Recent reviews by Pumkin

What a ride.

I really didn't know what I was getting myself into jumping in blind on a friend's recommendation.
I certainly didn't expect a game with such an elaborate story going on around your character as you go through your standard roguelite runs. It hooked me in and I kept playing just to see how the story would unfold, despite being pretty bad at first, not knowing characters and cards, and getting better over time and further into my runs, which also ties into the meta plot!

The presentation is top notch. I especially loved how lore and story is sometimes told through gameplay and somewhat 4th wall breaking elements.

You're thrown into the middle of everything and there's loads of visual novel style cutscenes explaining what happened before and after your actions, including through flashbacks and dreams.

The gameplay is also pretty good, tho confusing at first because there's a couple of mechanics that aren't exactly straightforward, but it eventually clicked and the game became pretty easy. There are optional ways to increase difficulty so that's no issue for those who are looking for a challenge. Optional is kind of the key word here, because the game provides a surprising amount of choices and player agency.
Unlike something like Slay the Spire (it's basically mandatory to mention this game in every deckbuilder review), where you're at the mercy of RNG, in Chrono Ark you choose a lot of what happens, for example when you get an event tile you always have a choice between two types of events, or when you're hit by an enemy attack that can hit two people you often get the choice of who in your party takes the second hit.
You also don't discard your hand every turn so you can actually anticipate things with the cards you drew before.

The OST is also fantastic and character designs cool and their backstories pretty likable.

I recommend this game if you like depressing story lines and turn based rpgs, even if you don't like deckbuilders, chances are you might like this one.

Honestly, a bit mixed on this game now. I still recommend it because the core gameplay is fun and the devs sorta seem to know how to build a good game. I'd recommend buying it on sale, but I doubt it's gonna go on any sale any time soon.

That said they make very questionable decisions sometimes, and either don't play their own game or are just bad at it, so decisions of made through the lense of a casual player combined with some weird spreadsheet weapon balancing. In order for things to change someone really needs to step back and look at the systemic issues holding this game back.

The devs incompetence might have looked endeering at first, because they didn't try to penny pinch you and just wanted to make a good game, but I feel like the community is past that now.

There are some glaring issues that will take a long time to get figured out.
The devs make weird balance decisions that gut weapons and upset the community semi regularly at this point.

Someone on the dev team really seems to put realism over fun, which doesn't make much sense for a game about shooting bugs in space. Realistic gunplay is definitely appreciated but it needs to be balanced with fun, because that's what this game is all about in the end.

There's lots of bugs, visual jank and crashes, which people seemingly kinda ignored early on and every update that fixes some of them and introduces a lot more new ones. Their list of known issues also says the same things every update, with some issues going ignored for months.

Whenever the devs add something new to the game you can bet your ass new weapons are gonna be bad and new features are going to be broken. So all the new content comes with the caveat of it probably not going to be good until it gets patched a few times, every patch trying to fix a thing about it and somehow failing despite patch notes saying it got fixed (looking at you spear lock on). Which also means whenever they hype up a new content drop you learn to not buy into it because the new weapons they drop are going to suck.

The janky early access indie game vibe sticks, with weapons floating in the air, bugs sometimes dying and not playing death animations, enemies launching you ragdolling across the map, you sometimes getting stuck under the map, getting shot by bots through terrain etc.

The game also still isn't available in 180 countries or whatever, because Sony is a prehistoric publisher that still does pointless region locks, and there's nothing the devs can do about it, so the whole review bomb because of the forced PSN account being needed didn't really do much but leave the game in limbo. At least we don't need PSN accounts anymore.

The core gameplay fun.. when the servers work and you can actually play it.
I'd say wait a month or two before buying, but definitely keep an eye on this because the game's got a lot of potential.

EDIT: Okay actually wait a year or two before buying. It's got a long way to go.

Why did it take me so long to try this?

I'll write a review later but the game is pretty good

Plenty of content and lots of polish, a really well done Early Access title about to launch as a full game.

My personal GOTY.

A really well polished and detailed rpg with a nice soundtrack and cute characters. Plenty of combat and enemy variety and lots of (sometimes frustrating) puzzles. Just under 100 hours of content if you take your time it just got a new game plus mode.

It's actually got.. a demo. Yes, a demo. You can actually try it for free! Remember when games always did that?

Anway, the game has two storylines going on at the same time, basically giving a lore explanation to gameplay mechanics, and leaving a layer of mystery on top of it all with the other line, and I feel like it's really well done. Some of the emotional moments hit pretty hard too.

It even has a slider to reduce enemy damage and increase puzzle timings if you have issues with that. I know I've used the puzzle slider a few times..

My personal GOTY 2018.

Let's see what happens #fixtf2