Blue Sock Puppet 最近的評論

Terrible game that is way too RNG based. Stay away, the guy who designs it is an idiot.

Get it

Better than buying coffee at Starbucks.

Solid little Metrodvania, if a bit short.

*The Pros*:

- Very nice sprite work. The characters and enemies move fluidly, animations pop nicely. Weapons looks cool.

- The background visuals can be nice and some of the Dragon bosses are a real treat.

- Soundtrack is great. Clearly inspired by SOTN, but that's ok.

- Neat little conceit using an Ikaruga-like elemental system to absorb enemy attacks. The idea is solid and could be fleshed out a bit more. Easily breaks the game in ways, however.

- Spells are cool, nicely animated and feel good. They end up being a bit overpowered later in the game however.

*Cons*:

- Map is rather small, but that's not implicitly a bad thing. However, the level design leaves a bit to be desired. Nothing feels terribly inspired. The arrow puzzles seem promising at first, but they don't really make them super elaborate. The world does not seem very cohesive like it would in a better Metroidvania. There aren't enough secrets and breakable walls.

- Missed opportunity to bank on the source material. What's there is pretty thin.

- Weapon selection is nice, but ultimately pointless. You switch up to the next strongest weapon constantly, there are artificial constraints put on some weapons like the Chakra, to keep them from proc'ing too often (i.e. making them interesting). The movesets are really limited; no street-fighter style special moves in sight unique to each weapon or innate ones Deedlit might have.

- The million different kinds of bows seem largely useless.

- The abilities you gain are very mundane. Very little creativity to be found.

- The inventory system is just plain bad. There's no reason consumable items should share the same slot as magic. Scrolling through the list on the fly feels really off and trying to use items immediately in the heat of battle often results in going make to the ability selection menu.

*Consensus*:

Definitely worth giving it a spin. Despite impressions to the contrary, I think the positives largely outweigh the negatives.

As a proof of concept, it really makes me excited to see what this team will be capable of with a bit more money and time.

7.5/10

aWESOMEBALLS!!!!14323

Great Wizardry Clone.

Tough as nails

I've been playing dungeon crawlers since I was a kid. I know they are an acquired taste and certainly far from a popular genre nowadays. I've completed numerous Wizardry, Dungeon Master, Might and Magic and Eye of the Beholder games. Some have more contrived puzzles than others, but that comes part and parcel with these games and that's never detracted from my enjoyment.

Given my background, I approached this game with cautious optimism. Having read the many reviews, I could see the reception was mostly positive though there were certainly some divisive aspects to it.

Now that I've completed it, I have to say that, overall, my experience was an enjoyable one. However, I couldn't shake the feeling that this ended up falling short of its potential and could have in my personal top 10 had the team developing it been larger or had a better QA department.

Numerous ideas which are meant to be the meat of the game come off as undercooked (so to speak), namely the combat.

This, despite the fact that it was obviously meant to be the larger focus of the game. It tends to feel a little haphazard, with insufficient visual and audio feedback from the various skills. The general pace seems a little too fast, enemies have too much health and you never seem to be doing enough damage. Level progression feels unrewarding because your characters never feel like they are given many interesting skills and once you do acquire a set that seems to work marginally better that letting them use their auto attacks, you just end up queuing the same sequence hamfistedly. There is little thought involved beyond sitting on buffing and interrupt skills for an opportune moment or properly managing the heals and threat factor (which really feels out of place in a dungeon crawler).

You quickly realize that you're only allotted enough xp for 1 level up per floor with the same staggered advancement separated by 500 xp for each character. I understand that this was paced in such a way to keep the game challenging, but I would argue that having a few areas with respawning monsters or arenas would have gone a long way towards adding some flavour. Perhaps not having all monsters repsawn, but in designated areas. The developer could have put aside an Iron Man mode of some sort with limited xp for those who were interested. As it is, most skills seem to underpowered to make a real impact (2% increase in damage?) and you're given a dearth of skills points to really boost your team to impressive levels. I think overall, these leveling bottlenecks were a bad idea.

Despite this very measured apporach to character progression, the balance in combat is all over the place as well. Your team often feels ill equipped for certain encounters (often due to poor equipment drops). It ends up seeming a lot more like luck of the draw than actual strategic combat, hoping that the boss will have a series of poor damage rolls or misses.

At first I was playing on the higher difficulties, but the combat did not feel rewarding enough to contend with the frustration and arbitrary nature of it all. The idea of emulating MMO style combat is not a terrible one, but ultimately feels poorly implemented.

Luckily, if you can't be bothered with the lackluster combat, there's an option to adjust the difficulty if you just want to cruise through the sequences. I played about half the game on the higher difficulty levels, but just got fed up eventually and didn't find any enjoyment in the protracted battles that could end from a single poor roll where one of your key members would be taken down in a single blow from full health and spell ruin for your party. No thanks.

To compound things, after all this trouble, once your group finally starts to shape up nearing the end of the game, the big gimmick in the final battle is that you keep getting weaker to the point where your are limited to next to no abilities. So all the planning of which gear to use and which abilities to queue is all for naught.

Which is just one of a plethora of examples where the game has this uncanny ability to pinpoint a single element (which you would normally be hard pressed to identify yourself) that just arbitrarily and aggressively seems to be designed to squash all enjoyment for you. The developers might think these little idiosyncracies add charm to the game, but I really feel like someone should have been there to reign them in at times because these annoyances really end up compounding and almost ruining an otherwise very enjoyable game.

First we have the combat, then the skills trees, then the level progression, then the idea that it's somehow good design to keep you from getting an automap until nearing the end of a level (maybe you could have split up various map fragments with more or less cryptic clues to find the secrets?). Lighting can also be an issue if you don't turn up your gamma. Another consequence of this is the very real possiblity of missing an important item in the darkness. I highly recommend turning on the option to make items more visible with the slight sparkle that will cut through the twilight. Loot could be more varied, and I don't think items with randomly generated stats really fit this type of game all that well, or you should at least have a set of unique items with set stats (and perhaps an interesting backstory) to outfit specific party members.

Make no mistake, despite the tone so far, I really did enjoy myself quite a bit. The art style is good. The models are surprisingly nice and well animated (except for the gnomes, yuck. But I hate gnomes. The gnome giants were the creepiest monters in the game imo). The soundtrack is subtle, but quite fitting. Sound effects are adequate. Level design was mostly very good. Puzzles are satisfying and the more difficult ones are optional.

There's a very nice treasure hunt that was added later on which was quite enjoyable. It should be noted however that the clues can be a little too cryptic and/or ambiguous sometimes. You might think this could be due to the translations (the game was originally in French), but French is my first language at it was not much better.

The plot could use a major overhaul, but it's never really meant to be the focus of these games. The ending really is a giant middle finger to the player though. I did not enjoy that at all. Dialogue could be improved. Tone is a kinda all over the place, but again, it's a minor gripe considering no one plays these games for the gripping plot.

So despite all this, I still highly recommend the game if you're a fan of the genre, with the caveat that certain aspects (which can admittedly be mitigated to an extent) may dampen your enjoyment slightly.

Support these guys so they can put out something similar with a bigger budget!

Overall, well worth your time.