More honesty at https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/curator/28898588-True-Game-Truths/

"They patched SOME of the ridiculously-overpriced DLC into the base game, so it's good now, you guys!"

No. No, it isn't. It really, really isn't.

But how could anyone mess up a game with such a nice cel-shaded animé art style, & a character creator that lets you make delicious stacked ripped fitthicc amazon battlewaifus with flowing hair, cheerful personalities, & bust and butt physics? If you can sit through this long review, I'll tell you in painstaking detail.

https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1741886212
I'd love to be able to co-op my way through this game's rich story with my friends, all the while levelling up and outfitting our characters with new gear, looking & feeling stronger & better during our journey, but...

For brevity, I'll abbreviate KurtzPel to KP use some point form. Luckily, the developer is called KOG, so I don't need to abbreviate that.

Stuff I dig, in no particular order:

• Presentation. The art style is gorgeous. Cel-shading, deliberate colour palettes, & effects like clouds & energy really give KP a beautiful animé look & feel. The fully-animated cutscenes have so much production value, I almost wonder if there IS a KP animé.
  
• Gameplay. KP plays like a third-person input-combo-based character action game, feeling similar to something like Black Desert, Vindictus, Dragon's Dogma, Tera, PSO... It plays like an action game -- you don't just press hotkeys & watch numbers appear. There's legitimate gameplay, here.
  
• Character creator. Sliders & sliders. Saints-Row-3-style skinny/fat/fit pyramid. Proportion-defining four-way grid. Stance, idle anims, height, voice, faces... Hairstyles built manually from 4 parts (base, front, sides, and back), all of which can have 2 colours. Shape & jiggle of busts & butts can be defined (no thighs, sadly, this isn't BDO...). From pretty to powerful, from classy to trashy, you can make the waifu YOU want. Or a dude, for some reason. There IS a catch, though -- see "Rebirth" section later.

Stuff I don't, in no particular order:

• Title. I don't care if it sounds way cooler in Korean, Elven, Swahili, or Sangheli. "Kurtzpel: Bringer of Chaos" sounds like a teenage edgelord's D&D character. It doesn't roll off the tongue, tell you any information, or stick in your memory. Your friends will think you're telling them about Kurt's Spell.
  
• Monetization. This one's going to take a few bullet points to get through. Apparently designed as a retail game (I'm not even going to ironically use the cringe-inducing buzzword of "buy to play"), KP was cut up & sold piecemeal as a free-to-play game with DLC & an Item Store. Let's examine that a bit.
  
• DLC. Half the classes sold as $21 DLC. Per class. A costume set: $35. Its matching weapon pack: sold separately, $40. You can't buy items in-game using in-game money, but you can buy gambling boxes on the cash shop. You can't even access all the character creator options without paying real money. After the completely-deserved deluge of negative reviews, KOG patched the 2 DLC classes into the main game & promised some vague cosmetic rewards for those who bought them. Gullible fools switched their reviews to positive. All the DLC vanished from the store other than the $3.40 Starter Pack... only for the $35 & $40 cosmetic packs & $14 full-character-customization item to come right back in the days ahead. I'm not saying this was a deliberately-staged attempt to exploit as much money from early adopters in the form of launch-day DLC then "patch it out" to try to look like they care, but it seriously feels like it.
  
• Item Shop. KP launched with no way to buy equipment using in-game money, but launched with a functional Item Shop that sells gambling boxes & overpriced cosmetics using real-life money. You can't earn a Standard Supply Box through progress (allegedly that's coming; inexcusable that it's not in yet), but you CAN buy an Advanced Supply Box for $4 each, with no guarantee that you'll get the stuff you want, & no full list of possible contents, either. On May 16th, they added even more overpriced garbage to the Item Shop, such as $7 pants, $4 gloves (each, not a pair), & even more sets of $14 underwear.
  
• Market. Received an item you don't want through one of the gambling boxes or possibly in-game progress? Well, throw it up on the Steam Market & sell it to another user. I suppose $100 swords & hats are nothing new on Steam, & KOG gets a cut of each sale, so why would they care about letting us buy items with in-game money, right?
  
• Rebirth. No, it's not a way to reset your character to Level 1 & gain new stats and powers. During character creation, Personality doesn't affect stats, but we're never told it determines character stance, voice, anims, & what parts we have available. Want all the parts? All the faces, hair, eyes, etc.? Then buy a Rebirth ticket for real-life money. Oh, and it lets you reallocate stat points, too, something you can't do without Rebirth. Thanks, KOG.
  
• Lack of content. I was expecting some kind of mission-based game where you fight monsters that lead up to a boss battle. Think of Vindictus, PSO2, Warframe... Instead, the "missions" are purely boss fights that need two players (matchmaking works, at least).
  
• Story, or lack thereof. The fully-animated cutscenes with high production value set up some massive fantasy war... but then players just run the same boss fights over and over. At this point I've fought more people of my same faction than the enemies due to the emphasis on the PVP mode.
  
• Lack of co-op story missions. The missions with story cutscene (all dozen of them) can ONLY be played solo. The gameplay would lend itself perfectly to something like a Vindictus-style mission format of progressing through a map with friends, fighting minions all the way, until we take down a boss together.
  
• PVP. Look, if I wanted to fight other users, I'd play a game built for that kind of thing, like a fighting game or an FPS. When I play an animé-style character action MMO, it's because I want what that can offer: stylish action, fighting monsters, taking down bosses, levelling up, adventuring with friends. I don't care for watching arbitrary letter-grade rankings change.
  
• Drop rates. Without exaggeration, there's a 1% chance of a boss dropping the single item it'll offer per battle. Increases to 5% on the highest difficulty, which I think needs to be grinded open in the first place. Ridiculous. So far I've played 42 boss fights with no loot to show for it.
  
• Affinity system. Certain NPCs will unlock items when you raise your affinity with them, but doing so is unnecessarily obtuse. Select the NPC you want in town, look at the map to see IF there's a mission/PVP match where there's a chance character might spawn, play it, hope the character spawns, click on some dialogue buttons that feel like RNG, head back to town to see if you got any Affinity worth a damn to unlock something. If you did, you have to go find the character again after a mission to collect the reward. You can't see the entire reward list in-game. I can definitely understand why some players would rather just buy the items off the user Market.
  
• Lack of progression. I don't feel like I'm going anywhere, achieving anything, advancing the plot, or growing in power. There's no traditional levelling, no stats, basically no loot, no world quests. What're my goals?

KOG makes other free-to-play games (Elsword, Grand Chase), so you can't pretend to believe they didn't know any better. With deliberate, despicable monetization practices, a serious lack of content, and no real sense of progress or reward, what should be a fantastic game is nothing but a good-looking trainwreck.

But man, does it look good.

More honesty at https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/curator/28898588-True-Game-Truths/ [i]"They patched SOME of the ridiculously-overpriced DLC into the base game, so it's good now, you guys!"[/i] No. No, it isn't. It really, really isn't. But how could anyone mess up a game with such a nice cel-shaded animé art style, & a character creator that lets you make delicious stacked ripped fitthicc amazon battlewaifus with flowing hair, cheerful personalities, & bust and butt physics? If you can sit through this long review, I'll tell you in painstaking detail. https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1741886212 I'd love to be able to co-op my way through this game's rich story with my friends, all the while levelling up and outfitting our characters with new gear, looking & feeling stronger & better during our journey, but... For brevity, I'll abbreviate KurtzPel to KP use some point form. Luckily, the developer is called KOG, so I don't need to abbreviate that. Stuff I dig, in no particular order: [list] [*][b]Presentation.[/b] The art style is gorgeous. Cel-shading, deliberate colour palettes, & effects like clouds & energy really give KP a beautiful animé look & feel. The fully-animated cutscenes have so much production value, I almost wonder if there IS a KP animé. [*][b]Gameplay.[/b] KP plays like a third-person input-combo-based character action game, feeling similar to something like Black Desert, Vindictus, Dragon's Dogma, Tera, PSO... It plays like an action game -- you don't just press hotkeys & watch numbers appear. There's legitimate gameplay, here. [*][b]Character creator.[/b] Sliders & sliders. Saints-Row-3-style skinny/fat/fit pyramid. Proportion-defining four-way grid. Stance, idle anims, height, voice, faces... Hairstyles built manually from 4 parts (base, front, sides, and back), all of which can have 2 colours. Shape & jiggle of busts & butts can be defined (no thighs, sadly, this isn't BDO...). From pretty to powerful, from classy to trashy, you can make the waifu YOU want. Or a dude, for some reason. There IS a catch, though -- see "Rebirth" section later. [/list] Stuff I don't, in no particular order: [list] [*][b]Title.[/b] I don't care if it sounds way cooler in Korean, Elven, Swahili, or Sangheli. "Kurtzpel: Bringer of Chaos" sounds like a teenage edgelord's D&D character. It doesn't roll off the tongue, tell you any information, or stick in your memory. Your friends will think you're telling them about Kurt's Spell. [*][b]Monetization.[/b] This one's going to take a few bullet points to get through. Apparently designed as a retail game (I'm not even going to ironically use the cringe-inducing buzzword of "buy to play"), KP was cut up & sold piecemeal as a free-to-play game with DLC & an Item Store. Let's examine that a bit. [*][b]DLC.[/b] Half the classes sold as $21 DLC. Per class. A costume set: $35. Its matching weapon pack: sold separately, $40. You can't buy items in-game using in-game money, but you can buy gambling boxes on the cash shop. You can't even access all the character creator options without paying real money. After the completely-deserved deluge of negative reviews, KOG patched the 2 DLC classes into the main game & promised some vague cosmetic rewards for those who bought them. Gullible fools switched their reviews to positive. All the DLC vanished from the store other than the $3.40 Starter Pack... only for the $35 & $40 cosmetic packs & $14 full-character-customization item to come right back in the days ahead. I'm not saying this was a deliberately-staged attempt to exploit as much money from early adopters in the form of launch-day DLC then "patch it out" to try to look like they care, but it seriously feels like it. [*][b]Item Shop.[/b] KP launched with no way to buy equipment using in-game money, but launched with a functional Item Shop that sells gambling boxes & overpriced cosmetics using real-life money. You can't earn a Standard Supply Box through progress (allegedly that's coming; inexcusable that it's not in yet), but you CAN buy an Advanced Supply Box for $4 each, with no guarantee that you'll get the stuff you want, & no full list of possible contents, either. On May 16th, they added even more overpriced garbage to the Item Shop, such as $7 pants, $4 gloves (each, not a pair), & even more sets of $14 underwear. [*][b]Market.[/b] Received an item you don't want through one of the gambling boxes or possibly in-game progress? Well, throw it up on the Steam Market & sell it to another user. I suppose $100 swords & hats are nothing new on Steam, & KOG gets a cut of each sale, so why would they care about letting us buy items with in-game money, right? [*][b]Rebirth.[/b] No, it's not a way to reset your character to Level 1 & gain new stats and powers. During character creation, Personality doesn't affect stats, but we're never told it determines character stance, voice, anims, & what parts we have available. Want all the parts? All the faces, hair, eyes, etc.? Then buy a Rebirth ticket for real-life money. Oh, and it lets you reallocate stat points, too, something you can't do without Rebirth. Thanks, KOG. [*][b]Lack of content.[/b] I was expecting some kind of mission-based game where you fight monsters that lead up to a boss battle. Think of Vindictus, PSO2, Warframe... Instead, the "missions" are purely boss fights that need two players (matchmaking works, at least). [*][b]Story, or lack thereof.[/b] The fully-animated cutscenes with high production value set up some massive fantasy war... but then players just run the same boss fights over and over. At this point I've fought more people of my same faction than the enemies due to the emphasis on the PVP mode. [*][b]Lack of co-op story missions.[/b] The missions with story cutscene (all dozen of them) can ONLY be played solo. The gameplay would lend itself perfectly to something like a Vindictus-style mission format of progressing through a map with friends, fighting minions all the way, until we take down a boss together. [*][b]PVP.[/b] Look, if I wanted to fight other users, I'd play a game built for that kind of thing, like a fighting game or an FPS. When I play an animé-style character action MMO, it's because I want what that can offer: stylish action, fighting monsters, taking down bosses, levelling up, adventuring with friends. I don't care for watching arbitrary letter-grade rankings change. [*][b]Drop rates.[/b] Without exaggeration, there's a 1% chance of a boss dropping the single item it'll offer per battle. Increases to 5% on the highest difficulty, which I think needs to be grinded open in the first place. Ridiculous. So far I've played 42 boss fights with no loot to show for it. [*][b]Affinity system.[/b] Certain NPCs will unlock items when you raise your affinity with them, but doing so is unnecessarily obtuse. Select the NPC you want in town, look at the map to see IF there's a mission/PVP match where there's a chance character might spawn, play it, hope the character spawns, click on some dialogue buttons that feel like RNG, head back to town to see if you got any Affinity worth a damn to unlock something. If you did, you have to go find the character again after a mission to collect the reward. You can't see the entire reward list in-game. I can definitely understand why some players would rather just buy the items off the user Market. [*][b]Lack of progression.[/b] I don't feel like I'm going anywhere, achieving anything, advancing the plot, or growing in power. There's no traditional levelling, no stats, basically no loot, no world quests. What're my goals? [/list] KOG makes other free-to-play games (Elsword, Grand Chase), so you can't pretend to believe they didn't know any better. With deliberate, despicable monetization practices, a serious lack of content, and no real sense of progress or reward, what should be a fantastic game is nothing but a good-looking trainwreck. But man, does it look good.