Recent reviews by The Zombie Penguin

Hard, but intensly fair, this is a wonderful wonderful game. It'll demand a lot from you skill wise, but reward you immensely if you're willing to engage with it's mechanics.

There's no "What was that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" bosses that so often plague From, very few camera issues, and a wealth of wonderfully thought out mechanics.

It does, however, expect you to really engage with these mechanics, to really put together a build and learn how to perfect parry, without being odious about it - There's plenty of ways to go hard with simply blocking or dodging.

What a wonderful, wonderful time

It's a straight improvement across the board from HADES 1.

I have over 6k hours in this game. I'm still playing it, i still boot it up all the time. It's incredibly, incredibly good. Absoloute gold standard. I could squee for years about it's design, but seriously.

SIX. THOUSAND. HOURS. PLAYING. THIS. GAME.

It's that much value for money.

Get in here, CITIZEN. This is a fantastic game. Quickplay is great for quick drop-in, drop-out matches.

Hitting up difficult missions with friends is fan-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-tastic. There's a lot to love. If you want a more detailed review, i highly suggest looking up Rock Paper Shotgun's Best of the best review on it.

It's just a lovely, lovely game.

What a wonderful, wonderful gem of a game.

Roboquest is an FPS-meets-Roguelike, with just a dash of the good parts of Borderland's and Destiny's random weapon generation.

Tight, fast paced movement - especially with everything unlocked - makes the game a moment to moment joy. You're rewarded for getting inclose with headbonks, the ability to bounce off an enemy's head and do extra damage. Add in a wonderful array of guns, all of whom feel wonderful to shoot by base, and excellent class design - six of them, all with reasons why you'd want to play them, and it's just a joy.

My one big criticism is the game does use a meta progression system, which i'm not a fan of. Thankfully, as these things go it's not that grindy to get everything unlocked, and the exploration aspects are rewarding. Still, it's a sour point for me - your mileage may vary.

It's also tough as hell - Even experienced FPS vets like myself will benefit from dropping the difficulty initially, and working your way up. But once you get rolling... oh my!

Huge fun. If you like single player FPSes, and you enjoy repeatability, you owe it to yourself to play this.

Grindy as ♥♥♥♥.

Also, and i quote:

"At one point, its CEO Xu Bo laid off 11 female employees as part of an internal investigation, with one anonymous employee alleging that Xu Bo shared in a board meeting that he did so because he “didn’t want another feminist ♥♥♥♥♥” in the company. "

Give your money to a better company, and a better game. If i could refund this, i would.

While this isn't the most repayable game, it's sweet and engaging enough that i have no regrets having picked it up.

Backpack Hero presents an interesting premise - Inventory Tetris Roguelike!

Sadly, it fails to execute on this core idea. The basic premise is, as said, incredibly cool. The current characters all present fun takes on the concept, with CR-8 being a particular standout. However...

The game suffers from several notable issues.

One: Bad encounter design. Enemies who come covered in spikes (which hurt you for attacking unless you use a ranged weapon), or self-buff with spikes are far too common, acting as direct hard counters to the common multi-attack style of play. Enemies who spam curses every turn or every other turn are also common (and more on curses in a bit). Enemies who spam poison or burn are ALSO common. All of which pushes you in a direction of "You better be killing by turn 2 at the latest". None of this provides fun puzzles to solve how to get past, and instead often feels punitive.

The fact that exp (and thus backpack space, and thus power) is connected directly to slaying enemies in fights, and some enemies will flee if don't kill them first further drives this issue - power is gained by fighting as much as possible, so you'd better be able to survive every single fight. So you'd better find a combo that can kill without interacting with the enemies mechanics. And if you've ended up doing multi attacks? Hope you found the Candle boss item, or the right potion!

Two: The game is too wedded to it's inventory tetris idea, and fails to explore the design space. EVERYTHING in the game is inventory tetris. Want to carry gold with you? You'd better find a slot for that. Been cursed? Those are items that go in your pack too, and if you cant take them, it's a health penalty. Boss rewards? You bet those are items you're going to have to find space for!

Three: The loot system actively fights the game - Most of what you'll see is dross, and ignored. Other items would be good, but simply cannot be taken because you lack the requisite components - the Black Manastone is an exciting legendary... if you were already heavily investing in mana and wizardy. You werent? Take it to sell to a merchant, i guess... Or that bow looks real shiny! Shame you were skipping arrows because you had no room early on, and why would you fill your inventory with items that do nothing?

Supposedly a curse rework is coming in the future, but i can only review what's here, and what's here currently sucks. Curses could be overlays that make item use more complex - Overlay items are already in the game via Tote. Likewise, the lack of relics or things that dont take up space in your inventory but instead add modifiers to it (For instance - weapons in the bottom row get +X damage, or similar) is a huge missed opportunity. The devs clearly recognise that the inventory tetris is the selling point of the game, but it's a real shame that it's not explored. Even boss rewards suffer from this, like the Bomb that makes your weapons do 500% more damage and then self-destruct. Hope you took that slime sword, or a way to conjure weapons!

Beyond that, the side issues like fact that routing and exploring is simply "Go to everything you can on a floor, and hope you have keys for the locked doors" rather than actively being asked to make choices huts the game. The game has shoutouts to Slay the Spire in it, and it's a shame that it did not learn from Spire's excellent map and the questions it asks of the player.

Edit: an additional point of pain is the complexity of the game. the Inventory tetris nature of the game is, obviously, a very complicated thing to interact with. The problem here is that like many complicated roguelikes, the complexity you're asked to engage with is not rewarded by the game - You're instead just having repetitive, shallow fights while you try to assemble a winning combo as fast as possible.

There's promise here, but the game in it's current state is too shallow to execute on it.

Many years later, perfomance seems great. Kinda embarssing i never did update this review till now!

While it's early days for me in this game, the depth that Vault of the Void is providing, ontop of it's dedication to giving you as much information as possible is wonderful.

If you've been burned by Monster Train and Rougebook, or want something that is rapidly shaping up to be a worthy sucessor to Slay the Spire's throne, give this game a look.