Recent reviews by raydotn

Back when I first started the game, I was pleasantly surprised to see the option of being able to advance event stages with pre-determined, pre-leveled characters (i.e. Assist Mode). This really helps to ensure that the game can be all about the strategy if you wish it to be, as well as have an immersive story (i.e. no out-of-place or over/underpowered characters) even when you're just starting out with a smattering of low-level characters.

If you are all for PVP, perhaps there is a need to pull gacha for Legendary characters. However, I've been enjoying my F2P journey so far on single player content, of which there really is a lot to go through. Other reviews touch on the different game modes way better than I ever can, so I will not repeat those here, but there's one thing I must point out that I love: the various unique ways that the turn-based mechanism has been utilised - chatting, playing cat-and-mouse, cake-throwing, investigation, etc. It's not all just battles.

The lovely pixel art is the icing on the cake.

Another plus point is that this game is also on mobile, so it is portable and we can whip this game out on the go as well. Simply impressive contents for the price of free.

I would only recommend this for advanced bullet hell players who welcome an additional challenge (or non-advanced players who don't mind the challenge).

I myself am a bullet hell games rookie -- I like the concept, but don't play them often -- and I had gone for this game thinking it would be a casual-fun shooter due to its pastel themes, but it definitely deserves its Difficult tag.

Reviews that say that the bullets are essentially invisible are all correct. But rather than a negative point, I believe this is the exact feature/difficulty that Gimel Dimension was built on and intended for.

As a rookie, I finally beat the game with the red ship, so it definitely is possible for an average player, but your mileage may vary on the enjoyment factor. Because bullets get cloaked when they blend into the background, the game challenges your peripheral vision / flash photo memory (if you know what I mean) / placement planning on top of, well, bullet hell.

Note: the bullet hells come mostly near the final couple of stages. Earlier stages play more like casual side-scrolling shooters, but you'll still die from invisible bullets if you get careless. Sometimes, going after Cells (i.e. currency that gets released after defeating an enemy) is not a good thing if it means you may run headlong into bullets you forget that the enemies left prior to being destroyed.


Here are some benefits the game puts at your disposal, which aren't very obvious at first glance. I only found them out bit by bit as I kept dying and finally squinted at the UI texts (white on pastel, urgh):

• Flash bomb: one chance to turn the screen completely white so that colour blending is neutralised, with several seconds of cool-down till next use.
  
  
• Upgrades (shield, power, magnet), which are manually triggered. Squint at the UI to see what letters you need to press to upgrade the respective attribute.
  
  
• When you die (i.e. lose all shields), you carry forward the Cells count as long as you continue using the same ship. While the upgrades do get reverted to square one when you die, you'd presumably restart with a much higher count of carried-over Cells so that you can buy your way to more power immediately, and hence presumably earn more Cells in your new run.
  
  
• If you're good, you won't even need to waste Cells to buy shields, because the game drops them after certain bosses. You can then focus solely on upgrading Power and Magnet (how easily you attract Cells) first and save your Shield upgrades for the last boss.
  
  
• The 3 different ships you choose at the beginning have their own bullet trajectories. It'll be useful to consider your own play style when deciding which one to use the first time while you familiarise with the game.

I would very much have loved to know how many stages there were in the game while I was playing, so I'd know how close or far to the end each time I died. So for those curious, there are 5 stages in total. I think. Was too busy using peripheral vision to catch the stage number properly. No more than 6 stages. When you're dealing with the twin bosses, that's the final boss.


What I didn't like about the game:

• Sound effects. Music is still ok. Sound effect varieties in this game probably can be counted on one hand, and involve extremely loud explosion sounds when you take damage. Since the whole premise of the game hinges on you avoiding damage, I always get a shock in each scarce case it happens. No sound balance at all.
  
  
• UI. Text colour suits the theme, but definitely not user-friendly. Barebones sans-serif font. And no settings to speak of.
  
  
• For some reason, I can't do any screenshots with F12. I presume it is part of the clunky UI/UX experience. (e.g. to pause to the menu, it is Enter, not Esc)
  
  
• When you die, you start all over again from Stage 1 (with the reprieve I mentioned above where your Cells get carried over). Yeah, I understand that's part of the game design, but I don't like permadeaths.

A 5/10 for me, only because I managed to beat it.

This is my first foray into such offroading games, and I'm not sure if I'm playing the game right, but I quite enjoyed it. Based on the experience I had during the free weekend, I would consider this more of a puzzle game rather than a car/monster truck game that I originally thought it was (of course, the type of vehicle you choose does make a difference).

Instead of what I thought would be whizzing through forested wilderness with breeze in my hair, I had to take hours to traverse mud and rock for what was ultimately just a couple of kilometres. I did countless three-point turns on the scout. I gingerly avoided cacti as I didn't want to run things down. I wiggled in my chair as I willed my vehicle to climb that sticky spot while throwing low-gear, deflated tires, sharp directional changes, and winches at the issue. There were a couple of spots where I was almost sure I was permanently stuck, but the wiggling god pulled me through. Am I playing the game right?

In the end, I simply felt an immense pride when I finally took my scout up to both tops of the Beautiful Views without needing any jackscrews or recoveries. I wasn't even sure if I was supposed to accomplish it with the scout (no differential lock gasp!) as it was a side mission I coincidentally passed by and accepted while doing another scout-related main quest. To add on to the difficulty, I sidetracked into yet some other side contracts whenever I drove near them while on the side mission. I assume it's an open map where quests are shared among all your vehicles?

But yes, it's a puzzle game that tests your patience and manoeuvrability, and less of a racer game.

On the other hand, the UI/instructions might have left more to be desired. There were no less than three instances where I spent excessive time at certain stages (even the tutorial) as I managed not to do things correctly, but there was no indication of this as you were free to do things your own way anywhere. This is good when you're freely playing the game, but not so good when you're trying to follow their own tutorial to pass the stage. I had to backtrack and retrace, or, in the most offending example, I finally found that to "Recover" your vehicle, you had to click the HQ via the side menu text -and- further into "more details". There was absolutely no indication of this in the instructions and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to click the HQ map icon, which would not show the option that the tutorial wanted me to perform. I wonder if this was the same event another player mentioned in their review about being soft-locked. If it was, I don't blame the user as the instruction was just that atrocious.

[Personal rating: 7/10]

Slightly recommended: 6/10

[Updated to a 7/10 - additional thoughts below. Once you are familiar with the game, it isn't that tedious anymore]

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I had forgotten about the game description by the time I started playing this, so the start of the game was really just figuring out what I'm supposed to do. True to the words of the game description that I'd later read, the game pushes you to start having some routine, because each day loop is really quite relatively short, and you likely cannot explore everything you are able to do in a day within a day, mainly because of the slow walking speed. If this were a survival game, I would have lost early on probably by Day 2. I only really started knowing how to harvest eggs and milk after many game-days from the start.

However, this is not a survival game (well, in a way it is), but is a game more for your immersive experience. It is a slow, steady life, while learning about substories here and there. You might like it if you're just here for the story. I couldn't tell the line where if my plants/livestocks were dying due to the main plot or by my sheer negligence, because towards the end, things fall apart. But when one of my goats died on Day 2, I think that's on me.

I don't think this game has replayability value, but I'd be booting it up sometime real quick next time to try and see if it's possible to just wander off into the desert far and wide, without sleep and food. I had gone for a few separate days not sleeping after all, when morning rolls onto me inadvertently while I was still trying to shuffle back home.


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[Update]
Played it through two more times (why did I do that), and realise there is certain replayability. Although there are no Steam achievements, I gave myself some self-imposed achievements to work towards, and found:

1. Dream sequences of my 2nd/3rd run were different from that of the 1st playthrough. Might there be even more sequences that is played out randomly?

2. I believe it's quite possible to keep all the goats alive through to the end. I would have had 8 goats alive towards the end of my final game had one silly goat & kid not snuck past the gate and went out to the yard when I opened it intending to defend the goat enclosure from within. All the 6 other goats/kids in the enclosure stayed alive. Then again, who knows if the wolves wouldn't keep attacking until at least one goat is dead.

3. No, you can't follow the telephone poles and trek to the city beyond. There is an invisible boundary circling the map.

4. On the 2nd run, I spotted a black-white wild goat passing by the outside of the goat enclosure near evening/night on the 4th? day. I originally thought that one of my goats had escaped and so went outside to chase it back, but I wasn't able to find it once I went there. I think it is somewhat significant as that was the same day your brother wrote to you in his letter about goats. However, it didn't reappear when I specifically waited for it on my 3rd run. I'm wondering whether it could serve as your sole male goat if it were possible to tame it, and then you wouldn't need to borrow the expensive Billy for mating. I'm not going to replay it again so if anyone actually finds out what this part is about, feel free to spoil it for me in the comments!

[Reviewed as singleplayer]
I have no experience with this series in particular, hence my rating baseline is golf games in general and not other games in this same series. On that basis, this is a decent golf game with decent graphics. Played with the 3-click mechanism and didn't try the other (swing?) type.

Had to disable the bloom effect though as it's causing red overlay on the whole screen during competition. However, that didn't help with the red overlay on the interactive character/objects in the off-game customisation screens while other graphics displayed normally on the very same screen.

Highly recommended, so I'll only state the very few things I didn't like about this demo:
- unable to change direction easily while in the midst of attack. Had to stop attacking completely, change direction, and attack again. Might become fatal if the levels and combat difficulty get harder in the full game.
- unable to detect/work with my generic gamepad, so had to play with the keyboard (which wasn't bad in itself)

Summary: not recommended due to game-breaking bug in the first level. (Until the developer comments on this, this is the logical conclusion.)

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The movement is much too slow to be enjoyable. I had thought it would be a cute, fun game that would throw all stress away, but instead it piled on the stress when I started the game with none.

Also, what is described as "knowledge shards" in the store information page that will "spawn ahead of you", don't actually spawn within sight. You still have to look 360 degrees to find where the next one is. That was why on the initial run, I had already roamed all the way to the other end of the office and collected all yellow flowers thinking they were the main collectibles, while wondering why the counter remained at "1/41" (had thought it was either a bug, or an indicator of the number of levels within the entire game). After not seemingly able to finish the level despite having collected all the yellow flowers (there were more shiny things outside the window but I could not get through with some half-hearted tries), I floated back at snail's pace to the start of the office. I really should have timed it to see how long this end-to-end journey takes. There, I saw the required collectible I had missed to obtain. Only after collecting it did the counter go up.

After collecting a few more knowledge shards and getting a certain amount of motion sickness (re: the shards don't spawn in front of you), I just couldn't bear to reach the other end of the office and quit. The thoroughly-yellow level did not help at all - I would have loved for the first level to start at some other colour-neutral stages seen in the game screenshots.

Aside, there seems to be no option to save when I quit mid-level. If I find that I have to start the stage all over again the next time I launch it, this game will be an immediate DNF.

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[Update]
Confirmed that when when you quit mid-level, the whole level restarts from the beginning when you next resume it. This alone (no save option) is really enough to give a not-recommended, because coupled with the bee's slow speed, one level probably may even take an hour to complete.

However, what would I know about the duration, because I'm stuck at the same place at 35/41 collectables that multiple other players mentioned in their reviews/discussions: the bee just can't get through that upper paneless window to get outside and keeps bonking against it as if it were an actual obstacle.

I really hope the developer can validate somewhere if it's a case of "you're doing it wrong" (if so, this is a very very very hard platformer for a first level of a supposedly relaxing game), or if it's really a bug, because if it's the latter, this is the top reason I do not recommend this game - if you can't finish level 1, you can't progress with other parts of the game at all.

In my first run, I encountered the evasive veteran right on the second/third night, and naturally I lost. At that point I thought this was an unbeatable game. But from the second run onwards, I began to understand more of the significance of the castle layout, shop & items, blood level, -magic- attack, etc, and put more thoughts into shoring up the starting-turn basic defence. And I was able to win challenging fights satisfactorily. (I've come to realise that bosses could even be an easier fight than that veteran I met in my first run. Damn them evasive skills.)

Of course, there were still certain rounds where I lost, so sometimes it may come down to your luck in the skills/items/enemies you encounter, but I was able to win consistently enough to understand that the game is very finely balanced, and not just entirely up to RNG.