Recent reviews by Nors2Ka

Almost quit at after the biggest seizure warning I've ever seen, on-by-default subtitles and difficulty selection with 3 health sliders, but I've held out. Altf4'd 20 minutes later because I've seen a grand total of 0 ideas unique to this game.

If you're a relative newcomer to games, this game is probably a blast. For me, this is another, good looking, well polished brick in the wall.

Where is... the game?

I've played for 8 hours, yet my first run is identical to my last run, except numbers are bit bigger.

Were those 8 hours fun? No. I kept expecting things to change, to open up, long after I knew that they wont. Take that as you will.

It's a decent game to play with friends from time to time. It has a lot of flaws and I'm certain the developers have no clue what makes the game good, but every now and then the rush of outpacing enemies is worth it.

And yet I've quit cold-turkey after their new UI release. What a disgrace to humanity, the "people" who spawned that abomination should never be allowed to touch any code, image editing software or design board in their lives, ever. The dread of slogging through the swamp of menus successfully prevented me from ever booting this game again.

The most ironic part? Previous UI was terrible too, but there were very clear ways of improving it. Nay - they've said - we shall instead make these menus worse for everybody (including console players) in order to make it look like CoD and cater to... the console audience??!

Not a puzzle game, it's a math quiz game. I would perhaps still play it, but it has the audacity to underline relevant words for already obvious quizzes. Miss me with that patronizing crap.

And of course - no back button is just ass. Another way the game is patronizing, it assumes you can't learn the concept of two different buttons. As if people who are completely unfamiliar with gaming would grasp the concept of having to save the game manually, instead of it remembering where you left off, but not grasp the existence of 1 additional button.

My impression, after putting in a generous amount of time. including watching Shroud and devs play their own game, I am confident in saying that this game is a mediocre Valorant clone first and "an innovative genre evolution, with unique duality mechanic" a very far second.

Almost every facet of this games design is alright, yet none of it comes together into a good coherent whole. It's as if movement, shooting, abilities, level design, duality mechanic and everything in-between were all developed in isolation, thrown together and... that was it. As such, I have no faith that this game could be improved over time; an tweak here and there, sure, but this game was developed and released in this finished state, you don't do that and follow up with a 180 fixing everything.

To think I had high hopes for this game, played it way past the point where I've formed this opinion, and yet it just isn't it.

The 2 hours I've played felt very flat and lifeless. For the asking price of 20 euros I've expected better design.

I've played 4 hours of this, automated my first mining setup and already feel like I've seen everything there is to see.

My experience so far:

1. Start playing it, game immediately feels bad to play and control, puzzles are boring and easy.
   
2. Game does all sorts of annoying things thinking it is smart (i.e. turning off your game), but in reality all that does is make the game annoying.
   
3. Story is anime, so I don't care about it one bit.
   
4. Found wings which made the game significantly less tedious. (Can't image how stupid some of the levels would be without wings, my god...)
   
5. "Completed" the game with the infinite lives mode, but the game obviously wants me to do a mortal run.
   
6. Thankfully I can start the 2nd run with wing and sword upgrades outright.
   
7. I think to myself "base puzzles suck, maybe the meta ones are better..."
   
8. Got some new toys to play with, new secrets to find, etc..
   
9. I start piecing together that there is a hidden alphabet, think of a way of decoding it, but I'm close to being done with 2nd run.
   
10. "Oh neat, you can do (4th wall breaking stuff)."
    
11. At the end of the run I get greeted with something that put the final nail in the coffin for me - the game outright shows you how to decode the alphabet. And here I was, believing that I'll have to think for myself.
    
12. Ditch the game, play the devs previous one, ZeroRanger, and be greatly delighted by it, even going as far as doing the 1-coin run.

These developers very clearly cannot design puzzles for their life, they're utterly terrible at it. You want to tell me it gets better? After 6 hours of disrespectful trite? No thanks.

Developers, System Erasure, if you will, please never make a puzzle game again. You have the chops to make a good game, that game should not be a puzzle game.

I was excited to play this game on release, but something about it isn't very fun at all.

The main gameplay of playing and discarding hands isn't exactly riveting as it just devolves into playing same one hand you're optimizing for. The shopping and "decision making" is another bummer where you either get the good jokers or you're scraping by with random assortment of hardly useful bunch that you can't do anything with. Once you're past the 2nd ante it becomes impractical to pivot your build and you end up limping till the finish line or getting shafted by luck somewhere along the line and then your run just ends.

I doesn't feel like if I win or if I lose is decided by me in any real part - game just plays for itself. Meh.

Largely underwhelming.

I've beaten the final boss on my ~10th attempt, spent the rest of the time unlocking random stuff and trying to find more things to do, but there was nothing.

The core gameplay isn't a lot of fun either, it's very spammy and ADHD, screens get flood filled with bullets in mostly the same patterns. And of course the game speed has to be ramped up to 11, otherwise there would be little difficulty.

Runs feel one-note, mostly using underwhelming weapons that all work largely the same way. Sometimes you get the good run, but that feels like you just got arbitrarily lucky - doesn't feel like there is much agency in how well a run will go.

Definitely not a "hidden gem", it is as popular as it deserves to be.