Recent reviews by FIGBird

I spent a lot of time considering whether or not to write this review because I generally enjoyed my time with the game. However, after spending 30 hours with it, I have come to the sad conclusion that I cannot recommend it to others.

This will be a long review, so I will summarize what I am about to write for those who are more interested in why I wouldn’t recommend a game I enjoyed.

I would not recommend this game to people because there are game breaking bugs, poor UI, and pretty severe balance issues that have persisted since release. This is topped by an upcoming DLC and a second game in development which shatters any confidence I may have had for the studio to solve those issues. My buddy and I summarized this game as “It does a good job of setting you up to be let down later”.

That out of the way, let me start with bugs. Note that nearly 100% of my playtime was with a friend, so I cannot speak to solo play and whether the bugs we ran into are present there. Firstly, there were times in the later zones where the quest would fail to render the next world part in full. This would lead to a few different issues. Primarily we’d have to restart the game to partially resolve the issue. After that it often left us dealing with problems for the rest of the quest such as characters stuck in the terrain and unable to move during the combat, or being unable to interact properly with the resource nodes. This grew more persistent as we progressed further into the map nodes so much that it was a regular problem in any play session

We had one bug which resulted in my buddy buying every item in a shop while trying to sort out why the UI was not responding. This, essentially, dumped all of the gold he had collected through our campaign. For reference, reselling the items barely returned a fraction of the spent gold.

There are also a lot of little things. For example, linked items in chat being able to be highlighted or otherwise interacted with when you have another UI screen open and above it. Skills which do not do what they say they should such as Icefall and Master of Ice (two capstone Cryo passives) which should trigger when the character freezes an enemy, but they only trigger sometimes. (As far as I could tell in some testing it had to do with who applied the oldest stack of chill).

This is where seeing a new game and an upcoming DLC becomes an issue. To explain, I work in enterprise software and understand how software is made. While I am not in games many of the things I do on a daily basis are reflected in the industry. This means I tend to be quite lenient with how I critique bugs. I expect some bugs and issues on a games release because software is hard and finding/fixing everything is a pipe dream. For those that disagree, consider this: if a game sells a thousand copies and those players each play for one hour that time is comparable to half a year of a QA working 8 hours a day without weekends and that does not include the fact that those hours are across many many different system configurations.

Anyway, what I am saying is that I expect issues to be found after release, worked by the team, and resolved over time. The game has been out for ~9 months and there are still bugs that prevent progression which is a really bad thing to see from the developers. It’s okay for them to work on new stuff, and to want to promote it, but to do so when there are significant issues is a big red flag.

Moving on, the UI has a lot of little issues. The biggest category being item management in general. Sort orders are incorrect in shops, items when removed from your character are put on the bottom of the inventory, equipping an item is a single left click making it really easy to put stuff on in error (most games use a double click, drag, or key modifier, or all of these to do so). One of the more frustrating issues was with a passive that allows healing skills to deal damage. This passive is at the very bottom of the tree. One of the first skills you can get in that tree says "The caster reaches out in aid healing 30% of target's maximum health.". Well, once you take that passive the skill tooltip changes to clarify that if you use it on an enemy it uses the casters max hp to calculate damage. There is no reason that is missing from the tooltip before the passive is taken and only misleads the player. This wouldn’t be so bad except for the balance problems I mentioned which we can touch on next.

See, here is the thing, 30% max HP healing is almost always worse than a skill right next to it which uses the normal spellpower calculations. The times that it is not are either the target is focused on max hp (almost exclusively) or you are at very low levels. However, none of that compares to what my buddy and I realized a few hours before we stopped playing. You see, one of the skill trees is so powerful that it should be your secondary pick for literally every character you choose. Monk gives you sustain in both healing/mana recovery, raw stats in the form of % value scaling, and spreading a portion of your highest stat to all other stats.

The raw power of might (the damage stat) is sooo much better than everything as you get further into the game that you are actually sabotaging your character in most cases where you do not invest entirely in it and go monk for that one capstone passive.

I know some folks are going to respond with “well, do not play that way.” which is exactly what we tried a few hours before we quit. We had a shape shifter nature character that was outpacing every other character by a landslide and once I did some calculations and dug into the damage formulas we realized that the path the character was taking was going to be the weaker version of what is absurdly powerful and there was no way anyone else was going to catch up. So, we reset the character and was unable to gear them properly due to the issue with buying an entire shop I called out earlier, but we were going to give it a go. This was how we discovered the UI around the healing skill, we knew we needed some solid damage and wanted to try something totally different. When the first time we hit an enemy for 171 damage out of their 6000 hp and then had the same enemy one shot the reset character and take half the HP off my tanky dps we found ourselves just broken. The game had finally let us down….

We never did see what the end game was going to look like because all of the little things finally added up. We had to restart the game regularly, had trouble doing basic things like buying and selling items, found out late that we could upgrade item levels, and that balance basically amounted to two words: Perfected Soul. (This is the name of the Monk Passive which adds +character level to all stats and adds 10% of your highest stat to the rest of them).

I know many will not get this far into this review, but for those of you that did, here’s why we came to the conclusion that Stolen Realm is a game that is very good at setting you up for disappointment.

You start off finding so many positive things, everything feels viable and strong. You look forward to the next level so you can try this with that. Eventually, however, the persistent issues, the scaling of the enemies, and the sense that maybe there really isn’t a lot of real build diversity as you get further finally all sinks in and you break.

I do not regret my purchase, even full price 20 bucks for 30 hours of entertainment is a steal by comparison to any other form of entertainment. However, all of this will stop me from buying anything from this studio again. This is ultimately what had me settle on writing the review. I want to send a clear message that leaving the game in the current state while working on new stuff has told me that this studio is more interested in profits than it is quality games, and as such I will avoid them. I really hope that changes, but I am not hopeful.

Thanks for reading,
FIGBird

Inkbound is excellent. It is a lovely mix of deck building and turn based action RPG
that I would not have purchased if the Micro Transactions were still present.

Inbound is a run based "deck builder" in which you draft abilities and items. It
features a hub you return to after each run with NPCs that flesh out the world with
lore and provide additional goals for unlocking additional stuff to find. In this
way it feels a lot like Hades. However, it features turn based combat that allows
for planning synergies between group members or tactical handling if you are solo.

A build is a combination of your base class/skills, two drafted abilities, and a
series of items that provide passive benefits. These items are part of sets which
when combined provide additional benefits. These sets are what really stands out
to me and I really enjoy it.

To explain, each item is a part of one or more sets. Each set has a distinct bonus
that grows in power as you collect items that belong to that set. However, there
are opportunities during the run in which you can discard an item while retaining
the sets that it is a part of. Since inventory is limited this adds an extra layer
to the strategy. For example, when drafting a new item I might pick something
exclusively for the sets it is a part of. I might also find myself asking "Which
items have effects I can live without to make room for the stuff I will get during
the next act". This system is one of the big ways Inkbound sets itself apart and,
as noted above, I really enjoy the way it does so.

Lastly, I want to touch on the monetization. Games are expensive to make and I
believe the industry needs additional routes to support the studios for people
that have the means to do so. However, the MTX (Micro Transaction) model that
many games are adopting from the mobile market is not okay. They are designed
to make people more willing to purchase something. Inbound recently removed all
of the MTX in favor of support pack "DLC". This means you can still throw extra
support to the studio without all of the trickery the MTX systems use to convince
you of a purchase.

Whether it was a simple marketing ploy or not, I hope the feedback from players
both in terms of sales and sentiment is one that moves the needle across the industry.
We as consumers should be open to additional funding for games, but it is also
important we try and show the industry that it can be supported without the trickery
and exploitative systems used in those MTX models.

This patch led to three sales of the game (myself, and the two others in my regular
gaming group). After spending the entire weekend playing it and having a blast while
doing so, I plan to buy one of the supporter pack "DLCs" because voting with my
wallet and writing this review will hopefully move that needle just a little bit.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend this game primarily on the fact that the puzzles are very simple.

If you want to explore a space with some fun and interesting mechanics, then you may enjoy the game. However if you want a challenging puzzle game that asks you to think abstractly, this will not deliver. Most of the puzzles are essentially find the object and the finale asks you to do this under a time limit.

The idea and the tech behind it are awesome. I want to recommend the game. However with weak puzzles, a narrative that is okay at best, and a $25 price tag I cannot recommend it.