Recent reviews by kvlt

It's easy to see why this one isn't universally beloved - it's both much more difficult and a much messier design than FiTS. I feel like I'll be a hundred hours in before I can even form an opinion on how well the balance holds up once you start developing mastery. If you don't mind rough edges, though, it's an easy recommendation - FiTS was too easy to really hold up in the long run and I'm usually in favor of bigger messier designs.

Special mention to the impossibly stupid animation for jumping attack with a bow mainhand, someone is prepping for their career in big screen fight choreography.

I thought this was going to be a bunch of vaguely xcom-y puzzles, and it kind of is, but they all have many solutions and there's also a bunch of great writing. Best surprise of the year.

I feel kind of bad for giving this one a thumbs down because there's a lot of good design work and great presentation here, but it's also the ten billionth deckbuilder to copy ascensions from StS without really thinking them through and I just cannot ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ handle playing 19 tutorial/easy mode runs per class anymore. It is more tutorial than anyone needs.

And you know, maybe this is unfair. Maybe there's something clever that happens around ascension 15 or so. But I'll never find out because this game is easier to go infinite in than any other deckbuilder I've played and ascension 2 is the stock completely irrelevant "bosses have more health" so I will die of boredom long before then. Please stop doing this. Your game deserves better.

Update: just over a week later, they've announced that the next big patch is stripping out in-game monetization/season pass stuff entirely. Here's hoping it works out for them, and everyone can learn the right lessons.

This is a very mixed bag. The game at its core feels like a less obtuse Stolen Realm with a lot more polish and numbers that make sense, which is both good and bad. For example, since modern design sensibilities entail a narcolepsy-inducing on-ramp, difficulty comes in a Slay the Spire-style drip - once you get your bearings you'll have to play another 15 hours before it gets to a reasonable spot where you might lose a run here and there.

Bolted on top of this is a shameless live service layer including a lobby that should have been a menu and the season pass silliness. That latter part, at least, isn't particularly egregious - if you like the game and play it you'll get enough rewards from the free tier to unlock the premium tier and at least so far it looks like previous seasons stick around in toggleable fashion so you're spared the usual FOMO. Plus it's all cosmetics. Downside, the game really wants you to play a *lot*. You're going to get a million quests with ten steps each and it will not infrequently only be possible to accomplish one step on any given run. Good in terms of providing direction but I'm not sure it's going to do as much as they hope for longevity.

Longevity is probably the biggest concern, really. Live servicing things up to this extent is going to be off-putting to a lot of people, while their contextually-generous approach means there's not much reason for the people who do look past it to spend any extra cash. But if your group needs a break from the, uh, highly experimental approach to balancing in Stolen Realm then this is a good alternative with plenty of its own synergy-seeking fun.

I mean it's a gacha, obviously it's bad. On the other hand I dig PM's setting and storytelling, so I put up with that for a while.

But you don't fire your good artist to placate a bunch of whiny freaks. Like, scary situation and all I get it, but you gotta stand up for your employees. So now we're into the triple reverse review bomb phase of this whole stupid thing, I guess?

This is a tough one, and I really want to give it a thumbs up. The design is fantastic. All the systems come together in a very enjoyable way, it looks and sounds great, etc. The problem is that as half the other negative reviews mention, there just isn't enough content and what does exist is much too easy.

If we had a good random map generator, a campaign 50%-100% longer than what's here, some sort of endless mode, or it were 1993 and I believed the game would catch on enough to see a million great community made maps...any of these things and it'd be an easy endorsement. I do intend to check back in a few months and see if I'm wrong about how much uptake there will be on the volunteer labor front, but I'm not optimistic. Very interested in seeing some more substantial DLC or future projects from the team.

I guess also stay away if you can't stand time pressure - that's the other half of the negative reviews, and it is true that nearly every mission is built around a timer of some form or another. A third of them you can completely negate via deckbuilding and probably a full half can be solved by walking up to the primary monster with your starter deck and murdering it, but it is there and if that stresses you out you're not in for a good time.

Look, it's not a "good" game but until it has competition in the open world spider train genre it's the only place I can point you for a fix.

There really is a great concept buried in here, it just needs a budget, small-scale multiplayer, and some actual design to really shine. Buy it so we can get the scaled up sequel someday.

The short version: this is a mediocre-to-good game I took 100 hours to beat that could have been a fantastic game with half the playtime.

You will probably feel differently if you're really into the characters/comic book storytelling in general, but if you're mostly here for the combat the two hours of padding between each fight start to grate pretty quickly. This is especially bad if you have the kind of brain that makes you gather every resource available to you and play on the highest difficulty setting available to you, because the resource gathering part is incredibly tedious. It also starts to feel like there was some really troubled development or poor allocation of resources happening, because this game has about a billion hours of voice acting but a remarkably shallow pool of enemies and environments for its length.

It gets a thumbs up despite the numerous glaring issues because once you do get into combat, it's pretty fun. It does a remarkable job keeping the challenge in line with your power growth as long as you push into each new difficulty as it opens up and the variety of characters you need to use keeps you from settling into a single degenerate build too quickly. On the flip side of that, there are some obviously busted things you can pull off and they are very satisfying when they line up right. The limbo training room also does a good job making you look at how each character's abilities work in isolation, which makes for a nice springboard to think about how to assemble a team that functions well.

That loops back to the negatives, though - it's worth doing once with each character, but if you want to keep everyone leveled up you're going to need to do it a lot more than once. There's no challenge once you've solved it with a character so this ends up feeling like yet another chore. It's even worse because experience gain is tied to card usage but not to enemies defeated, so you're incentivized to drag each round out instead of clearing as quickly as possible. The game would have been much improved if they'd axed the experience-based leveling entirely and just yoked it to mission progress roster-wide.

It's also still pretty buggy. My favorite was one and only one character showing up to an end credits sequence in their bathing suit. Enemies getting blown out of the combat arena but still counting as alive and taking their turns is less fun.

On the whole it's an easy recommendation if you really want to hang out with superheroes, everyone else should wait for the complete edition on sale for 75% off a year from now.

The big negative first: the game cops to being "season 1" after you finish it. If you squint at it and look backwards you could argue that there's a reasonably satisfying story, but there are a far greater number of plot threads left hanging. Some of it will move a bit more once the second batch of free DLC hits, but I am skeptical that much will be resolved before we see a full Troubleshooter 2 released.

For that to be a negative at all you have to care about the story and the characters, and the translation isn't going to do you any favors on that front. The dialogue never gets much better than stilted, but to my surprise I was pretty invested well before the end. Part of it is just down to determination on the writers' part. You're going to see a bunch of characters who look like mooks when you meet them, and then you're going to spend dozens of hours with them. You're going to make wildly inaccurate guesses about who is a villain and who will join your party. The effort on display here deserves more polish than it got, and it's easy to imagine a cleaned up version really landing these scenes.

On the actual game front, there's a similar mismatch between effort and polish. You could (and I did) easily spend an extra couple dozen hours hunting down, taming, and training monsters who are only useful to one possible class for a single member of your massive party. There will be occasional moments where the combat feels great; you're relying on cover from smoke grenades to advance, and your tactical decisions feel critical. There will be many more moments where you advance a single melee character into a crowd and clear the map with counter attacks, or exploit the AI to sneak out a win because everything will charge and one-shot you.

If none of that scares you off and you have any affection for the idea of vaguely xcom-themed combat existing alongside anime swordsmen who deflect bullets and RPG class changes and skill customization, this is the best game to meet your needs.

Update: the second DLC released between me finishing the game and me writing this review, so this will need an update in another who knows how many hours. It's not free as I'd anticipated, but for the ludicrous amount of content this team has stuffed into everything I'm calling that perfectly reasonable, and I look forward to all the new stuff.

Update after actually playing Crimson Crow: I still can't say I'm satisfied with the overall arc and resolution of the story, but as long as the team at Dandylion keep making new stuff in the setting I'll keep playing it. The new missions are really excellent at forcing you to mix up your approach a little bit and find new, even more degenerate ability sets and it's great. Absolutely top tier developer and you should buy the game.

I'm sure there's some good stuff buried in here somewhere, maybe up behind this attic door I can't reach using any of the brooms/hoes/actual step-ladders I've passed, but the actual game part is stupid adventure game puzzles with an extra trillion red herrings stapled to a sanity mechanic that asks you to fake incompetence if you want to see anything interesting or poke at your phone next to a lightbulb for two minutes every so often if you want to progress.

Hard pass from me.