Recent reviews by popcar2

I want to believe.

This game was made with good intentions but it's clear the developers lack any foresight or skill to pull this off. What you see now is a pre-alpha game that will likely die in a few months because the devs are terrible at knowing what the playerbase needs. The base gameplay is so barebones that it's not worth playing for more than 10 minutes.
The lead dev, bluedrake, has good intentions but has some insane hot takes that makes it clear he has no idea what he's doing.

First of all, there were cheaters in the playtest. The devs dismissed this, saying the game doesn't NEED anti-cheat, and the best form of anti-cheat is good server moderation. They again dismissed anticheats at some point saying "all competitive games have cheaters, anti-cheats just slow them down" (Implying anticheat isn't useful). Also, the community can make their own anticheat!
Goomes (Community manager): "my general understanding of anticheat is none of them are perfect, and the most effective ones are probably really intrusive and you probably wouldnt want on your computer in the first place lol"

So we're already off to a fantastic start. The game releases, and behold! Cheaters everywhere. Who could've seen this one coming? Of course, the devs do a 180 and said they're implementing an optional anti-cheat for server devs. They could've listened to the people that warned them, but they released the game anyways without anti-cheat. They'll fix it when most of the playerbase has already left.

For a game that's solely focused on modding, there is surprisingly not much thought put into it. Modded servers are dead because it's too confusing to get them to work. Aside from the fact that steam workshop was broken on release, there is no way to auto-download mods from a server and no error messages upon connecting. So if a server uses mods X and Y, if you don't already have them and try to connect, it will just boot you to the main menu. You have to know beforehand which mods are required and go look for them in the workshop, because the game DOES NOT EVEN TELL YOU which ones are missing.

Of course, the devs didn't see that coming. They made a poll on which feature they should focus on next, and auto-downloading mods got the vast majority of the votes. It's so obvious, it's mindblowing that they released the game without it. Imagine G-Mod but it tells you to go look for 60 separate mods upon connecting to a server. Anyone could've told them it's a basic feature.

Listening to his dev updates, bluedrake is the type of guy that sees and accepts all criticism but learns all the wrong lessons from it. Upon seeing that the game is mixed on steam, he said that this doesn't affect him and is normal because the only games that are overwhelmingly positive are niche 2D pixel platformers. Sure. Definitely. And he said that most people don't understand that the game is in early access and therefore are saying it's too empty and simple. No, we understand. They don't understand that as soon as a game is available, it's ready to be reviewed and criticized. They never admit that they released the game in a sad state it never should've been released in. Updates that should've been there from day 1 are too slow.

Every preview of the game on YouTube before release said the same thing: The game is too janky, too empty, too unfinished to be released. They ignored everyone and did it anyways. What we're left with is a boringly generic and janky military shooter with the hopes that modders will save the game and make it... Fun.

1 week ago, the peak player count was 1500. Yesterday, the peak player count was 660. By the end of the month, I expect it to be way less and mostly consist of modders. The only thing you can expect is glacially slow updates and the developers having terrible takes on Discord. They released a broken game and expected the playerbase to stick around for months until they fix it.

20 Minutes Till Dawn feels like a game thrown together to meet the hype of vampire survivors clones. It's poorly thought out and is laughably easy, becoming almost impossible to lose in after unlocking a couple of upgrades. The only way you can die is by limiting yourself. The only difficult part of the game is the first 3 minutes before you get the few upgrades you need to win. After that, it's watching everything around you die in one second until the game eventually ends.

There <i>are</i> harder difficulty levels but I'm now on difficulty 9/15 and it doesn't feel any different from 0. Maybe it does get hard at the end. I'm not spending another 5 hours to find out.

Each update seems to make the game more broken and unfocused. The addition of soul hearts elevated the game from "This is really easy, nothing can hit me" to "This is really easy, nothing can hit me and I also have unlimited HP". The dev doesn't seem to know what they're doing. Ice is still busted, summons can win the game for you without shooting a single bullet, enemies and bosses are really boring and derivative, every stage looks and plays the same, it's STILL hard to see what's happening on screen at any given moment...

I would like to say that creating different builds is fun, but it isn't. Every upgrade is some variation of "deal more damage", some comboing with others to deal even more damage. The dev realized that this is just a DPS race and no other stat matters, so they made other stats tie in to dealing more damage. Some summons deal more damage based on max HP. Some upgrades increase your fire rate with move speed. None of it matters. Every upgrade is just "Deal more damage", and every run ends the same way.

The game is cheap but I wouldn't call the 6 hours I've played that fun. The first 20 minutes were, but after my first win it just became very derivative and every run is basically the same.

There is a legitimately good game here beneath all the crashes and technical issues. I crashed in 2 DMZ games in a row, losing almost an hour of progress with friends. What a pain. Wait for updates.

The game itself is fun, but I feel scammed by the fact that I bought this in EA and they suddenly added premium currency, a cash shop, and a battle pass to a game I've already bought for full price. The devs said they won't even make any content updates, so this is literally just greed. I wouldn't recommend it unless it's in deep discount, which is only a matter of time because the devs are hell-bent on killing their playerbase with terrible PR and moves like this.

"B-b-b-but it's just cosmetics!" Yeah, and I just paid full price to buy the game, so why does it have microtransactions like a f2p game? They also make every regular cosmetic overpriced so normal people have to grind to get any cosmetics. Disgusting practice. Would've gotten a refund if I could.

Also, battle pass aside, the MMO aspect of this game sucks ass. It's virtually a singleplayer game where you see people walking around. There's no incentive to interact with anyone, you can't join people in their fights, the co-op is poorly thought out and gives you no advantage for teaming up. You control 2 temtem vs you and your friend controlling 1? Why would I want to give myself less control? Why is this even an MMO if there's no reason to team up?

It's Picross 3D. If you know what that is, you know what's up, and you know it's good. Voxelgram has an insane amount of levels, really smooth controls, and great QoL changes to what you expect from Picross 3D.

If you don't know what Picross 3D is, it's a logic game where you slowly break away blocks to reveal a sculpture of an object in the end. It's fun and casual, and not very difficult.

While Voxelgram is a lovely game in its own right and improves upon Picross 3D in some aspects, imo it falls short in a couple of aspects. Everything just lacks oomph

Nitpicks:

• Everything feels a little unsatisfying. In Picross 3D, a block breaks into many pieces when you remove it, in this game you just get a "click" noise and the block fades away. The level end screen shows you the final object with little to no fanfare, and finishing a diorama just feels like I ticked a box.
  
• I don't like the sound and music. The click sfx get grating over time, in terms of music there are like 3 tracks that are really melancholic for some reason. The music tries to be relaxing but it comes off as needlessly sad for such a casual game.
  
• No timer or challenge levels. In Picross 3D, you have a timer to keep you on your toes and challenge levels you need to finish in a quick time. Some people didn't like these, but I loved it and wish this game had something similar.

Aside from that, this game is pretty great, but with a little more polish it could've been amazing. Still highly recommend, following up Picross 3D was never an easy task.

Stuttering issues are variable for different people. I'm under minimum specs but I'm running the game extremely well on 30fps, with very few stutters (like 1-2 per hour), and usually only when entering a new area. It's not a big deal on my end and the game is perfectly fine.

As for the game itself, it's 11/10. Everything about it is incredible. Combat is amazing, the world is fantastical and full of variety, the open world is full of surprises and never boring, the game has an OVERWHELMING amount of content, and there's even more build variety than dark souls. Just awesome!

You have to grind for 20-30 hours just so you can play this bloody game. Until you grind XP and unlock the last 3 tiers of many different towers you're straight up playing at a disadvantage, and you're going to lose every single game because the game fails to match you against people of the same level.

Probably the most brilliant game I've ever played. I might not ever finish it, but it's a fantastic brain-melting puzzler.

Easily the best and most accessible tower defense game out there. If you enjoyed BTD5 or the genre in general, you'll enjoy this one. Sure, there are still microtransactions but absolutely none of them are necessary. You can unlock almost every tower upgrade in ~10 hours total, and the other MTX are barely worth it anyways because the game is very generous with monkey money after unlocking all heroes.

Easy/medium are good enough for casual players but where the game really shines is hard difficulties and above. The game has a pretty good amount of depth and each stage has its own strategies, especially now that field of view is a factor when placing your towers. Your tower placements are more important than ever now, and field of view can be brutally small on harder maps.

BTD6 feels like a proper sequel that fixed the last game's issues while adding good new features. The game is no longer about spamming sun gods with camo villages, now there are tons of strategies and every tower feels relevant. All towers have very powerful 5th tier upgrades that could make them even stronger than sun gods. Towers that used to be weak like tack shooters and ice monkeys are now surprisingly good and worth using now.

New additions include heroes, which honestly aren't as big of a deal as you might think. They help you during the early game but after you pass round 40 or so you forget they're even there. Definitely useful to hold out the first handful of stages before you properly set up, but not game-changing.

Other new additions include new bloon types. Purple bloons are immune to magic/fire attacks, stopping wizard/druid from being the most OP early game tower like in BTD5. There's also DDTs, which are super fast camo MOABs and your new worst enemy. Really, ♥♥♥♥ those guys.

Overall, BTD6 is good/good. Definitely worth buying if you're a fan of the series. The one thing that's worse I would say is coop, which is broken (for now) due to bad netcode and random disconnects. I don't like coop anyways, but it's worth pointing out that it is nigh unplayable if you're into that.

A genuinely great platformer with a powerful mario maker-esque editor. Great controls, great polish, and a great community putting out a bunch of levels every day.