Recent reviews by Sonoko

Meh.

I think it's fun. c:

If you like endless menial chores on multiple characters every day this game's for you.

If not, basically anything else would be more enjoyable than this trash.

As someone who greatly enjoyed SMB1 and SMB2 growing up back in the day, I really, really want to enjoy this version, but I just can't. Everything with the way the game actually plays, the camera, the controls, the physics, is a straight downgrade from the originals making it just an extremely frustrating, near unplayable mess.

You pretty much have to lower the camera sensitivity to 1 and screw around with steams controller deadzone mapping to even make the game feel even halfway enjoyable to control, but you're still left with a mess where anything dealing with narrow platforms, slopes, or moving objects is exponentially more difficult than in the originals. If you could somehow brute force endure your way with how bad the game feels to eventually "get used" to it, the end result is just considerably less enjoyable. You need to do really obnoxious slowing down to even pass stages like Swing Bar Long while the original design clearly intended you to just hold at a diagonal into a slope, and fun swag strats in SMB2 stages like intentionally getting knocked into the air in Pistons and maneuvering to the goal straight up no longer work as you just immediately get a Fall Out for getting knocked too high into the air.

Frankly, it's really inexcusable that the physics aren't a 1:1 recreation of the original. As an official product they should have access to the original's source code, making it completely trivial to port over to a new engine, and failing that, a little disassembling to recreate the physics the stages were designed for should be a given in a product like this.

Just go play the originals instead of wasting money on this garbage.

This game has a neat idea behind it with being class based and multiplayer, but the overall execution is abysmal.

First and foremost, the gameplay is incredibly shallow. The core gameplay loop quickly devolves into just mousing over tokens every now and then, and then clicking the prestige button every few minutes, while occasionally entering a captcha. It's a perfect balance of an incredibly low amount of interactivity that it grows dreadfully boring playing it as your sole focus, but requiring enough activity that playing it alongside of another game quickly becomes irritating as your progress immediately grinds to a halt the moment your autobuy falls off.

The primary draw of the game to me was the class system, however the classes do nothing but provide passive buffs to your group. There are no gameplay differences between them whatsoever. Ideally your group has a mix of one of every class, so it doesn't even matter what you pick, ultimately serving as a nuisance that bars you from who you can be grouping with and still progress optimally. Sure you can level up everything, but that's less optimal, and seemingly renders the actual choice behind your class as moot anyway.

The overall systems in the game make little sense as a whole, and reek of the developer just putting in random things as he goes along without any real vision for the game:

* Early on you rapid-fire unlock every single artifact, which then quickly become irrelevant as the costs ramp up exponentially while your boss soul growth hardly increases after you cap the priest buff out. The dev recently "rebalanced" it, but all he did was change the cost growth so you top out around 4x as high as previously before they become irrelevant.

* One of the artifacts, enemies respawn on death, literally makes you kill slower, so the dev just lets you toggle it off instead of actually making it worthwhile.

* There's a mechanic where you put in raid souls which reduce hero cost. You completely max this out at 90% a few hours into the game and half of the raid soul screen is then completely irrelevant.

* There's a talent tree, with a low respec cost, so the optimal solution had everybody putting everything into resource gathering and then respeccing for damage once they wanted to push a higher stage to unlock more talent points. So the dev added an ability to save two specs and toggle between them, re-enforcing this optimal one-way-to-play talent system. Oh, and then later on you max all the points in the talent tree and just start dumping them into an infinite point additive +100% damage bonus anyway so it's not like there was any real depth to talents regardless.

* There's a competition that happens every other day that you enter where growth of enemies is doubled, meaning you just top out at half of your highest potential stage (with some variance due to wallbosses). Everybody just enters competition and leaves once they stop instakilling so they get roughly 2x the boss soul gain, plus some bonus tokens at the end of the day based on how far they went in competition. This entire system has literally NO POINT to it, and you could accomplish the same thing by just making every other day give you 2x boss souls and handing out bonus tokens based on the regular highest stage, and it would end up being less tedious as you could stop having to enter/leave competition repeatedly.

* The dev one day just randomly added a lotto minigame that pays out hundreds of thousands of tokens. Ok then.

* The dev one day decided that he was going to remove seasons because people don't like them. Probably because they're terrible and completely make the game around replaying the beginning over and over every month, despite the game having no replay value to justify this. And then IMMEDIATELY 180'd and decided he was going to keep them because some people defended them. It's a huge game-defining feature, yet removing/keeping it is decided on a whim.

Furthermore, the developer appears to have no idea how any of the math in the game works together whatsoever. Or how math in general works, for that matter. As I mentioned earlier, boss souls quickly become irrelevant due to exponentially increasing costs, while the reward for them is linear, and the gain of them pretty much flatlines. The rebalance merely shifted the point in which they become irrelevant, instead of fixing the issue.

Gems are incredibly special.
* Spending them to start with heroes/xp accomplishes nothing. The entire beginning of a run very quickly has you instakilling as fast as the game allows and even maxing out the buff does not speed it up.
* Wallboss class XP caps out super fast, and instead of something logical like later Wallbosses giving more class XP and the gem buff being a multiplier, they all give a flat amount that's just added to it, and it caps way too low to have any significant impact, making it where tavern quests provide far away the vast majority of your class XP.
* Token gain is a linear bonus which makes it fantastic to start with but then costs more and more for the same bonus making it progressively worth less, and its benefit is largely counteracted with the rising token cost required to increase it as well. (The addition of the token cost was a change done on a whim as well, by the way.)
* Damage has the same issue, as the multiplier does not significantly increase it quickly becomes largely irrelevant as you'd need a weeks worth of gems just to double your damage from it. And it just gets worse and worse. Keep in mind like most incremental games, there's exponential growth in enemy health, and if you aren't at least doubling your damage, you aren't having an impact on your max stage whatsoever.

But the most amazing part of all is that the vast majority of gem gain is linear growth from +gems from a talent and the merchant class buff. It's completely nonsensical and further reinforces that prestiging the moment you stop instakilling is the only sensible way to play the game.

Class levels largely become irrelevant as the buffs either cap out (raid soul/boss soul gain) or keep steadily increasing linearly while the class XP required outpaces class XP gain off tavern quests. Leveling warrior from 100 to 200 will only double your damage despite taking forever. And then 400. Yeah...

After you effectively top out the rest of the progression mechanics, the only thing that matters is a mix of round table, RSE, and sticking raid souls into hero damage. This is because both round table and RSE provide exponential growth while only having linearly increasing costs, while hero damage is just a flat cost while functioning as a multiplier. But since your raid souls have a fixed gain rate, this just means you progress ever so slightly slower and slower, in an immensely unsatisfying way as your raid soul gain has nothing to do with how far of a max stage you can push. The problem is compounded by seasons, as getting rewarded 2x of your raid souls at the end of a season really just means your progress is tied to redoing the beginning of the game over and over for eternity. And your progress doesn't matter, so who cares!

I don't think the frequent updates are a good thing, either. Updates are pushed out clearly untested and broken on a regular basis, with little thought behind the actual changes. Awhile back the developer made bards scale to the number of people in the group, and bard ended up giving you a negative buff when solo. And he wanted to prevent people from stacking merchants as adding a really high +gem bonus was obscenely overpowered compared to anything else (wow who could have seen that coming?!) so he made merchant buffs average out. As in, 50+100=75. Absolute genius. And just a few days ago he pushed a build live that was screwed up and let people progress super high and needed rollbacks.

I do feel like there's potential for a good game here. But this isn't it.

It's ok