Recent reviews by allaryin

Tried to get into it, but intentionally bad (needlessly faux retro-minimalistic) UI sapped any joy out of the experience within minutes. I hear talk of bugs, but I uninstalled before they could affect me.

An approachable metroidvania turn-based monster collector with sufficiently complex party composition choices to be interesting. The story is a bit cliche, but inoffensively so - I've seen far worse writing in much bigger budget titles.

Battle system is interesting, intuitive, and approachable - with a surprising amount of depth. Fights can get very repetitive after a while, since the majority of battles (even trash fights against things 1/4 your level when you're going back through an old area) wind up being 3v3's that can sometimes take 2 or 3 rounds to complete. This is mitigated somewhat by a map traversal power that lets you avoid encounters.

Exploration is good, the map does not have to be completed in a linear order, and enemies scale based on how much you have explored, so you shouldn't ever really get too far out of your depth no matter which route you take.

Completed in ~28 hours with 100% map completion and most (but not all of the pokedex).

My only real complaint (apart from not being able to completely ignore trash fights when backtracking and thus making the long fights feel longer than they need to be) is the user interface. It has enough console platformer in its genes to make things *just* a bit clunkier than necessary when played on a PC. There never seems to be quite enough information on the screen, which makes inventory management, level advancement, and party organization take longer than they should.

One of the best progression type roguelites that I have ever encountered. Has a forgiving difficulty curve, meaningful character scaling, and increasingly complex level/boss mechanics. All told, the game oozes with well-thought-out design decisions.

Better in coop, but there are some network sync issues, and joining private games could really use a better user experience.

Portal meets Stanley Parable. Starts off slow, but is a good ride once the train leaves the station.

Loop Hero actually accomplishes the goal on the tin - they encourage you to keep playing. Very few games can nail this level of "one more turn" experience. One part idle game, one part base builder, one part deck builder, one part loot aggregator, the game does a good job of easing you into its available mechanics. Sure, you can run into systems before you are ready for them - but the game will eventually teach you how something happens, or it will provide you an education the hands-on sort of way ;)

It is also simultaneously very chill and fairly difficult. Difficulty ramps up steadily at a pace influenced by your decisions, and if those decisions are made poorly, the difficulty can quickly outpace your character's growth. But unlike most legacy games, even if you mess up and die, you get to bring back some of the resources you'd gathered on the run - and if you suspect that you are going to die in a coming fight, you can choose to end the run early and claim even more resources.

Loop Hero is charming and absorbing. I've broken even on the price at ~$1/hour played right now and it looks like this is going to wind up being one of those games I keep coming back to for years to come.

It's hard to describe - but they've struck a sort of balance of mechanics, difficulty, simplicity, and emergent gameplay that REALLY works. If you like survival games but don't like the micromanagement aspect that a lot of them have, you will probably enjoy this - especially if you also enjoy a challenge.

Highly recommended if you have other people to play with - the game is best experienced with a group (even just two players is enough). And while technically possible to play solo, Valheim is not balanced for solo play. Some aspects of the game (not just counting the normal social stuff one might expect) simply don't work as well by oneself.

I have been a fan of ADOM since the 90's, so it pains me not to recommend this release. It is WAY too early in its dev cycle to be worth more than a couple of hours of fun. I was actually a little shocked at how little is implemented thusfar.

That being said, it's still ADOM under the hood, with the decades of design and planning that come with that, and will eventually be worth every cent of its price tag... eventually.

My single largest complaint is not actually the size of the release, I expected cut features. No, what this game needs most is better UI options. The context menu is cute and meant to be accessible, I guess? ... but it's slow and I found it very unintuitive. Manipulating inventories is strange... but the fact that I can't even just switch on classic keyboard commands is infuriating.

Classic style graphics are nice and all, but what we NEED are classic style controls as an option.

This is a -very- strong first drop for an early access game. There are very strong Factorio vibes here - with a lot of gameplay clearly inspired directly by the older title.

My current nitpicks, which I hope will be addressed before full release are:
1. The English localization is rather poor at times - to the point where the voiceover narrator is saying some fairly bizarre things that just don't make grammatical sense.
2. There is no good in-game wiki sort of doc for looking up what resources come from or where they're used.
3. This is further complicated by the fact that the tech tree is not implemented in a strictly linear fashion. It is possible to unlock a tech only to discover that you need to unlock 5 other things on different parts of the tree before it is of any use to you.
4. There's no option to automatically mute audio when the game is in the background.

But yeah. Strongly recommended thusfar.

Surprisingly chill experience. Fishing minigame is a bit irritating, but there's something special about sailing into a hurricane while playing Wagner on a hurdy gurdy.

On my second ever voyage, our ship was attacked by a kraken immediately after leaving an island and went down - but not before I grabbed the loot we were carrying and swam with it back to the island, where I found a rowboat and two more chests that we'd missed on the first visit. Rowed through a storm to nearest port. Sold loot. Bought a new pair of boots.

Not recommended unless you have 1-3 friends with whom you expect to be able to play regularly, as sailing a ship effectively really does warrant extra hands. Expect to argue with said friends about parking jobs.

Dirt cheap FPS Gungeon with a mediocre translation and a lot of potential. There's not a ton here - but what there is already provides a good amount of replayability. There are some mildly annoying balance issues, but they're minor. I'm hoping the developers plan on releasing more content before final release.