Recent reviews by lufia22

Just not good enough for me. It's an interesting game and fairly priced, but I couldn't see myself returning. I was excited when I saw all the different characters to unlock and play, but once I realized these are more of a difficulty slider, I got pretty discouraged.

The game is a bit wonky. For example, if you pause the game while there is text on the screen from something like the Killing Moon event, it just stays there. So you have to unpause and wait for the text to go away and pause again so you can actually see. The controls get a little weird at time when dragging locations. Like the game will stick your mouse to a location and have a weird delayed drag.

It's an interesting concept, but at the end of the day it's just placing buildings and waiting. It's a resource management style game where you try to keep up with the ever increasing upkeep costs while constantly having to expand as your tiles become exhausted of resources. You have goals to meet like building a certain building or defending against X amount of raIds.

My biggest gripe is that this is supposed to be a real time game, but the visibility options are not very good. The grid starts filling up and becomes a giant cluster ****. Even fully zoomed out you still have to drag the board around to see things. This really made the game feel like a chore to play, especially when they start introducing raids where enemies will attack your tiles. At this point, keeping up with what was happening with the poor visibility became more of a chore than a fun game.

It's just not polished or fun enough for me to keep. Best of luck to the devs.

Amazeballs. It has a lot of moving parts that makes for a great deal of decisions. Dice placement games tend to be fairly shallow, but this one manages to take the concept deeper. I can't wait to see what else they have in store for the game.

Fun ass game that offers a pretty good challenge.

Mechanics:
- Typical auto fire offering.
- Typical bomb stock that makes you invincible and does massive damage to the screen.
- One of your auto-firing weapons will automatically target ground enemies. A minor mechanic, but ground units can be blocked by environment objects, requiring you to reposition to hit them.
- You can pick up one of three "Options." A vulcan machine gun "drone" that fires in one direction for a time, a cannon "drone" that targets and shoots enemies for a time, and a large rocket that does a lot of damage in an area. These options can be charged by not firing your auto weapon. Once charged, you press the auto fire button to activate. The Option will the last for a set amount of time and cooldown before you can activate it again. Each option has its own cooldown and charge time, with the machine gun being the fastest and the rocket the slowest.
- Your helicopter can also angle slightly to the left or right. You do this by moving in a direction while not auto firing. Once you auto fire, your helicopter locks into whatever position it was facing. This is a bit awkard and takes some getting used to because to re-center your ship, you have to let go of movement and auto fire for a moment.
- There are multiple helicopters to choose from. I haven't played with all of them enough to know the ins and outs of their differences, but I do know at least one of them played slightly different.

Scoring:
Fairly typical stuff. You kill enemies for score. There are some special enemies in each stage that help contribute to your score at the end of the stage. The quicker you beat the boss and less bombs you use the better. If you pick up the same Option you already have equipped, you get a 5000 point bonus. Option pick-ups will remain on screen and rotate between the three options, allowing you to save them for scoring.

The most unique part of scoring is that when you kill an enemy using an option, you get double the score. You will factor this into your strategy as to which weapons you use and when you will use them.

My only gripe with the game is some projectiles/obstacles are not very obvious. For example, the first boss shoots some tiny, white rockets at you while also shooting the typical orange/red bullets. It took me a few deaths to realize what was hitting me.

StS is a very well balanced game with great decision making. You can get hundreds of hours out of it just by trying to beat all ascension levels with each character.

Slay the Spire encompasses what a truly great roguelike/lite needs, which is a good balance between strategy and tactics. Each decision, while minor in a vacuum, ends up snowballing into a win. Each character is very unique and has many builds you can lean into. The game feels fair for the most part, and your losses can usually be blamed on poor planning, misplays, and bad decisions more than bad luck.

Some people might not like the fairly repetitive nature of the game. Your builds and choices will vary widely from run to run, but you will run into the same encounters and events quite frequently between your runs. I see this as a positive because it creates predictability. You know you may need to equip your deck with certain options like AoE damage or ways to deal with certain status effects. This is what makes the game so well balanced and designed. Despite the predictability, the game still poses a challenge, and it's up to you to maneuver your way to the finish line.

So few deckbuilders have been able to live up to this game. For me, this is the Brogue of deckbuilders.

I've played plenty of games like this. I honestly only bought this game because it was in a bundle. It's a very simple dice management game, but these games tend to be very shallow and, unfortunately, fairly RNG dependent.

Yes, you can mitigate the RNG, but sometimes you just get railed by it. Does an enemy need a specific number to complete and you roll over and over and don't get it? Unless you have an ability to change that, tough luck. I frequently feel like I lose because of RNG and not because of any decisions I made, and that's not a great feeling.

If you're good at making decisions, this game feels fairly on-rails. Sometimes there's a difficult choice, but most of the time I feel like the choices are obvious. Mix that with RNG and it's more like you're playing a slot machine if you win or lose.

The music is absolutely obnoxious. It's fairly short piano music with chimes, and it loops over and over. After a couple of playthroughs, I got sick of it and turned the music off.

I also question some item balance. Some items will improve your silver coin gains under certain circumstances but cost multiple gold to buy. Since 10 silver equals 1 gold, it feels like these would take forever for these to pay themselves off. If you get offered one of these items late in the game, they're useless. In fact, there's a lot of items that feel useless if you get offered them later in the game.

This is more suited as a mobile game for $5 or less. I don't recommend Dice and Fold.

Simply put, do not buy this game. It feels like an alpha that should have been released in early access at best. This is massive edit to my review after completing the game.

Is ReSetna a full game? Yes, you can play the game from start to end-credits, but the game is bug ridden and has serious pacing issues. It does not feel properly playtested.

The story is mostly told through codex entries you pick up as you play the game. The in-game story is very minimal and, honestly, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The entries are so fragmented, it's hard to make sense of it all until you collect a bunch. I honestly didn't even bother.

The game boasts 20+ hours on the store page. This is a lie. I beat the game in a little over 9 hours, and 1-2 of those hours were me attempting to complete an incredibly frustrating chase sequence that ended up just being an achievement and not something required to complete the game. I can't fathom getting another 11 hours out of this game, even if I tried to collect everything.

The combat needs a lot of work. Enemies do not die very fast, but are easily dealt with by dashing through them and attacking them from behind. The game starts out very slow. Enemies feel like damage sponges, especially the first boss. There's a parry button, but it locks you into a long counter-attack animation, and doesn't feel particularly worth it. One huge issue is that when you get hit, the game just stuns you. Were you mid-attack? Stun. Were you jumping? Stun and you fall to the ground. When fighting multiple enemies, particularly ones with projectiles, this gets incredibly frustrating as you end up getting stun locked if you try attacking or jumping away.

Speaking of combat, the game has three weapons, but they do not feel like side grades. While each weapon has something somewhat unique about it, the damage never improves on the older weapons. Once I got the spear, I never used anything else. The game never requires the use of each weapon's unique properties, like the axe's ability to throw a projectile. This seems like a missed opportunity.

The game features some precision platforming elements, but good god can the controls be infuriating. As already mentioned, if you get hit while jumping, you lose all momentum and fall straight down. There is a warp ability that acts sort of like a grapple to floating nodes placed around the environment. It took me a long time to figure out that if you hold a direction while warping, the game kills your momentum. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to make it far enough until I realized if I didn't hold a direction, the game would properly launch me with momentum. Wall jumping is also very annoying. For some reason double jumping after jumping off a wall is delayed and very finicky.

ReSetna also suffers from some very weird pacing. The game starts out very typical. You explore. You find a boss. You get a power up. You unlock access to more areas. Then, all of a sudden, I unlocked several abilities in a row with no boss in between, unlocked some chip upgrades, all the weapons, and the game became a walk in the park. My health was larger, regenerated, and I came back from death. Usually in a Metroidvania you go through a loop of explore > boss > power up > explore > boss > power up, but past the very beginning of the game, they just throw everything at you and suddenly you're all-powerful.

Speaking of weird pacing, the game has awful breadcrumbing. There were two instances I was completely lost. One was a ladder that was barely visible in the top-right of the screen. I'm not the only one that had this issue, as I know at least two other people I've spoken with have missed this ladder. Another was a teleporter I apparently missed. Without it being displayed on the map, it was difficult to find. Typically in a Metroidvania, you go to areas with locked doors or rooms you haven't explored to find your way forward, but an unmarked teleporter left me exploring every nook and cranny for what I missed. I even missed an important vendor in the hub area for a while because it's a bit out of the way and the game never forces you to meet them.

Quests are poorly implemented. Some require items from around the map, but when you pick up said item it doesn't tell you what it is or does. There was an entire set of items I had no idea what they were for. When turning in the quest, I didn't even know what my reward was. No pop-up or anything. Items around the map are easy to miss. The lore items are literally a faint white glow on the ground. The game does a poor job of distinguishing some treasure from regular background objects until you get used to what they look like.

The game boasts 7 biomes offering unique experiences, but these barely change anything. The most unique area was the acid area, but past that each area's theme is...a color? I guess? This one's blue. This one is red. They don't offer anything unique like store page states. Lots of rooms are huge, empty spaces. Most biomes are just sterile, metallic areas with the corresponding color applied to it.

Some of the bosses were pretty neat, but once the game throws all the upgrades at you, they lack a challenge. Most of the bosses are after this point. The last "boss" is a joke, and super anticlimactic.

But lets talk about the bugs. Oh, the bugs. This game has bugs galore. From enemies spawning outside the combat zone, to text appearing and staying on your screen, to walls you can walk through, to respawn points not being properly places allowing you to skip areas, to treasure you can't loot, to an entire side-quest you can't complete because the NPC will not talk to you, and more.

Simply put, this game is not ready for full release. It feels like a game that was only maybe a third complete, but they hurried and slapped the rest of the game together to call it complete. The game has clearly not be QAed properly. There are bugs galore and issues like getting stunned on hit that make the game feel awful to play.

Best of luck to the devs, but ReSetna offers very little new to the genre and is far from a polished product. They are supposedly fixing bugs and are aware of the bad combat feel, but I don't think that's going to fix the deep seated issue of game pacing that needs a complete overhaul of the game. With the game being at full release, I just don't see it happening. I can't recommend this game at all, especially in its current state.

A very generic JRPG with not a whole lot going for it. It seems like a valiant effort at creating a JRPG experience, but fails in most regards.

Visually, I am not a fan. I realize this is originally a 2016 game, but even then I would have considered these character models ugly and stiff. Sometimes the game's environments are pleasant to look at despite this, but the lack of enemy variety and very lackluster spell and ability animations don't help in this regard.

The combat UI is also needlessly complicated. Rather than giving us a simple ability list like JRPGs have done for ages, they opted for a four-way directional system. You have to press one of your controller's face buttons to select an ability, then press the same one again to confirm it. As a result, you can only see four abilities at a time. The game limits you to 8 per stance, but most characters can't even fill up these 8 slots, and the ones that can only do so because they get upgraded versions of the old ones (i.e. Fire vs Fire+). It's serviceable, but I don't understand why we had to reinvent a worse wheel.

Speaking of combat, there are a number of things I dislike. Many abilities are just the same thing in a different flavor. One character's main abilities are literally just different elements of essentially the same attack. Each character has two stances, but this frequently feels like a useless mechanic. To change stances, you have to give up an ENTIRE TURN to do so. While there is a talent you can use to reduce the time penalty of changing stances, it doesn't help enough to make it feel worth it. The healer, for example, has a standard healer stance and a buff stance. I barely used the buff stance because wasting two entire turns to change into it and then change back when I needed to heal was too dangerous to do in fights that actually mattered and the fights that didn't matter were too short to bother. If you played Sea of Stars and hated how few abilities were in the game, you will dislike Earthlock even more.

Character balance also seems terrible. There is one character whose intended role seems to be a tank and a support damage dealer. The only problem is her tank role is often completely useless in boss fights because bosses are taunt immune, which her entire tank stance revolves around. Even in standard fights her tank stance feels useless because it's counter attack based, but only works against physical attacks that come from grounded foes. If the foe uses an spell, ranged attack, or melee attacks while flying, she can't counterattack or the counterattack simply misses. In fact, the two "tank" characters are probably the worst in the game, offering terrible damage and very little ability to actually tank. One offers some decent buffs, but the game never seemed to require its use.

The best part about the game are its bosses, but they feel more like a puzzle you have to trial and error. You will encounter one shot mechanics that can only be solved by having a specific character in your party, sometimes with specific talents equipped. If you didn't bring that character, you're SOL and have to restart the fight.

If you've read other reviews, you've probably read about the game's quick travel system, which can be done through save points. I'll echo these sentiments that the warp system needed to be streamlined. In order to warp somewhere, you first have to warp back to your base then warp to the destination you want. I'm not sure why this extra step was needed.

Finally, the story and characters are so generic, they feel like the cliff notes of a fully fleshed out RPG. Hell, the "big bad" doesn't even reveal itself until the very end where its appearance and ultimate demise is over in the blink of an eye. Filled with tropes you have seen hundreds of times, Earthlock does little to stand out.

Save your money and time. There are TONS of JRPGs out there to play, and this one is not worth your time.

This is a good game, but for me it feels a bit too early access. There aren't a lot of weapons to choose from currently, so runs feel very samey. Weapon upgrades are often very boring 10-30% stat upgrades, and I'm not even sure what some of the stats, like range, do for some weapons. It looks like only about half the "main" weapons are in the game right now, and I certainly hope more secondary weapons are planned.

So yes, it's a good foundation for a game, but it definitely doesn't feel close to feature complete at the moment. I would hold off on your purchase.

I hope they can make some improvements, but for me right now the game is just a bit dull. I really love the mining aspect because it adds a layer of positioning and an actual reason to explore the map.

It's the gameplay that just lacks. Part of what makes Vampire Survivors so addicting is trying to assemble your build, using skips, rerolls, and banishes to find the right items. Every level up is like opening a treasure box. There's also a lot of characters and things to unlock in Vampire Survivors. Here, I feel like those two elements don't exist.

There's not really assembling a build in this game. You get weapons in set level intervals and once you have four that's it. Every level you get a choice between some weapon stat upgrades or passive character upgrades, with weapons gaining a more powerful boost that actually changes how they play at certain levels (up to three times). In general, this progression is boring. You're choosing 15% reload speed here, 10% damage there, and leveling up just feels boring and unexciting except at those set intervals.

As far as unlocks go, it's very grindy. There's a lot of meta progression, don't get me wrong. There's A LOT to do. It's just that it's not very fun. You have character levels that unlock new classes, goals that unlock more artifacts and weapons, character and weapon challenges that improve those respective things, as well as an upgrade system where you use resources you mine during your missions to upgrade passive stats like XP amount, HP, damage, etc. The problem is it's all just a slog for very minor improvements. You'll do a challenge and get like 5% damage. It's all very grindy while also not being super impactful.

At the end of the day...

Pros:
- Mining and objectives are a really great addition to the genre. They give you a goal while exploring the map.
- The game looks pretty decent.
- Runs mostly great on the Steam Deck except some issue with d-pad responsiveness.

Cons:
- Most of the content is grindy meta-progression
- Very repetitive level structures and very few bosses (two types as of writing this)
- Level ups are boring

Game is kinda dookie ngl