Recent reviews by No Step On Snek

Yep, I've played this game this long and I'm still giving it a negative review. Why?

It's because 2.0 is an epic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of development retardation that adds pointless grind and gates to advancement to what was previously a fun game. Oh, it takes away fleet management options (e.g. ordering a ship to mine a single system) to reduce player control as well, sweet!

There is a fun game here, under their abysmally conceived changes, but you have to use freeplay mode to find it. Download the mod that lets you give ships the orders they took away for no reason (e.g. mine this system out, fly to that one, mine that one out, fly to this other one, etc.), it's called 1.0 command something or other. Then turn off collision damage, unlock all research, and stomp around the galaxy having a blast, like the old days before the devs decided that people shouldn't have fun while playing their game.

I love the game's art style and visuals, but this game is fundamentally lacking in too many ways for me to want to play it any more. I fell into and out of love with this game over the space of a couple of hours.

It's so pretty and calming, but there is no undo, so an accidental click while dragging the map will wreck your perfect work, leading to annoyance. There is very little indication of which faces are matching correctly or not, and precious little explanation of mechanics like the perfect tile bonus you should presumably be targeting.

Worse still, my play felt very RNG controlled. Why did one town build into a picturesque mostly connected beauty and the next a spider work of rail lines and rivers when my care and method of placement was unchanged? It could be me, but it didn't feel that way, it felt like the tiles I was dealt planned for me to create a mess of lines that wasn't calming at all.

There is no advancement that I can see, beyond unlocking tiles, and there are no options for me to tune it (e.g. no difficulty mode adjustment, no "this isn't zen enough for you, turn on even-more-zen mode").

I find myself mostly saddened by this game, because I feel like it's close to being a great game. As it stands I have no interest in playing it further, it's just a mildly pleasant then mildly annoying time waster that I can't see how anyone would want to play for more than a few hours.

EDIT: they made putting easier! I can finally shoot even and below on the first few courses. Ignore my complaints about impossible putting below. I'm back playing this again and enjoying it much more since the putting changes.

I have a love/hate relationship with this game. It's the closest thing to an enjoyable disc golf game on the PC that I've ever seen, and on that basis I recommend it. Unlike most sports games, where I can play better on the computer than I can in real life, in this game that's not the case. After six miserable hours of failure in this game I can safely promise you that I'm wildly better at real life disc golf than I ever will be with this game.

Positives:

- Discs mostly work the way they should (assuming you understand from IRL play how a particular disc should behave depending on speed and throwing angle) though I feel like flight paths when you're throwing up or down in elevation are off sometimes, but if you throw a fast understable disc at too low a speed it will tail off into the left immediately and when you want to crank up and hyzer bomb the same disc at high speed it gives you the long S you expect and so forth
- No bugs really (a couple of times the character model went wonky when a disc landed on/next to a rock wall)
- Graphics are fine by me

Cons (possibly only for me, you may not suck at this):

- The entire game is based on a "stop the tick mark on a spot as it circles a ring" type swing meter, and I'm absolute trash at it
- Feels like no progress, other than buying discs--I've upgraded the three skill meters a lot and it has never felt like game play changed much (lol, it certainly hasn't gotten any easier!)
- Putting is im-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-possible, at least for me, it's way too hard--putts that would be gimmes for a novice in real life are a crapshoot, especially if there's any elevation difference
- After six hours I have only unlocked the first course and half of the second course . . . I may try to go back to this at some point, but for now I've given up on this sucker which is a shame--there are a bunch of other courses that I will never see (my fault, to be sure--I'm terrible at that stupid swing meter)

I haven't played any better options, so while I'm probably giving up at six hours in I'd still recommend it to anyone who's into disc golf. It's clearly too hard for me, but assuming you're not a complete klutz you will probably have better luck with it.

This is a strange game for me, in that I like it and come back to it every six months or so and play a run and then shelve it again.

I played Steve Jackson's Car Wars back in the '80s, so a modern car battler with some FTL-like comparison talk was right up my alley.

The good: the game is fun, the UI is simple and functional once you get used to it, and building up your convoy and winning battles is a blast. The boss is very FTL-like in some ways, and is pretty easy to manage once you figure things out.

The bad: the unlock system is goofy. I won repeatedly without unlocking much of anything, with the unlocks apparently nothing that I'd ever randomly stumble upon while playing. Beating the boss with one unit set doesn't unlock another like in FTL the first time through, for example. When I'd played the game as much as I was likely to I looked up how to use debug mode to enable all the vehicles, because after winning a half dozen times I'd unlocked nothing. The other thing I'd note is that the open world lack of urgency takes away the balance that made FTL so good. In an FTL run your hopes could be dashed by the wrong encounter or getting bad items in stores (at least on hard, that is). In Convoy you can roam around and grind and do side quests until your convoy is solidly OP. The final thing I'd say is that games feel very samey game to game, which is why I tend to shelve the game for six months, come back to it and start a new game, beat the boss and shelve it again.

All that said, I feel like I got more than my money's worth out of it and can easily recommend it.

It's a pleasant enough little clicker game. There is no strategy really, beyond going for damage or going for morale with the monsters and traps you pick. Sure, you can try to match monsters to resistances, but in the end your monsters explode like pinatas anyway and the extra percentage boost or penalty on damage only comes into play once or twice, usually, unless you have a leveled up skeleton knight up front or something to slow the incoming pinata whacks.

I really enjoyed it for four hours, winning a playthrough in that time, and if it weren't for the fact that there is entirely too little game here for the money I'd give it a thumbs up as a casual no-strategy clicker. Attempting to play through it again led to me quitting after the first few batches of adventurers, though, because I was already absolutely bored. There was no difference between the new game and the game I'd just won; in one playthrough I felt like I'd seen all it had to offer and while it was pleasant enough it wasn't compelling enough to want to click mindlessly for four more hours.

Doesn't play like an RPG, it's more like an anime style visual novel with brief mini games in between. Rough flow is something like this:

300 seconds of cut scene, cut scene, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, cut scene, dialogue, dialogue
30 seconds of combat mini game
300 seconds of cut scene, cut scene, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, cut scene, dialogue, dialogue
30 seconds of stealth mini game
300 seconds of cut scene, cut scene, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, cut scene, dialogue, dialogue
. . . and so forth

Realizing the main point of the game was clicking to continue and refunded. If you like anime-themed visual novels, you'd probably love this, though.

Super fun little monster taming platformer. The UI is good, the graphics were fine by me and it was easy and fun to play from the start. I liked the team fight and status effect options, even if the game really encourages you to load up AOE damage critters and instanuke opposing teams.

No complaints really, other than that it's quite short and has little replay value.

Once you put together a team that can wreck everything there isn't really anything worth doing after finishing the story, but I think there's a good 20-30 hours worth of fun there though, and they're not done with it so maybe they'll add more to it.

Looks like it could maybe be fun at some point, but this is not that point.

I'm an American so royalty is not something I'm into, but this was an insta-buy for me because I feel like I owe the devs money for the 1600+ hours of play time I've gotten out of the base game.

I loved Darkest Dungeon, and this game is clearly an attempt to flip the script and give us reverse-DD. From the mood, the art, to the exactly duplicate combat system.

I like the minion selection well enough, and I like playing evil necromancers, and I like the combat system.

So why don't I recommend this game? It's hard to put my finger on why it feels so flat. I think it may be that the minions feel so disposable and generic. Lose a skellybro? Throw together a new one. It's not like they have any real difference one to the next, and I couldn't identify them from one another in any meaningful way as I played.

In DD, when I was throwing heroes into the meat grinder I always had some that I was attached to, that I was targeting for future greatness because they showed up with the right set of abilities. Where others would go mad or get any number of afflictions, the chosen ones would be healed and cured and coddled for late game greatness. I grew attached to them and cared about their welfare, and in Iratus I never felt anything about any of my disposable minions.

It's not a bad game, but somehow it feels hollow, lifeless but still stumbling along like the minions you create.