Recent reviews by Whirling Manatee [Friendly]

It's kind of like Darkest Dungeon meets Final Fantasy Tactics.

It's a very engaging game, but I just don't enjoy how punishing the permadeath mechanics are for your squad. Yes, you can save before fights and reload, but when a boss fight takes you an hour and one of your good characters dies near the end, it's not a very pleasant experience. Does the game expect you to just suck up the loss of someone you've invested 6 hours into? Or are you supposed to reload and grind through the same fight a second time? Is it really that important for the gameplay experience for you to just entirely lose your guild members instead of having them suffer a really long injury or something?

Maybe some people really like this. I know Darkest Dungeon was also very popular. But it's not for me. I feel like I just wasted the last 6 hours of my life. Very unsatisfying. Maybe if the game had a bit more polish and played more smoothly it wouldn't feel so insulting to have a boss just delete one of your back liners, but I am just not that into the experience.

A solid improvement on the "reverse bullet hell"-style roguelite. Probably one of the best out there at the moment; much more polish and variety compared to other popular favorites like Vampire Survivors.

Collect and upgrade weapons as you delve through 5 layers of each biome. With 4 dwarves, 4 biomes, and dozens of weapons, there's a lot of variety. The addition of specific challenges at each of the 5 difficulties for each biome helps add replay value.

The ability to adjust hazard level while grinding and unlocking helps manage challenge level so you can have an experience that's hard enough to be fun without being too hard. I managed to complete all challenges on hazard 5, and it was pretty tough but not unmanageable when fully unlocked, which I think is a fairly appropriately scaled difficulty.

It's not a perfect game and some weapons are just much better or worse than others, but all in all I got great value out of it and would recommend it to any fans of Vampire Survivors, Brotato, or other "don't push any buttons" action roguelites.

I wish there was a way to give this game a 3/5. It was quite a fun game with an enjoyable, snappy combat loop, but the QoL for town management was rather poor and the total amount of content in the game is pretty low. While $25 is a reasonable price for a game, it only took me about 13 hours to reach the end and I don't really feel compelled to keep playing for achievements.

Pros:
- Aesthetic is great. Really amusing plot and the don't-starve-like graphics reinforce the vibe.
- Combat is fun and responsive.
- Decent balance of mechanics to learn without being overwhelming and good pacing

Cons:
- Very poor colony management QoL features
- Infuriatingly slow, unskippable animations throughout (especially annoying is the new blueprint pickup)
- Passage of time during combat runs makes everything feel rushed
- Resource acquisition and management was tedious
- Lack of variety and choice in combat loadouts - you basically just pick random weapons and roll with it
- Upgrade paths are mostly irrelevant

I think in general, the main thing I didn't like about this game was that it both encouraged you to explore dungeons and break everything in them for loot, but also your colony gets messed up while you're away and the longer you're away the worse it is. So there's this competing interest that resulted in me basically speed-running the combat portions just so I could get back to my cult sooner.

So, while the combat and premise were good, there were a lot of small complaints about the game. Still worth a play (if a short one).

Impressively complex and detailed. Very good 5e implementation, if a bit light on explanations. D&D novices can probably just ignore the details and roll with it, but if you want to minmax, be prepared to consult the PHB.

My few minor criticisms:
1. The small party size is restrictive. You can endlessly respec yourself and your team, but you can only have 4 people in the squad at once, so many of your characters will be sidelined most of the time.
2. It feels much more like Divinity: Original Sin than it feels like Baldur's Gate 2. I suppose this is no surprise, but somehow it is a slight disappointment.
3. You can't pick which character makes conversation rolls once you've started a dialog, so if you want your main character to do most of the talking, you need to make them CHA-based.
4. Companion pathfinding is idiotic. Your chumps will walk through fire, acid, and already-detected traps in order to keep formation outside of turn-based mode. The best is when combat ends, turn-based mode ends, and your teammates obligingly rush through the fiery wreckage of battle to get to you, further injuring themselves.
5. Inventory management is absolutely chaotic. In the spirit of true pen and paper gaming, I guess, every character keeps their own gold and gear, and if you change who is in your party, you lose access to all the items on that character. You can pick up bags on the ground and use them to help organize your stuff, but I don't enjoy that. Swapping party members is an absolute chore, and to sell items to merchants is an exercise in tedium.
6. Absolutely insufficient in-game documentation for what to expect as you level up, so again, plan your builds outside the game if you care about that.

All in all, it's a great game and I'd definitely recommend it, but in its current incarnation I think I would give it 4 out of 5 stars.

A very solid game in the style of SNES-era JRPGs. Somewhat derivative in ways, but rarely in a bad way.

The story was good, with some interesting twists, and the gameplay kept me engaged for about 90% of the game. Eventually I kind of grew tired of the combat, but by that time the game was over, so I'd say it worked out about right.

My only real complaint is with the equipment upgrading system, which is overwrought, slow to navigate, and ultimately unnecessary. If I ever played this game again, I would completely ignore crystals. Equipment management in this game was generally a chore, and the game is not difficult enough to require doing any of it.

That said, it was still a really fun game and I enjoyed the 40-odd hours I spent on it.

If you enjoy turn-based tactical combat or deckbuilders, there's a good chance you will enjoy this. I know that hardcore xcom or deckbuilding enthusiasts have criticized this game as a diluted version of both, but I think the combo works quite well.

Things I liked:
1. The voice acting and character development was great. It really gives you an immersive experience in the MCU and explores some of the lesser-known characters.
2. The interactions between the different groups of allies was pretty well done.
3. The combat was fun and satisfying. I really liked that you can tune the difficulty setting until you find a level that is just hard enough for you.
4. Good mix of progression elements and strategy.
5. A few different types of gameplay keeps the play experience varied.

Things I didn't care for:
1. The crafting system's shared resources heavily discourages you from using your limited supplies on consumables until very late in the game. This makes much of the research tree feel irrelevant.
2. Some of the abilities and mechanics are very poorly tuned. Summon Charlie is a disappointing capstone for Light Hunters, and some of the ally Legendary abilities are way less useful than others.
3. Lack of variety in Legendary abilities. I spent a few hours grinding out friendship exp to unlock them all, and was disappointed that almost all of them are basically the same, with a few of them having crippling disadvantages for no great reason.
4. The final battle forces you to use random team compositions that are very different than your usual teams. This actually caused me to fail the fight and have to turn down the difficulty setting, which was really anti-climactic. You spend the whole game building interesting team combos, and then you don't get to use any of them for the last fight.

Despite my complaints, this is still one of the few games I've actually finished in the past year. It was definitely worth the energy and I enjoyed it a lot.

In total, it took me 69 in-game "days" to complete (nice) and about 80 hours of gameplay. I liked the episodic nature of it, which suited my adult time availability fairly well. I could play 1 or 2 days and feel like I accomplished something.

Very solid deckbuilder. Lots of variety for highly-varied runs. Nice gradual progression of difficulty allowed for a satisfying victory at the hardest challenge rating. I found this game more approachable than Slay the Spire on the whole, due to its slightly shorter runs and slightly less punishing RNG.

My main complaints are a lack of variety in enemies and too large a power variance among artifacts and caverns. Overall a good entry-level deckbuilder that is approachable for casual players.

Very good action roguelite.

Pros:
* Consistent progression helps gradually ease difficulty until you can succeed
* Story is well-paced and surprisingly long. I'm continuing to advance the story 30 hours into the game.
* Nice difficulty curve that did not feel overwhelming, but is still satisfying to overcome.
* Significant variety between each run keeps the game interesting.
* Fun gameplay!

Cons:
* Some opaque mechanics result in the ability to spend limited resources in non-optimal ways early in the game.
* Difficult to advance character relationship - gifts are a very limited resource early in the game, and you often have no control over whether the recipient will be available. Nothing like finishing 2 or 3 runs in a row only to have the character you're trying to advance just straight up missing from the house each time you're there.
* Unclear hitbox collision issues. This game is sometimes a little like a bullet hell, and certain attacks can destroy certain projectiles, but not others. Dashes can dodge attacks but dash-attacks do not. Certain dash modifiers deflect, while others destroy projectiles but not deflect, while others knock enemies away. Some enemy attacks can't be deflected. All in all, it just results in a sort of painful progress of trying to figure out how to dodge attacks and then sometimes still just getting hit anyway.

Generally my gripes are minor. This game is super fun and satisfying. The music bumps and the art aesthetic is consistent and appropriate. Great job!

The comparisons to Vermintide or L4D are pretty accurate, but the maps are less linear and the game is less stressful overall than either of those two games. It's just a fun co-op bug shooting romp through some caves. It has a nice dash of role-specific utility so each of the 4 characters can contribute something different, and the advancement experience feels a little like Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer (which is a compliment).

All in all, a very pleasant addition to the genre.

A fun deckbuilder / roguelike hybrid worth at least a couple playthroughs.