EntropyNines 最近的評論

This game is absolutely fantastic.

Don't get me wrong, when you boot up this game you know *exactly* what you're getting into. It's rough. The graphics are rough, often having mixels and slightly janky animations. The gameplay has absolutely zero tutorialization. It's not by any means something with an even average budget. That's its greatest strength.

As I played, I noted things I didn't know and found out by complete accident. I noted design decisions I disagreed with-- the inability to check what items do in the middle of a run, the inability to not pick one up when standing on it, the sometimes awkward and cumbersome UI that I only later found out you have the ability to reduce. A roll that isn't indicated you can perform and doesn't actually give iframes.

And then I kept playing. And kept playing. Surely this time I'll get farther. Just one more run couldn't hurt. And then I realized, *despite* its rough edges... I was having some real fun. It's inherently simple. It's dopamine-inducing-- you get the same power escalation as games like Vampire Survivors with some slightly more involved gameplay. It's just so fun to find all these rare equipment, watch the numbers go up, pick up passive after passive, slaughter everything in your way, eventually get slaughtered yourself when the enemies become so overwhelming they shower you in bullets at the same time you're showering them.

No, The Dark Realm is not an AAA game. It's pretty clearly a passion product. And *that* is what keeps me coming back, booting up the game every now and again.

Just one more run.

EDIT: Game's still buggy, but it's significantly more playable now, so my review's changed to a positive one. Just expect some bugs.


EDIT: Joining games is now much more stable, but basic game progression is still liable to break. It's getting better, but I'd still hold off for now.

This game is free. That's a pretty large plus.
That being said, this game is also nearly unplayable.

Let me explain my experience.

I spent nearly 40 minutes, cumulatively, hopping from lobby to lobby. The reason for this is because the game's multiplayer is horribly glitchy. It takes forever to join a game because 80% of the time, the host will start the game, get stuck on a gray screen, and lose connection.

I managed to get in the game twice. Both times, over half the lobby lost connection or got stuck on a gray screen before even starting. The game has no failsafes in place at all for people leaving the game. If this happens, the game progression is wrecked, and the players who were supposed to be host to their clients will be unable to connect to their client and be softlocked, requiring a debug command so they can be host to themselves. Both times, this ended up ruining the session, and the players left quickly.

I figured I'd start a solo session as a last ditch effort to get the game to work. It worked perfectly up until I was supposed to enter the Medium and then the game stopped responding. I gave up.

It takes a lot for me to actively not reccommend a free game, but the game being so broken I can't even play it properly will do it. This game has potential, and if it lives up to it i'd be happy to change my review, but it's just not worth your time, currently, in my opinion.

So, I bought this game as a quick idle fix. It seems to be something along the lines of The Prestige Tree and its offshoots, and I enjoyed those, so I was hoping it would give me at least a couple of hours of enjoyment for the 1 buck price.

It gave me maybe 10 minutes.

To begin with, this game has no content *at all* pre-packaged with it. All of its generator types and tiers and upgrades are based on Steam workshop. Luckily, the game comes with 5 base mods. Unluckily, those are the only 5 mods the game has. So the "example" content is the only content the game even has at base.
This already struck me as a bad sign, but who knows, maybe it'll be good.

So let's talk about those mods, then, since they're the content.

Mod 1 is a basic currency. The last currency you unlocked can be transferred into this new currency, at a rate that is never explained. (This will become a recurring issue, believe me.) You can also increase total income of it by clicking an X button, at a price and effect that is never explained. You can ALSO auto-generate said currency by clicking a G button, at a rate and price which is yet again never explained.

So, basic as can be, but with an ominous undertone of critical information not being explained.

Mod 2 is... some sort of multiplier? It displays two currencies being multiplied (eg. A*B) and, uh, two buttons labeled X and XX? None of this has any tooltip at all. I have no idea what this does, how it works, what it costs, or even what currency it costs, but occasionally a currency went up faster when I clicked XX.

As for mods 3 through 5? Never showed up. I went 21 layers in, and then just to check, I started a new save, made absolutely sure I'd set for them to appear, and went 9 layers deep, and they just never appeared.

So there's exactly 2 different types of layer at the moment.

After 10 layers, you can prestige to increase your Ticks per Second. It doesn't display what the new value will be. I didn't really notice much of a difference, but it just seems like pointless padding to me since it unlocked nothing new.

Aside from the actual content, there's somehow a lack of polish? This game has one sound effect, for clicking a button, and it eventually stopped playing around layer 3. The buttons are occasionally unresponsive, and popup windows sometimes get stuck. These are not things I would nitpick on, but the lack of content kind of highlights their existence in a nasty way.

As far as I can tell, this is not an Early Access title. But in my opinion, this should not have been put on steam. This looks not just like a pre-alpha, it looks like a game that has just started development. It's not just undercooked, the baker has yet to preheat the oven. It's not worth the asking price of a dollar, unfortunately.

THIS REVIEW IS PROBABLY INACCURATE NOW THAT THE GAME IS OUT OF EA, CHANGED TO RECOMMENDED FOR NOW, WILL UPDATE WHEN I HAVE TIME TO EXPLORE THE GAME AGAIN

I have more than 350 hours in this game.

I think I hate it.
See, on paper this game is an absolute dream-- and in structure, it is too! Thousands of creatures to collect, each with unqiue traits that can assemble many unique teams? Thousands of THINGS to collect?? Wow, this is *exactly* my game!

Except. God, where do I even begin.

First of all, this game will never let you experiment with anything ever. Not without a permanent cost. Making artifacts to equip your creatures is incredibly costly, and if you stick things like trait materials and nether stones on them, taking them off destroys them altogether. Doing anything other than basic exploration costs rare resources, so you'd better hope your team pulls through or that set of traits interacts exactly how you thought they would, or you're wasting stuff like keys, the entrance cost of the arena, etc. etc. There is no training dummy to test stuff out.

I am actively DISCOURAGED from experimenting. When a team doesn't work, i've wasted so many resources that it feels like there was no point at all.

Even if you do have a team that works, there's not much to use it on that won't cost you. Basic exploration is incredibly easy, offers zero variety or challenge, and the game absolutely loves forcing you to spend most of your time in empty realms with basically nothing in them-- essentially, a waste of time.

I loved the idea of this game. And for the first 200 something hours, it was great. But now, my experience has been tainted with frustration and boredom, mostly. If you don't mind losing a lot on things that don't work, feel free, but this game has caused me a lot of rage over its boneheaded design at times.

Do you like EXPLOSIONS?
Do you like RAINBOWS?
Do you like DESTROYING THE WORLD?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these things... play Copy Kitty.
Play it.
Plaaaaay iiiiit.

It's seriously so good and exhilarating and Hard Mode is extensive as hell and essentially functions as a whole campaign of its own and there's 2 characters so there's 4 WHOLE CAMPAIGNS with 13 WORLDS EACH and its just

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

thing go boom :D

hey you should be buying this just because of the soundtrack

like yeah the game is super fun (if kinda buggy rn)
and yeah the dev is super nice and attentive to feedback
and yeah the graphics are some of the best sprite art ive ever seen

but like

holy crap, the SOUNDTRACK.

huge shoutout to cityfires for being such a good musician!

literally look at my hours

that should give you an indication of how good it is

Alright, I've played for a bit so far.
The game is fun. Really fun. It's like a tile-based deckbuilding game. Think Slay the Spire but more based on reflexes. If you've ever played MMBN it's a variant of that.
Pros-
The music is fantastic. The gameplay is slick and clean and crisp and it all just flows *right*. And it's got the addictive "one more run"-ness that any self respecting roguelike should have.
Cons-
The game is *hard*. Really hard. This might not be a con depending on who you are, but the bosses will 100% kick your ass. I ended up wishing there was an easy mode or something just so I could stop dying so much.
The game is kind of a mess as you continue playing. There's so much going on that it ends up collapsing into a ton of visual noise, a chaotic mess that tends to shut down rational thought. It feels sometimes like I died because I literally didn't know what was going on rather than dying because I lacked skill.
Overall
I'm totally going to reccommend this game. It's fun, it's addictive... but it might make you hate yourself a little.