Recent reviews by Leafstar

10/10 game. Got kraken-ed on the first sea tile.

Loving the game so far. Building very nicely upon Dungeons 3, this seems to be a very worth successor so far.

P.S. damn, you got me with the microphone icon in the main menu screen :D

A great game with a lot of interesting characters.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I liked it more than the mainline games.
This comes mainly down to personal prefence, but I really enjoyed the victorian epoch setting of the game and most of the introduced characters.

Gameplay:
At its core, this game is a visual novel with detective/puzzle elements.
The game doesn't deviate too much from the mainline games in that perspective, but there are two features, that are worth mentioning:
- There can be multiple witness in the stand at once. The dynamic interactions between these are great.
- The great deductions with Herlock Sholmes. They lighten up investigations a lot. Due to their nature, they are also pretty funny/goofy, once you correct some parts of them and their context breaks from the original narrative.
I don't play a lot of deduction games, but when I resolved an inconsistency and knew exactly the reason, it pushed my dopamine level to a new high. Most inconsistency are not too hard to figure out, but there were 2-3 times I was completly stumped.

Visuals:
Van Zieks alone is a reason for a solid 10/10.
Joke aside, the 3D setting and its particular execution fits the game well.
Emotions and actions are conveyed nicely and way more dynamic compared to its 2D mainline counterpart.

Story:
I can't really write too much, without spoiling the plot, but I will say, that it was a good idea to combine "The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures" and "The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve" in one package.

All in one, I definitely recommend this game. In my opinion Shu Takumi created another wonderful masterpiece!

This game and its devs are just plain awesome.

Gameplay:
This game captures the "starting a new settlement"-feeling to perfection, what would be called the "early game" in games like Anno. Every settlement features a unique mix of biom, events, milestones and resources. You get building options in a roguelike manor. You get to pick out of X options, which you can adjust to your environment. The roguelike aspect fits this game really well and makes every founding of a new settlement a new joy.

Meta progression:
The game features great pacing as it slowly introduces new elements to the game loop making the game accessible for beginners as well as city-builder veterans. The meta progression helps with consistency, but also features game changing elements like the rainpunk unlock.

Sound:
Great and fitting the overall mood of the in-game setting.

Graphics:
I like the style they went with in this game, but that's mainly due to personal preference.

All in one, this game is just marvelous and you should definitely give it a go, if you are into city-builders!

I loved the mix between light-novel, that plays very similiar to the ace attorney games and the dreamgear sections.
I also liked the graphic style and the accompanying.music arrangement a lot.

It's free. So just give it a shot for yourself :)

A solid tower defense/offense game with a strong and dedicated community. What more to say?

The switch downgrade was a no-go, since it feels worse than the original dungeon defenders now.
It is still fun though, but I just can't justify this over the original one anymore. The whole promise of using the unreal engine was to get a slick new design, nice graphics and a fresh new UI. The UI part worked out well, but the graphics are a blurry mess at the time of writing this review.

I wished, they scrapped the switch-port and focused on the pc version, even though I backed it with a switch version in mind. I didn't want this though. I would rather like to have one well optimized game instead of a downgraded pc-version and a mediocre switch-port. I know, that you work hard on this game and I will continue to believe in Chromatic Games, but this just wasn't the right decision and the backlash shows that. If you find a solution, I will change my review accordingly.

P.S. The attack speed limit on towers saddens my heart - especially when watching my apprentice towers.

Update 28.12.2020:
The developers redeemed themselves and created a wonderful masterpiece of a game. My friend got me back into it and we are having a blast. The game feels way more optimized than before and most bugs are seemingly gone. Upgrading my rig by replacing my SSD with a NVMe drive wasn't the worst idea either.
I still don't like the character-throwaway-mentality, but I guess, they keep it for the immersion. I found my way around this problem by simply knowing, what to skill in the first place or looking up working builds.

Let me give you some advice/beginner-tips for this rather harsh world of wasteland 3:
- Design your characters around their quirks, if you choose to have some. They have an enormous impact on your play-style and should be the first thing you decide. Avoid using your "death wish" character without armor as a melee/shotgun tank.

- I recommend maximally investing in 1 weapon skill and 1-2 environment-skills simultaneously. It's better to master a skill rather than being a jack of all trades. Weapon-skills aren't as important as I originally thought and you should probably only level them to unlock their advantage-skills and avoid usage-penalties due to being too low.

- Some environment-skills feel like they are used more frequently than others. Based on that, I suggest, that you get at least someone with Nerd Stuff, First Aid, Lockpicking and Mechanics respectively. (Don't put them all on 1 character)

- Some environment-skills add stat-modifiers, which tie in better with certain weapons.

- Don't feel bad, if you don't meet all skill-checks on your first play-through and see it as a reason to replay the game, since it's very enjoyable now.

- Diversify your choice of weapons between your characters. If you run around with an army of sniper rifle guys/gals, you are going to run out of ammo and have a bad and especially expensive time. Keep in mind, that your party shares its ammunition. That being said, use your character's primary weapons, well, primarily.

- Explore everything you can. (This should be a no-brainer)

- Some dialog options sound more aggressive than they are. It's a post-apocalyptic world and most NPCs seems to have grown thick skin.



All in one I want to stay true to my original review and I can recommend this game now with good conscience.

Finally I want to apologize to the devs for my rather aggressive tone in my original review, but I really hate long loading times, but they ultimately did a great job on fixing that. I would even recommend this game at full price now.










Old review (OUTDATED):
Update 1.1.2:
The loading times are now way better. I will probably give this game another go in the future.

Original Review:
The combat is fun and the voicing is great, but sadly that are the only positive things I could come up with.

Technical Problems
The game crashed once in the loading screen segment while I was traveling to the workshop in colorado springs. It saves automatically bevor moving to a new location. So it wasn't that bad.

The loading times are frankly said terrible. It's even worse, when you have to commute back and forth between two locations multiple times for the sake of talking to a npc. The game is installed on a Samsung Evo 850 SSD. It might be a little bit dated, but it still loads all of my other games really quickly. Other than that the transition between character-, inventory- and the other screens also doesn't feel great and at times really laggy.

Gameplay Problems
Why do I have to recruit a new character to respec (or rather replace) my current one? Why can't I just "retrain" my character? How should I build a connection to a character, if I have to dispose him, when his stats don't fit the current situation?

This leads me to my next point. I feel like I have to dump all of my skill points into exploration skills to not miss out on anything, since the required skill levels in colorado springs are already pretty high (4-5+) and eat up more than half of my available skill points.

Conclusion
All in one, I am not too happy about my 60€ purchase and will probably set this game on hold, until at least the loading times are fixed. I suggest, you wait with purchasing this one until most problems are fixed.

I bought the game back then in the hope, it might be as good as it's predecessor, but it simply won't live up to these expactations.

The graphics might be the best selling point for this game, but everything else is very weak.
The combat is enjoyable, but the dodging is clunky.

Let's start with it's weakest link, the camera. The camera in this game is beyond awful. I tried playing the game again with a friend in co-op, but the camera tried really badly to sabotage us. In co-op gameplay, the camera between the players is linked and the only console is the only way to disable this.
If you get pass the camera, you are greeted with linear gameplay and a somewhat boring story.
The character-customization from DS2 is simply gone. You get to choose from 5 pre-defined characters with pre-defined skillsets, which unlock with growing level. The talent-system is in my opinion irrelevant. It doesn't add to the character in a meaningful way.

Would I recommend this game?
No. If you want to experience this franchise, buy the better DS2.

Core Gameplay:
You defend your crystals, build towers, kill waves of enemies, level up, loot and get better equipment, kill even stronger waves of enemies and have fun.

Review:
While the game undertook several changes since it first appeared on steam, it stayed pretty consinstent over the time. It had some weak patches, but it also had some pretty neat changes. I got bored of the first part of the franchise, because my towers were basically godlike and I could take on everything. They changed this with the sequel. You need to kill the special enemies and bosses yourself and can't just layback (at least I haven't reached the item-power to do so yet) and it's very entertaining. I think we can all agree, that a game, in which you got nothing to do is a bad game.

The game is meant to be played with up to 3 other defenders, which can be very funny or very frustrating (like every other online game, where you have to work together), but overall I prefer to play this game alone. Some maps are way easier as a team, especially the harder difficulties in the game, but it's still somehow doable.

The only problem I have with this game is, that it takes some time to unlock the heroes themselve. When I remember correctly, you start with the 4 basic heroes and have to unlock the other 5 with wyvern coins or real money. You get wyvern coins for finishing a map and completing daily or monthly quests.

One important point is, that you don't get any advantages by investing real money. You can only unlock skins and heroes with the premium currency. Personally, I think the 4 starting heroes are all you need. The others are just for optimizing your defense.

All in one: The game is f2p, it's fun, try it yourself. You don't lose anything beside some of your time.