Recent reviews by Tablis

Great utilisation of the Deep Rock IP. Unclear hitboxes lead to some frustration. Some mechanical concepts are never explained properly (such as Potency). Polished and addictive but at the same time losing tends to feel somehow more anoying (unfair?) than in other bullet hell roguelites. Still recommendable but it might cost you extra in nerves.

♥♥♥♥ move Sony (?)
edit: averted
edit2: why are you like this

I haven't heard of this board game, bought it randomly on impulse. And I got completely lost in it. I can't stop thinking about it, it sparks joy in me. The balancing is such, that there is rarely a runaway leader; most games are close all the way to the end. I bought the physical board game AND all expansions AND some upgrades for the tokens/components. It's that good. Knowing more about the source material, I now appreciate that they ported the look of the game exactly. They didn't succumb to the temptation of making it 3D and having 3D agents and troops running around a spherical planet, doing animations which slow things down. No - the abstract meeples and little cubes are exactly like the original, and it's still great. The singleplayer challenges are well balanced (except one which is too hard). The multiplayer is there and alive, but also kinda barebones in terms of quality-of-life stuff. Hopefully upgrades are coming, such as the ability to set the time a player has to think, which is too long now (90 seconds). Overall, it's fantastic. Now I understand why it's sixth on BGG[boardgamegeek.com].

This merging of tower defense, deck builder and horde survival has an addictive feel to it, similar to the "just one more turn" aspect of 4x games. Progression is balanced and losing is surprisingly non-frustrating. The lore part is objectively well executed, although personally I found it kinda lukewarm. Achievments are all reasonable and not grindy. One warning though - this game requires a beefy setup because in a run over an hour long you get to a point where so many enemies (and damage numbers) are on the screen, that it will grind down almost any computer to 3 FPS with crackling audio issues.

Occasionally I get a particular itch to play a strategy in the vein of Panzer General. And - surprisingly - the pickings for this kind of game are quite limited. Here is one such option and it's a good one. Sure, there are nuisances of varying calibers: can't resupply vehicle ammo, can't heal units, can't indirect fire without eyes on target, no undo button even when no units were uncovered, cannot disembark infantry after moving vehicle, infantry riding on tanks takes no damage, and a few more of this kind. But the core gameplay is there, and it works. There are two difficulties - Easy and Normal - and don't expect to win missions on Normal on the first go, as they are designed with little room for error. The opponent often has far superior numbers, but the AI is... a bit weak by way of being very predictable. You end up learning its preferences, when is it willing to trade, what scares it away (such as all your ATGM-capable units in a ball). The story is okay; I was waiting for a plot twist which never happened, but nevertheless I am not disappointed. The solitaire is fun once you figure out the strategies and typical good moves, but having to win 100 times is too much, and I had to come back just to farm it long after I finished the campaign.

The English translation is pretty uneven. The dialogue lines go back and forth from almost correct to a grammarian's fever dream, but it's understandable enough that you can figure out what's going on. It only gets annoying in the descriptions of skills and items, which need to be precise, but these are often broken or ambiguous as well. The story has 6 chapters (battles) and can be rushed through relatively quickly, with maybe some currency farming here and there to buy perks. Still, because of the highly random gameplay, it feels like there is a good deal of replayability. There is an optional training ground which keeps getting harder and this contributes to that feeling as well. The H-scene 2D art is good, but the animations and interactions are very basic, so overall it averages out to an "okay" experience. Oh and It's all vanilla. This happens to be my first auto-battler so I might not have the right frame of reference, but I enjoyed it. At this price it's a decent value.

The low-res aesthetic reminiscent of Diablo 1 is meant to appeal to demi-boomers such as myself, and it's doing a bang up job of that. The sound effects of clattering bones and impacted armour are also well done. But behind all that, there is a highly enjoyable - if not very complex - gameplay. The quests provide direction, the heavy metaprogression (upgrades and inventory items) provides feelings of accomplishment. Combat balancing is just right, although it does not feel like it at first. During a game you can "double apply" up to 3 level up choices that are presented, making it possible to turn up to 11 an already overpowered build. There are relatively few "shooty" enemies. Achievements are straightforward. This is one of the best horde survivals I've ever played, and I've played a few by now. It feels like Vampire Survivors before it - I'm sorry to say - lost the plot.

I got this in a bundle with Bio-Prototype, otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed it. And the - unfortunate - similarity which comes to mind is that the English translation of both looks fine at first glance, but isn't. Here it's even more pronounced, because on one hand you have some really nice puns in the flavour text of items, on the other some mechanics/keywords are described downright wrong (misleading). Speaking of puns, there is an amount of poop/fart jokes which might raise an eyebrow, but it fits okay with the overall lighthearted theme.

The game itself is a slow burner... which might be said about most horde survival roguelites with metaprogression, but this feeling is somehow stronger here. If you stick through the first few hours though, hopefully you'll start to discover there is an addictive and decently designed experience to be had here. Achievements are less difficult than what the descriptions sound like and don't require much farming. There is effectively only one kind of map with no features other than trees; on the flip side the amount of weapons to choose from is huge. A solid example of the genre, nothing very special either.

On one hand the similarities to the likes of Vampire Survivors and Brotato are obvious. On the other, Bio-Prototype still manages to inject a surprisingly high amount of novelty into a genre that can feel a bit stale by now. Not only in the theme or complete lack of meta-progression (a rare design decision), but also in the build-building, based on various kinds of organs which are chained together to create devastatingly powerful and sometimes unexpected combos. Unexpected, because while the English translation is mostly orthograpically correct, it fails to properly explain the function of some of the more complex pieces (or character traits). So the process of learning the organ arsenal ends up being a bit of a trial-and-error reverse engineering kind of experience. Some of these items I've only grasped when I was almost done with the achievements - which are not difficult, except maybe the stage 35 in Endless; do it on Tier 1 difficulty. The protagonist hitbox seems a bit unreliable, which makes tight dodges a flip of the coin. Other than that I have no complaints about the gameplay, which is fun, addictive almost. Interestingly, there are no shooting enemies, which makes it feel like early Vampire Survivors - nostalgic.

The first thing that you'll notice when starting out, is how frustratingly zoomed in the dungeon display it. It turns out, being able to zoom out to a more sane view is actually a stat that you progress. There are 4 stats (auto attack, health, vision and inventory space), which you slowly improve between runs, so eventually you keep starting stronger. At the core of this title is a barely competent, incredibly bare-bones dungeon crawler. I wouldn't call it a roguelite even by the vaguest of definitions; it feels more like a poorly ported, mobile puzzle game sometimes. And there are many quality-of-life gameplay issues, which should've been fixed as low hanging fruit. Not only there is no volume control, but you can't even toggle music and sound separately... so you're stuck with either super loud music, or silence. The crystals that function as exp can be picked up from the floor, but are invisible, so you end up going over every tile looking for them. You cannot rearrange the items in your inventory. Once you complete the game once, the difficulty level changes from Normal to Hard and you cannot go back to Normal... but you still have to farm crystals, on Hard (luckily not much harder). Achievement descriptions are misleading in the player's favour - you do not need to max out the health and attack skills.

That sounds kinda worrying so far, so maybe the porn carries it? Unfortunately, no. The description advertises "Live2D animated & interactive CGs". In practice this interactivity is limited to the face of the protagonist - or certain bodyparts of others - slightly repositioning themselves in reaction to mouse movements. That's it. As for the animations (and the art in general), the quality is hit-or-miss but generally mediocre. They tried to have a variety of H-scenes, but at the end of the day some feel kinda samey still. I had to force myself to go through all of them, which is a rarity for me. The scene writing follows genre conventions to a T, no surprises here (none were expected).

If a "sideways thumb" opinion was possible, I would've given it here, as it is not terrible as far as porn games go (I have a bit smaller expectations of them). The achievements are reasonable and the game can be 100%'d in two evenings on average (one is possible as well). Get it on a steep sale, and if you do - for the gameplay, not the plot.