game to Don't Starve again because they are very very different games, but at least when you fail a recipe with the crock pot you get wet goop, which can be turned into fertilizer which REALLY helps mitigate your losses, where as in this case you are using 2-3 resources (not even counting the 1000 units of water required to fill the pot) to make something that has a very high chance of wasting you are your teams resources unless you play the game with the wiki open.

Very fun game to do goofy antics in, only complaints (and I do mean ONLY complaints) is 2 things:

A: Sometimes players that arent the host can't use the teleporter, very odd.

B: Some enemies should probably not be able to spawn together, especially when their counters are directly apposing one another Such as Eyeless Dogs and Big Wormy, or the Lettuce Man and Stoney Bois, because those can easily lead to situations where you kinda just die at no fault of your own, which is never fun.

Bought the game a couple hours after it came out, and I have played through about 90% of it at this point and I really enjoyed it, the only gripe I have is that due to it being third-person, sometimes your flashlights beam wont always point exactly where you are pointing if something is up close, which has lead to me taking a lot of damage that I didn't feel like I deserved, but once you get use to it, its not that big of a deal (plus its a stealth game at the end of the day, so you aren't exactly meant to fight every enemy like I tried to do.)

Others put it better than I did, but the controls are very stiff, turning and moving feels like it has no weight at all, and the parry system may as well not exist.

This made me realize I am very bad at digital art..... :(

Haha Rampart go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I don't know how to play chess

There is about 50-billion new kinds of slimes, and I am just as confused as in the first game.
70/2, would recommend.

(Note: I haven't played the game in a few months, so if I get some things wrong please do correct me in the comments and ill correct it in the review)

Sadly I cannot recommend Battles 2 in its current state, mind you the gameplay is still fun but there is 2 glaring issues that I have with it currently, but first lets talk about some things they get right.

The removal of energy and a lot of the P2W mechanics that the old game had was an amazing call, and building off TD6's 3d models was a very good change of looks in my opinion, and their overall focus on trying to make it more balanced is a good step in the right direction.

BUT: like I said, there is currently 2 very glaring issues I have with the current game.

1: Due to the more competitive focus on the game, any messing around late-game is essentially out the window, as someone who really enjoyed messing around late game on battles 1 with my friends this is very sad to see (For context, you cannot get ANY eco/farms up after a certain amount of rounds) Not to mention, there at the time of me playing is no alternate game modes like double cash, or ultra boost.

2: The grind takes a long, long, long time. Mind you I don't mind games having a lot to grind for, but this game doesn't really do it in a good way. It takes forever to max out any single tower, you could play 30 matches and still be stuck with a T2 tower which just sucks, and frankly for a game revolving around the towers you pick, it should be easier to level them up. It frankly sucks to just not be able to compete with other players just because you physically aren't allowed to upgrade your towers due to shorter playtime, which is extremely off-putting for new players. I feel like this could be solved by just simply reducing the XP required to upgrade a tower so that it feels like you are making progress instead of only getting 1 upgrade after 6+ matches maybe 2 would be a better general number. Alternatively, you could have all towers/abilities unlocked in custom games.

Other than these couple of issues, the game is great, and frankly I wish steam had more than just a yes or no, because I don't want to say flat out "Don't play game bad" because its not a bad game, it just has issues that need addressed.

Honestly one of the most fun games I've played in a long while, but a word of advice:

Do NOT go into the game thinking that your skills from other Asym Horrors like Dead By Daylight is going to help you at ALL. The similarities between the games end at 4v1 Horror. There is no looping the monster, you arent going to have the monster chase you for 5 minutes, and you WILL get your rear handed to you in the first couple of matches. That's part of learning the game.

And lastly, don't forget to ping, you can ping what you are looking at with Middle Mouse by default, but you can also Self Ping with C, which will display a lot of useful info like crafting progress, healing progress etc.

Hopefully this game gets some more traction, it honestly deserves it as its a very balanced and well put together game. And I would say don't listen to the DBD andy's that have less than an hour in the game saying "Monster OP!" or "Teen OP!"... and probably don't play Dollmaster for your first match he's kinda tough to get the hang of.
But overall, give the game a try, and if you are stuck don't feel bad for looking up guides, and keep in mind this is made by a small indie company, not something as big as BHVR. But most importantly, have fun!

Edit: Just to clarify btw, this isn't to say the game DOESNT have its problems, long queue times for teen will hamper the experience, and the tutorial could use things like teaching you how to use cover as Monster, or teaching you how to ping as Teen.