Recent reviews by Maul

I get such hard playstation 1 Jackie Chan Stuntmaster vibes from this one and I mean in the best way possible

An amazing boomer shooter set in an amazingly well-constructed Warhammer 40K setting.

After my home group disbanded back in mid-2019, I considered dropping DMing tabletop RPGs since I thought the online experience would never measure up to sitting around with your friends around a wooden table and rolling some dice. On the one hand, the feeling was justified. On the other, though, I couldn't be more wrong.

Yeah, it's not the same experience. Some would even go as far as saying it will never measure up and that's ok. But as I see it, it's something else equally great. Playing online expanded the possibilities so much that I've DMed online pretty much exclusively ever since. Made new friends and found new players, this time with no geographical limitations, and scheduling sessions became a lot easier.

And Tale Spire is a big reason behind that. I tried it all: Discord Bots, RollD20, DnD Beyond, Fantasy Grounds... Name it. We eventually settled with Discord for communication, ambience sounds and soundtrack, handouts and note taking, FoundryVTT for character sheets, initiative tracking and automated dice rolling, and Tales Spire for battlemaps. Sure, I could drop Tale Spire and use Foundry's topdown maps to smooth things out quite a bit, given Tale Spire does not handle anything besides battlemaps not even in a half-way decent manner (and I don't even think it's their intent), but nothing comes even close to suddenly leaving the theatre of mind and dropping, much to the players' frequent awe, vast expanses of a million meticulously placed assets, properly tagged and ordered, along with its secret passages and enemies easily hidden away, and more than decent atmospheric and lighting options to boot, ready to go with a click. And to top it all off, my player's custom created character minis are one click away from being imported from Hero Forge.

Moreover, communities like Tales Tavern and Tales Bazaar attend to most of everyone's battlemap needs, so you don't have to spend time creating maps if you would prefer not to. Just search, copy and drop them in-game.

It's the digital version of the physical models and minis I could never afford as a kid but a lot cheaper, (somewhat) endlessly expandable, and easy to use. Allowing custom assets would only take it to the next level, but I don't think its in their plans for the foreseeable future.

But sure, development of new assets and features is sluggish indeed. And requiring online connection, specially one you have to depend on their servers, is one of the big cons. That and not having a free version for players. And keep in mind that even though they recently started adding assets for different campaign settings, Tale Spire is mostly for medieval fantasy settings as of now.

Overall, for its price, it's worth it. And when it come's to creating detailed battlemaps, or even an unnecessarily big battlemap you could call a city, there's nothing not even remotely close to it out there.

You should give it a try.

I have never written a serious steam review before but I feel I won't do this game enough justice if I don't. So here it is.


This is exactly the kind of game you expect to get by buying dozens upon dozens of cheap on sale stuff, like many of us do. This game pays a well-deserved homage to a very particular type of arcade game, of those I can only readily recall Wild Guns, on SNES. But then it builds upon its foundations and original formula, giving the entire experience a very distinct feel.

For starters, the game comprises of 25 different stages, a robust variety of enemies and several different bosses, all of them behaving very differently from each other and no colour swapping happening anywhere. Controls are indeed cut short of this brilliance, but not to the point where it would impact the enjoyment, and I would even say that the aiming system — which many would argue severely impacts game play — was intentional. Besides simply running and gunning, the game gives you a couple of different mechanics that makes the experience all the merrier: you can crouch behind destructible objects or dodge sideways to avoid shots as well as unsheathe a laser sword to strike enemies immediately in front of you and enemy bullets to make them disappear. Also, as mentioned, the aiming system provides you with a target locking button that, if pressed, targets the closest enemy and, if not, aims directly forward. This simple mechanic can sometimes target a enemy you did not intend, but in order to make it a more of a bullet hell experience, the game provides you with 6 different types of weapons, more than compensating for this very particular target system, many of them able to hit areas packing with enemies and being very mechanically different from each other.

Then, you add to the mix a indisputably inspired soundtrack that captures the entire experience and gives it a spin of brilliance — I cannot stress this enough — that mirrors many of the great gems of the past, that managed to do so much with so little. The soundtrack is something else entirely.

I'd say though that the title does sound bland, something that plagues swathes of indie games and not exclusive to this DYA Games title, and surely the thumbnail in the store doesn't actually help either, but I hope people can look past that and enjoy this master piece.

TL;DR

Final Score: A well-deserved 10

Do you like hurting other people?