Recent reviews by JoshBoshGames

Beaver Engineering

A masterful unity of all elements of good game design.

The soundtrack is a brilliant blend of highs and lows. The simple yet compelling music gives further reinforcement to the player's emotions as they play.

The game has a unique but consistent style. Simplistic, certainly, but very much fitting and enhancing the rest of the game-play. There is no needless clutter. Every item in every scene perfectly crafts a story of the world around it.

And the world in itself? A masterful achievement of story-telling and design. Each part of the game's world tells a story of its unique inhabitants. And those inhabitants in turn shape that world around them.
Your character being no exception. Your progression of the story and your choices as you proceed shape every part of this game's unique world, as you bring the people together, both figuratively and quite literally too.

And the story, seemingly simple. But as you progress, you find greater meanings as a commentary on that which at its core makes us human. Our prejudices, our beliefs, our values, our motivations and all that which makes the essence of being.

This game is not about understanding languages, it's about understanding people's very way of life. Not only the meanings of individual words, but the contexts that brought about the creation of their meaning.

It is a true masterpiece of creative game design, and i eagerly await more.

Finally, an excuse to use the extra buttons on my steam controller!

Game experience is mixed.

The applications of multiple classes can be extremely fun, especially with regard teamwork of abilities used together.
The game has occasional updates that are generally beneficial for game balance.

Very rapid learning curve that takes at minimum a few dozen games to get used to, hundreds to master.
New players are often taken unawares by game traditions and may sometimes be berated by older players for mistakes made.
the free to play token mechanics are relatively well balanced but can be a source of frustration due to reliance on other players on your team.

In my opinion:
The developers place a large responsibility on the community to teach new players how to play. with insufficient player counts to allow for skill based matchups, let alone consistently low lobby wait times, more experienced players can easily grow frustrated.

The in-game economy is geared in a free to play manner, appropriate to the game's current revenue model.
Accordingly, cosmetic items may take time to acquire due to the low average acquisition rate relative to their cost.
However, with the potential for consistent losses of in-game currency, it is possible for items to take periods in line with weeks to acquire, even for low cost items.

IMO, the developer response to the concerns of previous paid players was concerning. The stance of the developers that the paid customers had recieved their money's worth in the play time allowed before the free-to-play release was not unreasonable for most players, however it was somewhat insulting with respect to the communities financial investment.
The game is in a state that many did not expect and would not have supported given a choice. It is my opinion that more could have been done to adress this.

TLDR:

Exciting multi-class interactions
Good game balance

High skill curve
Few tutorial resources
Inconsistent currency gain
Prior conflict between developers and community

They recently implemented a time-out for players that leave midgame, which is a good measure, however there is still an ongoing problem with hackers, and the hackers/bugs can create situations where you cannot play in lobbies, yet you are still penalised.

It is a fun game, but there are just too many bugs, including one that prevents you from completing the campaign without a complex workaround. The fact that this bug was never fixed is extremely disappointing

Game Is completely broken with the removal of online features.

This game has a lot of long-standing bugs and the Devs do not listen to the community in trying to fix them.

To that end, the community discord has rules in place that any criticism of the devs or their work will land you mutes or bans.

for the 1.8.0 release, the game introduced a severe, potentially game breaking, bug.
things happen, mistakes get through, however i'm surprised such a serious bug was never caught.

But, the worst part,to fix this, the devs decided to completely remove core game features, as opposed to making any sane move such as rollback.

I cannot say that this game is a sensible buy, You may find it unusable with no warning.

EDIT 18/07/24: Trains completely broken no fix in sight. Save your money.

I am impressed at the detail in this game! It even has sound distortion from relative movements! The physics can be buggy at times (I'm looking at you, bouncy trains.), but otherwise a brilliant game.

)MG, This Game. My heart strings are hanging around my feet, you tugged on them too much. A really satisfying game, with extremely likable characters, but a bittersweet ending. It kinda sucks, but you're right.

'There's no happiness to be found in the Literature Club'

Just sadness, but also, respect for a great game made by a team of dedicated people.