Recent reviews by Frohsinn

One of the best crafting survival games out there. Yes, it has been on the market for a long time and it is still in alpha, but The Fun Pimps have been updating the game regularly and making massive strides with its progress. The basic gameplay loop never really gets old and with the vast variety of places to see and explore you rarely find yourself without something interesting to do. The scaling of the horde every 7 days makes each horde night a challenge, and it will put your creative building skills to the test. If you are a fan of this type of game, it doesn't get much better than this.

Okay so there is a bit to unpack with this game.

TL:DR is: Has mobile game trappings, extremely grindy, shallow combat, meh story.

The longer version:

The game has quite a bit of potential, though much like Graveyard Keeper, leaves a lot lying on the table. If you don't like idle games, or games that have LOTS of grinding, then I would suggest not reading the whole of this. This game is likely not for you. If you love grinding in games (like me) then there is a lot that this game brings to the table.

The story is sort of typical, but it really isn't the main draw of the game. Bad guy wants to do bad things, but will be thwarted by heroes who have set out to retrieve something for the king.

The combat system is set to auto-run, which will put off a lot of people, but its kinda nice to not have to focus on all the time. Each "run" through a zone takes on average 30 - 90 seconds depending on which enemies you come across or how well geared your characters are. The most you can impact each run is by casting spells to either debuff/damage enemies, or heal your characters or decide when they should retreat. The biggest drawback to combat is that there is no auto-repeat option on a board, so you are forced to watch like a hawk when to repeat a run (if you are super concerned with efficiency). Overall, the combat is just a vehicle to get materials that are needed to craft gear in town.

The crafting cycle is a beast of it's own. This is the meat of what you will be doing in the game. When your characters bring back materials to town you use those materials to create specific materials needed to craft weapons/armor/accessories. This is where the mobile game trappings come into play. If you want to turn logs into planks, gotta wait. Wanna take your planks and turn em into magic planks? Gotta wait some more. Want to take those ingots and magic-y planks and make a sword out of em? Guess what! Waiting again. The wait isn't too arduous on most of the materials, but when you start doing large batches of materials, the wait can be 2+ minutes for something to be done. But when you get deeper into the game, you can get bonus materials if your character tacked to a building has a lot of skill. (Most I have seen is 3x)

Now for the gear. The gear is the main draw for the game in my opinion. This is where the game is at it's best, but also leaves a bit out. First, the game does not take its gear seriously. Want an astronaut helmet? Game has that. Want a musket? Or how about a watermelon cannon thing? The games got you! The gear that you make has multiple rarity tiers, and higher rarity tiers have more potential to be awesome. The game has quite a bit of depth here. There are loads of combinations of different gear items, and lots of different stats that can roll on items. There are some that seem useful, but kinda suck depending on your characters, and vice versa. Each item has guaranteed stats that will roll with a few (?) spots. One of the problems is that it seems like any stat can roll on any (?) spot on an item. This means you can roll a mage staff that buffs both intelligence and strength which limits the usefulness of an item. This also means you can get stupid lucky and get a very low level item that has great stats and outperforms higher level gear. There is a surprising amount of depth here to be completely honest.


Lastly, the Swag in Swag and Sorcery. The game has fashion shows! The gear you craft or get as quest rewards has a few categories on it. You have color, material and style that you have to consider for your fashion shows. There are three judges that you have to please, and if you have extra gear that you don't want you can bri...I mean gift to the judges to figure out what they like and dislike. The game will also tell you what color is currently trendy. You can get a general idea how to dress depending on the "theme" of the show. Early in the game you won't have a lot of gear to get really specific in how you dress your character so you just throw your guys and gals out to the mercy of the judges. Now, should you win the show, you will be given Reputation points, currently I have no idea what these do to be honest. But along with the Rep, you also get given a sum of money and materials that can be used for crafting more gear.

Hopefully this helps someone out there make a purchase decision. Decided to write this because most of the reviews I saw were 4-5 sentences without much context.

Where to start with this one. I wanted a super spooky game to play on Halloween and figured since I loved Outlast, let's give the sequel a try. That was a mistake. As far as horror games go, there are plenty of ways to build tension for the player that do not lead to fatigue or growing numb to the tension. This game fails on all accounts.

There is a constant soundtrack playing with spikes in volume and pitch happening at certain intervals, which is great when done well, but these happen all too frequently while you are just exploring or wandering around. What ends up happening is that when something is supposed to catch your attention, the volume peaks, but you don't realize that you were supposed to be scared.

There are sections of the game where you can look at things to "record" them. The problem with these sections is that a lot of the time, you just start recording randomly and have no idea what it is you were looking at or why you were recording it in the first place. This plays into when jumpscares happen as well. A lot of the time you are not looking directly at where the scare is supposed to happen, so you end up missing most of the event, which does not help build tension at all.

Now I want to talk about the threat in the game. You are having to deal with a deranged cult of inbred hillbillies. While that premise might sound entertaining, it loses a lot of it's appeal when you have to hear every enemy in the game constantly preaching their gospel. The whole crazy preacher thing is just annoying and just comes off as a nuisance. Most of the notes you find in the game also fall into this category. While it is great to build up the backstory of the game in this way, most of the notes are insufferable, and others are barely legible (the latter makes sense for the game).

My last complaint is minor, but a complaint nonetheless. The excessive camera movement when you are exploring the levels, for the first two hours I just dealt with it and the growing headache that came with it. This is literally the first game I have ever played where I suffered from this. After looking in the options, I did find that there was a setting to turn this off, but the amount of movement in the camera is just too much.

This game is a showcase of a company not understanding the product they made, and why people enjoyed it as much as they did. To see Outlast fall so far from the first game is truly disappointing.

All I can say is it's Cookie Clicker with a nice shiny RPG veneer! This game is beyond addicting and a great time if you just want something mindless to do.

This game is attempting to add something to the typical match 3 formula game by giving pitting your character against monsters in a dungeon. That said, this is not too complicated of a game. You complete matching sets and your character battles monsters. The character auto runs in the dungeon until he meets a mob. Your goal is to match tiles to hurt and kill the mobs and when done, the character runs forward again. A great game for a way to kill a few hours if you are not looking for something too complicated.

The most complexity this game offers is from having the ability to "level up" your characters gear between runs. That said, the process is very straight forward, using gold you earned from your runs you select which gear to level up and then you are able to run deeper in the level. Rinse and repeat. It's that simple.