Recent reviews by Adilor

I'll admit, the look of this kind of game is the kind that I'd give a quick skip when looking through the discovery queue. It has so much more going for it, though, and absolutely should not be judged by its cover. At the strong recommendation of a good friend, I picked this one up and played through it (one "season" of content at time of writing this), and can confidently say that it's become one of my favorite games to release in quite some time.

The characters and overall story have quite a bit of depth to them. The game starts off as something of a playful romp, but gets much more heavy and deep as the story progresses. There are numerous character cameos as well, some with a lot more flourish and their own story elaborations. You might find yourself gaining a greater appreciation for certain bugs.

The gameplay itself is great if you're a fan of unique combat mechanics. Similar to Undertale, it's not just about trading blows with your opponents. A majority of combat time plays out in "duels", which come in a variety of flavors, each of which being its own minigame. Performance in them will determine which side, or both, takes damage. There is a light RPG flavor; you won't be dealing with equipment ugrading or random loot drops, but there is some inventory management in juggling a bag or two of food, keys, and special ability granting items. You'll also gain levels, but these merely serve to make battles easier by reducing the health of enemies you encounter.

Graphically it's what you'd expect from a retro inspired game. It's mostly sprites with simple animation loops, but there are plenty of pixel art portraits. That is not to downplay it, however; the artwork is good if not great. A neat feature is that you can select from a variety of palettes and borders, letting you customize how the game looks.

The music is absolutely fantastic. The game includes a wide berth of tracks, many of them expertly crafted to fit a specific mood or scenario, with many original compositions and some inspired by classical pieces.

More people should play Creepy Castle. It really does deserve more attention than it's received so far.

First off, I do actually like the game. I really do. It is quite pleasing aesthetically, and has a great system in place that lets you play the game how you want.

Problem is, how you want to play the game might not be very successful.

It is of this gamer's opinion that a tower defense game should not be a puzzle game. There should not be a narrow band of builds that will actually grant victory among an immense number of combinations that could be played. With 15 different towers and 17 skills, picking just four of each can be difficult, yes, but it affords the player the ability to define how they want to go about defending their cores, and that's not even counting the perk points, which add another layer of depth and customization. This system by itself is fantastic, but the execution that makes use of it is rather poor.

There is progression; not everything is available from the start. This progression, however, cuts off quite fast. Everything is unlocked at the point of hitting level 12, but the levels keep going, rather pointlessly. Perk points are gained differently, at a rate of 1 per completed map, and when you feel like you're not powerful enough to get past a particular map, there's a problem.

Now, I can understand a TD needing some strategy; if one doesn't make you think about what you're doing, then it's probably not very good. SSTD, though, feels like it asks too much of strategy, putting the player on a very fine line between perfection and failure. I was doing fine with this game through the first few levels. I made a blunder here and there, and learned from what were clear mistakes (setting all Violators to attack the highest HP targets was a bad idea, for the record). There were some tougher levels that took me a couple attempts to figure out, but it felt okay. The challenge was fair. Then along came Works.

Works is the map that I feel enforces an unfair level of difficulty and shows that the game really wants you to use a very specific setup to get through it. I have taken numerous attempts at it with different builds and have yet to even see the boss wave. I have beat my head against it long enough that I don't really care to continue. Maybe it's a fluke, maybe the rest aren't so bad after it, but I'm not going to put myself through the torture of trying to figure out the exact combination of towers and skills it takes to get through this map that seems to have too much of everything.

Sure, I could just use the magic of Youtube and look for a setup that gets through it so I could continue, but that's not how I play; I would get no sense of accomplishment and may as well have used Cheat Engine to bypass the level in terms of enjoyment. When a game completely shuts down a player's ability to progress, without giving them an opportunity to either adequately learn what they're doing wrong or power up to overcome the challenge, then there is a significant problem that needs to be addressed.

The game doesn't need to be easy; it just needs to cater to more than an elite 1% of builds. Don't tell the gamers how to play their game.

What a fantastic experience this game was. Even on its third of four difficulties, I only felt genuinely challenged at a couple points, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it thoroughly.

Aesthetically, the game is beautiful. Every area feels distinctly different, and none of it feels fake or half-baked. Characters and animations are great, and even the voice acting, for the most part, isn't bad.

Storywise...I don't feel like I'm ever qualified to criticize a game's plotlines, but it felt good, solid, strong enough to carry the game.

Functionally, things are spot on. Not once did I ever feel like I got screwed over by being unable to control myself precisely how I needed to. The game has a good system behind the numbers, even if the exponential stat growth does lead to being immensely overpowered in the latter parts.

Plus, all the characters are anthros, and they're not badly done. It's not necessarily a furry game, but it certainly appeals to us.

Buy it, play it, love it.