Recent reviews by Dragomok

Fractured Online is an interesting spin on a classic MMORPG with a pleasant community (NIKE seems like a great guild).
Unfortunately, the game flounders in execution in many places to appeal to the MMO crowd, and flies too close to the formula (and repeats many problems I have with the genre) to appeal to the non-MMO crowd.

In FO, it seems like everything is nudging you towards a "pick everything up" approach to items:

1. There are SO MANY items: a boatload of crafting materials; four gems with three cuts each; so many types of meat, the game needs a scrollbar to show them all...
   
2. ...and, crucially, a staggering amount of reagents containing different combinations of whooping 38 elements, all of which are potentially important and needed in bulk for three-and-counting different progression systems.
   
3. Many important items drop from plants and mobs that are rare and unevenly scattered all over the place, enticing you to always get them if you run into any.
   
4. Camps guarding treasure chests spawn randomly in unpredictable spaces all over the map, offering good loot if you take a small detour.
   
5. And since there are absolutely no NPC sellers or buyers, it seems like you should hold onto non-essential drops so you can sell them to other players.

And yet, despite of all that, the inventory is a tiny grid not able to deal with the deluge of all the items.
There's not enough inventory to contain all the items from a casual stroll down a road, two towns over, within a single CR biome, while discarding "obvious trash" items like hides and meat. Nor is there enough inventory for a trip to a nearby mine, when you intentionally only pick up valuable or needed items. There's almost enough space for going to a single Combat Hotspot while ignoring everything along the way - but then again, I had to discard valuable items there too. And gods forbid if you have the gall to take on chest camps along the way.

Between the constant upkeep of gear, house rent, and monsters rewarding you only in loot after you "master" them, it feels horrible to throw away items you need and want. This killed my enjoyment of both an MMORPG staple of free roams of exploration (since it's a waste compared to single-task laser-focused approach), mining (since a roadtrip without diversions is just a long commute), and being a trader (since it's hard to fulfill buy orders if you can't carry loot for yourself).

Annoyingly enough, FO also has a much more sensibly balanced weight limit system. It's completely beyond me why Dynamight feels they need such a tiny grid limit on top of that.

Big part of FO is manual labour: quarrying stone, ferrying logs, building houses, packing wheat, and stuffing smelters with ore and coal. Sadly, this straddles the line between "honest day of work" and "mind-boggling tedium".

While chopping wood, hammering ROCK AND STONE! or USELESS CRYSTAL, BUT FUN TO DESTROY!, and loading up the wagon is fun, unloading all of that is pain. Even if you optimise the process, you need to click the item in your wagon's inventory, wait a beat for your char to pick it up, click on the receiving structure, wait a beat for your char to deposit - and then repeat that 20 times to build a single furnace. Or 32 times to build a single charcoal pile that every village builds by the dozens, but also every 8 logs your char needs to build it up, and you can screw it up by routinely picking up one log too many.
And for farming, it's the reverse: both planting and harvesting a single plot of land requires several clicks through menus, of which even a tiny village has dozens - but packing up and unloading the produce is a smooth single-click activity.

FO has two halves of a good system, but they're attached to separate things.

Last but not least, FO suffers from many of the standard MMORPG maladies. While mobs feel slightly more alive than the genre average, they still stand in the place all day, they have tiny tither making ranged combat difficult, and appear in the same exact places (and spawn into existence like GMod props; you can almost hear a popping VX). Chest camps ammeliorate that, but like I said, the itemization discourages doing with them. You're supposed to fight them one-on-one or in pre-determined tiny groups. The game is a lonely singleplayer experience until you reach the endgame or go basically out of the game to organise a group, since the game doesn't funnel strangers together and doesn't incentivise transient jolly co-operation, and a veteran has little reason to be in the noob area.

While PvP is not my cup of tea, I almost wish they went with the Hardcore PvP planet before the PvE-Only planet, since the PvE is not particularly improved and might work better as the backdrop for ganking and invasions.

if you can ignore all of these, you might find an enjoyable game. A handful of dedicated players certainly do. I couldn't, and won't pick up Fractured Online again.

Aside from finding out my demi-sexual butt is having difficulty handling a dating sim...

...the combat starts out much, much more difficult than Supergiant Games' Hades. At the start, I have constitution of a wet tissue, and enemies and projectile move faster than I can reasonably react - so much so that I'm not sure whether the first "ambush" after meeting Sunder in the tutorial was supposed to be a near-impossible "meant to lose" situation, or I just suck so much.

After playing the demo, I went into Gods against Machines with tempered expectations.
Between obvious AI art, stock GUI scheme (the same one Fractured Online uses), very indistinct art direction, seemingly unsophisticated gameplay, and "right click for unit info" straigh tup not working, I fully expected a gaming equivalent of a supermarket hot dog. It might not be great, but sometimes a cheap hot dog is what you need to scratch a particular itch.

Unfortunately, it seems it's one of these games where the demo cuts off right before the game gets bad.


GvM is basically a game about using god-game rules to fight an enemy that uses standard RTS rules, where you need to make it lose enough resources before it generates enough Victory Points Corruption to win. As in, you don't control any units, and your entire input is constantly blasting with your basic attack spell, and rarely blasting a Bigger Badder Attack or summoning a Bigger Badder Unit. You have spells that create temporary artillery pieces and unit spawners - but you can and should set them to autocast, since manual casting can't make any difference with them other than missing the perfect cooldown.

The issue is that when you go past the levels included in the demo, the game starts overusing anti-magic fields - areas where you can't cast spells - and the game grinds to a halt and becomes barely interactable. You see the distinctive anti-magic building getting constructed and you can't destroy it before it's completed, because buidlings under construction get 90% damage reduction. You then can't do anything to attack the enemy factories and Corruption-generators inside the field (wide-area spells don't have enough reach to hit it, and "elite" summons have neither strength nor determination to attack the center), so you go to destroy the few buildings outside and - OH LOOK, another anti-magic building is getting constructed! Obviously, this means you should go on the defensive and provide covering fire to your own units so they can attack - OH LOOK, enemy assault is protected by units that also have a anti-magic field!

I've seen about 30 different spells so far, and only one (1) of them counters the anti-magic field, and I've seen if offered exactly once. And there weren't any anti-magic-penetrating spell upgrades either. So - unless you had the extreme luck to even see the spell and the precognition to pick it - you basically have to sit down and wait until your units get lucky, or the enemy constructs enough stray buildings outside the anti-magic field for you to chip away the enemy's resources.

I'd be fine with the game remaining an unchallenging cakewalk, and I'd be fine with the game getting challenging by adding depth, but I'm not fine with the game getting "difficult" by locking the player out. Especially since the rest of the game seems low-effort, too.

...and I haven't even mentioned the anti-magic fields are represented by yellow-orange dotted line on the ground that is very hard to make out.

It's a bit of an eyesore, but even with this DLC, the game is cheaper than I expected - especially considering the quality and the amount of content.

While the gameplay itself feels competent...

...Survivors of the Dawn has the lack of polish of a late alpha, and is missing both gameplay (like bonuses for levels after maxing regular levels) and QoL features (like ability to check your loadout - or even any sort of indicator in the UI how many weapons you can equip) expected of the bullet heaven genre...

...but it's been in Early Access for 4 out of projected 6 months.

(Plus there's an annoying design oversight where end-of-node victory fanfare overlays the music playing at the 100%.)
(Plus the English translation is off and is moderately hard to read.)
(Plus there's no keybinding so you can't dodge while playing on arrow keys.)

If you don't mind unpolished games with barebones UI and some clear jankiness, but I'm going to request a refund and wait 6 more days for Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

It seems Maple Story is at the point of its life where the opening experience is a Frankenstein's monster made out of openings from older versions, hastily abbreviated and badly stitched together.

The kind that rushes you through ossified maps with NPCs running shops and fronting systems that are now 100% obsolete, teleports you to the destination of what once was an introductory journey, instantly levels you up to the "player who has the basic grasp of the game" level, and dumps you in the middle of a city on the middle of a crossroads in the middle of a continent with no clear direction (both spatial and metaphorical). Complete with a coming-of-age story stretched and stapled around the whole thing like Handsome Jack's new face.

And all that's after you have managed to pick a class from an enormous list of character metaclasses that's unsorted, uncategorized, awfully cropped, and not making sense for people who weren't there over the years as these metaclasses were gradually added.

So:
with most reviews saying the end game is horrible, and my review saying the early game is horrible, your only bet for enjoying this game would be the middle game. Maybe. Possibly.

...and with the recent controversy of Nexon patenting anti-player RNG adjustment system...

(Also - starter mobs' spawn rates have been so much increased from what I remember from older versions, making open world combat feel even more insubstantial than in your standard MMO.)

Space Tyrant is a casual game that almost, almost succeeds at smooth untaxing gameplay, but then proceeds to snatch failure from the jaws of victory.

Shortly after the tutorial, the game introduces a new pause screen: at the start of each battle, you're forced to choose one out of three one-off activable effects. The effects are presented as pure white text descriptions with no icons and no colour coding. And you need to read them carefully, since while most of them are either situationally useless or actively harmful (and you're likely to get a completely useless hand), precious few can be a great boon.

Amazingly, this tiny change turns combat tedious, and consequently completely kneecaps the flow of the game.

And that pause didn't even need to be there! The game could've just as well just assigned one effect instead of forcing you to pick, or use easily identifiable icons and have time flow normally (there is, after all, an active pause for players that would need to read the tooltip descriptions).

But now there's too much tedium such a shallow experience.

Rift Wizard is a game concept so fantastic it was an insta-buy for me - but unfortunately, there is something completely impenetrable to me about it.

I've had a lot of minor and major successes in different traditional roguelikes and turn-based roguelites. I could get to Lair and Orc Mines while playing gimmick-centric builds in DCSS; I've beaten lighter ones like Sword of Fargoal, Dungeon of Dredmor, Golden Krone Hotel, and Path of Achra; and while I'm not a master, I confidently strided where others kept failing in Into the Breach and both Darkest Dungeons.

But I. Just. Can't. Grok. how to succeed Rift Wizard! I'm doing well with regular things like avoiding paths with enemies resistant to my damage types, conserving items until needed, and trying to use up charges on my auxillary spells before getting a refill; but trying to make a build feels like every single choice I make is the bad one.

Going for one strong single-target spell with scales-with-kills damage, and some light backup? Can't keep up with enemy spawns, dead on jump 5.
Going for one strong AoE spell with max damage? Still barely can keep up, run out charges, dead on jump 4.
Going for summons, either pumping points into upgrades for a low-level one or picking the most expensive high-level one I can buy? The summon inevitably gets in the one-hit-kill zone and I'm defenseless, dead on jump 6.
Multiple evenly-upgraded spells? Not enough damage per round, dead on jump 5.
Few spells and skills that make them synergise? Spells too weak due to lack of per-spell upgrades, dead on jump 4.

I don't know why this specific game slips from the grasp of my mind, but it seems to evade me completely and thoroughly.

I bounced off hard off Dragon Cliff for two big reasons.


As a fan of idle games, Dragon Cliff doesn't start off with any of the elements recognizable from great idle games, like Cookie Clicker, Idle Wizard, or Territory Idle. What it has instead are: baffling, apparently time-wasting crafting timers for each and every individual item in the town management phase that doesn't seem to be otherwise time-dependent; and auto-attacking battle system where you still need to monitor your mana-equivalent to fire off skills or risk losing the heroes.

It's not a semi-idle game more than tower defence, auto-battlers, or Loop Hero are. Heck, the latter two have a greater claim to this title than Dragon Cliff, since they rely heavily on manually-activated skills.


The localization is wonky to the point of being unusable!

The translation of plain English words is fine, so I guess it's at least not as bad as first Korean translation of Darkest Dungeon.

But there's the big argument for bad font aesthetics and readability - which are the first thing you see on a new save. The story-and-tutorial text boxes feature THE ABSOLUTELY WORST rendition of apostrophes I've ever seen anywhere! It's a tiny slash followed by at least an m-space, a design that OBLITERATES spacing and makes the text look like this:


But that pales in comparison to the nail in the coffin that are the barely readable and completely incomprehensible names of in-game mechanics that are likely the result of translating game terms on a 1-for-1.

It's only annoying when the attack/spellpower is a four-word, twelve-syllable phrase that takes most of the tooltip's width.
But it's a whole other ball game where non-obvious terms completely obscure what a skill does. I had no idea what the hell "skill target" was supposed to be in the first buff skill, 100% rage passives were hard to read, and I was pretty sure it was going to get worse from now on.


This might be the game for you only if you don't want an idle game, won't read text, and your decision-making either relies on randomly clicking stuff and intuiting what it does (or browsing the wiki to get the basic info tooltips were supposed to provide).

BTDB2 is an interesting game for a few tries or casual play, but one that I don't really feel like picking up again.

There are two main reasons:

BTDB2 feels like a phone game first and foremost that's ported to PC as a side gig. While the level and pervasiveness of monetisation gave me a bit of an annoying culture shock, the bigger issue is UX. Tower placement can only be done by drag-and-drop, which messes up muscle memory if you played other Bloons games and serves as a recurring irritant.

BTDB2 is based so closely on BTD6 it could almost be a game mode. While the latter is the pinnacle of its series, its greatest draw - taking normally despised lock-and-key design and making it incredibly deep and engaging - clashes with the core gameplay here.

Being limited in a match to a hero and 3 towers would be a good premise for a PvP tower defense. Unfortunately, between the ecosystem of BTD6, breakneck progression tempo, and players' ability to spam specific bloons, this results in extremely limited choice of towers. With the most dreaded killer combos appearing way earlier budget-wise than they were originally designed for, this forces you to pick towers able to deal with them early on, cutting out many specialists and late-game powerhouses, and also paradoxically putting a lot of redudancy into your builds.

This also results in an unfortunate flow of matches.
Either someone's experimenting and folds up very early; or both players have an impenetrable defence and the game turns into Massed Lead Zeppelins chicken - where both players gamble on who sends the big wave of DDTs with haste first. No, seriously - if gloss over low-rank screw-ups, virtually every game ended by either player getting killed by a DDT.

Passable phone game on PC where other game's great mechanics lead to stale meta.