Recent reviews by brized

I've played this since around when it came out in the 90's.

This is isometric, but movement is based on character heading instead of map heading.
This makes for a steeper learning curve, but a much higher skill cap than traditional twin-stick controls or MOBAs.

The movement is also physics-based. You have friction & momentum, more with vehicles than on foot. Some weapons can bounce you around or suck you in, in ways that go beyond MOBAs. Again, this adds to the skill cap.

It is an old engine. The most outdated thing other than the graphics is the UI. It could be much more streamlined.

To help with onboarding, a "START HERE" zone with some tutorial stages built-in would help. Duck Game does a good job of this with small stages that teach you techniques through the challenge they present. Something like that would smooth the curve quite a bit for new Infantry players.

I wish this had the Combined Arms zone made by ryanbe and STAS in 2009. It pushed the engine and the Infantry concept to its limits.

If you appreciate physics-based, high skill cap games like Rocket League, push through the learning curve for a deep gameplay experience.

And always remember...

GG EZ $$

This could be put in most art museums and make everything else seem pathetic.

It took 2-3 hours to finish this game. Most of my logged time was AFK.

This feels unfinished. The writing seemed rushed. The characters are forgettable. The setting and plot is interesting, but wasn't executed well. The voice acting is incomplete. The way mechanics are introduced and built on is uneven.

If you compare this to an Ace Attorney game, Lucifer Within Us builds on its Cross-Examination mechanics. But it falls short on every other element.

If you're a game developer studying mystery games, this is worth checking out. There's something here that one could make a better game out of. Otherwise, get it for $6.00 or less. It's 2-3 hours of ho-hum entertainment that leaves you with a feeling of wasted potential.

To all the people saying it's just rock-paper-scissors (RPS) or shallow:

1) This would mean that characters do not matter, or the character with the highest life would be the best. However, each Yomi character has match ups with the others ranging from around 5-5 to 7-3 (out of every 10 games, each will win 5, or one will win 7 and the other will win 3, etc.). This means that some characters are "counterpicks" to other characters, where they usually win 7 out of 10 games.

2) Yomi "just being RPS" would also mean that individual skill caps out at RPS level. However, the top player of Yomi has a consistent win rate of over 90%, while the best strategy in RPS has a win rate over 70%.

Here's the Yomi data on both points: http://forums.sirlingames.com/t/more-yomi-data/5346
Here's the RPS data on win rates: https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-win-over-70-matches-in-rock-paper-scissors-3e17e67e0dab


If you want to complain about it being hard to figure out the deeper parts of the game, that's fine. Ranking up with a character should unlock hints on that character's nuances and matchups. But shallow RPS accusations? The only shallow thing here is you.

Pros:
Good production values (art direction, music, sound design, voice acting)
Fun way to learn about basic Norse mythology
Short


Cons:
Attacks are so slow to come out that it doesn't feel like you're playing a capable warrior. Mitigated by being able to cancel animations by dodging, but that only prevents the game from being too frustrating to play at all.

Character's move speed feels slow.

Story is undermined by the above. Hard to suspend disbelief about your character's background when it doesn't feel good to play as her.

Shallow combat mechanics. It's very obvious when to quick attack vs. heavy attack, and heavy attacks dominate most the time because dodge cancelling almost entirely shifts the risk of whiffing and being punished to just whiffing and missing some damage output. And the opportunity cost of getting in 1-2 quick hits vs. one heavy hit again favors going for the heavy hit.

Most levels are boring, due to only using 2 of:
1. Enemies
2. Puzzles
3. Environmental hazards

It's fine to use one element at a time in the early levels, just enough for players to learn the mechanics involved, but later levels should combine all three, and up the intensity. One of the last levels (Tree) is just navigating a slightly confusing level while occasionally dealing with an environmental hazard. For how far it is in the game, the player has already learned the underlying mechanics involved (especially since the Lake level was similar but better executed). A shorter, more intense level would have been better than what we got, and that goes for most levels. Compare with Braid, where every level explores a different/new game mechanic, and moves on before it gets stale.

Not enough unlockable shortcuts in the level design, resulting in boring backtracking at times.

You should get your life/powers refilled upon entering the hub, but don't.

I really wanted to like this game, but I'm disappointed.

Movement lacks interesting physics or techniques. See Super Metroid, Smash Melee, Duck Game, various 2D Mario games, etc. for good examples. Google search "The guide to implementing 2D platformers".

Most weapons lack depth; the main exception is Brass Blessing, which has interesting risk/reward mechanics. Rockets are also good in that they work differently depending on the distance to the target, but they should have a faster fire rate. It would introduce the risk of overheating as well as allow a little more choice in use.

The utilities seem poorly balanced; Quantum Blink is obviously optimal for speed running normal hive stages, while Overshield is obviously optimal for boss fights and ambushes. Even in multiplayer, everyone using Overshields and healing grenades is almost certainly better than other options; it's significantly lower risk while still offering high effectiveness. Also, all utilities should have a sound cue on recharge.

All in all, loadouts feel flat. Two weapons and two utilities would give player characters more depth and feel much better to play. If you don't want to overwhelm new players with options, make the extra slots unlock as you hit higher difficulties.


The Queen is great, but the other bosses aren't interesting, as patterns are not varied enough. Players can generally stick with one strategy or position for the entirety of the fight with minimal risk. The standout example is the Crusher, which you have to repeatedly jump over and shoot in the back. The boss lacks an anti-air pattern, so players always know to just jump over it when it gets ready to do anything. This is known as degenerate gameplay, and it's boring. Look to bosses from 2D Mario, Castlevania, Metroid, Contra, etc., for a spectrum on pacing, difficulty, and complexity.

There's an apparent lack of AI-based enemy and item spawns. See Resident Evil 4, Pac Man: Championship Edition, Geometry Wars, etc. for good examples.


Lack of overall polish across the board; less an issue for player characters. See "Juice it or lose it" and "The art of screenshake" talks on YouTube.

I can run Witcher 3 on high settings at 60fps, but this game chugs and skips at times.

Lack of originality in the writing. Look at HELLDIVERS for an example of using popular works as inspiration rather than resorting to lazy plagiarism.


All in all the game isn't bad, but it rarely rises above mediocrity. It's just not fun most of the time.

Quack.

I liked XCOM. I like fantasy. I like Lovecraft. I thought I'd like this game.

I was wrong.

The game has a few fatal flaws: excess RNG and grind. They combine in a way that results in less than 2% of players finishing the game. Not due to difficulty, but due to a lack of fun. Compare with XCOM's over 25% completion rate.


Excess RNG: You may be thinking, "but XCOM had RNG too! People hated it, but still loved the game!" And you'd be right. The difference here is that in XCOM, about half or more of the outcomes in the game are due to player agency and not RNG. The cover system, how you build your base, what skills you choose, and to a lesser extent the skills themselves are not RNG-based.

Also, XCOM has only 4 classes your soldiers can level-up into. DD has 13, and their skills are randomly chosen. When you start to understand the underlying game mechanics and want to build a specific party, in XCOM you can do that from scratch in a few hours. In DD, it's going to take much longer, and due to the difficulty you want specific party comps ASAP.

But it gets worse. In DD, you have randomly-generated quirks, passive strengths or weaknesses for each hero, and they are not balanced with eachother. So to get an optimal party, you don't just need the right classes with the right skills, you need the right quirks as well. That much RNG, with no player agency countermeasures leads into...


Excess Grind: The RNG dominance on system mechanics creates a need to rely on it to get what you want, and this means lots of time and repetition. But it gets worse. DD has a base like XCOM and upgrades, but in DD, there is significant overlap in the resources you need. Upgrading one aspect of your base directly impacts your ability to upgrade multiple other aspects. And one of the upgrade resources, Deeds, is in such demand that it creates a bottleneck.

This would be fine if the upgrade costs scaled right, or the supply of resources was balanced right, but the way it is slows the game down to the point where you have to grind up the resources to unlock and defeat the next boss.

And that would be OK if the gameplay was deep enough, but there's an imbalance in RNG vs. player agency in combat as well. It gets boring once you stop being able to explore new game mechanics through classes, skills, enemies, and party comps. The question of "who should I target, and what should I do to them?" is usually an obvious rather than interesting choice.

There just isn't enough variance in possible outcomes per fight with the same starting inputs once you factor out RNG. So once you have a party that's specialized for a specific enemy type, you could repeat 100 battles vs. those enemies and they'll all play out the same way until you start getting bad rolls. That wasn't the case in XCOM, due to greater depth.


The Terrible Synergy: So it all comes down to this: You know what you need, but can't have it because you can only grind for it. You want to advance in the game, but can't because you don't have what you need yet. You have an abundance of certain upgrade resources, a shortage of others, and there's no way to even them out. You can adventure in specific areas for a higher *chance* of a type of upgrade resource, but it's not enough to prevent the bottleneck.

All these factors all combine into what feels like a 20-hour game stretched into a 50-hour one. If the resource pacing was such that you could get to each boss without grinding, and then beat the boss more through strategy than grinding up the right party and gear for it, you'd have a great game. Instead it's just wasted potential.

I really wanted to love this game. The problem is, it's 2016 and it doesn't have the kind of controller mapping support you'd find in a 1990's game. The controller is hardcoded to one input layout.

That on its own wouldn't be so bad, but the running sections of the game require you to switch from face buttons to right analogue stick constantly. See, 360 shooting requires the right analogue stick. The face buttons each do very important things, like jump and teleport. The human thumb can't do both at the same time.

But it doesn't end there. The game rewards you for going fast, and sprinting is bound to both R buttons. The game doesn't let you sprint and 360 shoot at the same time; you start shooting, you stop sprinting. So why is the controller hardcoded to allow the player's hand to sprint and 360 shoot at the same time? Why didn't the devs move the critical face buttons to the shoulder buttons, and move sprint to a face button?

Devs, if you're going to make games like it's the Stone Age of Gaming, at least make the controls work with the human hand so we don't want to change the controls constantly as we play your game. You've ruined an otherwise great game by both being lazy input Nazis and chosing a One True Controller Layout that forces you to use a claw grip like Gollum. Do you want your players to develop mutant Gollum hands? Do you? Because that's what you did.

I laughed. I cried. Buy this game. Play it.