Recent reviews by orclev

Very good remake of the original. I was surprised how much I remember of the original and how closely the remake follows it. There's some small QOL improvements like a map that actually shows you where you need to be headed to instead of just having you search every nook and cranny like the original, and a bunch of dialog to flesh out the story a lot more, but aside from that it's pretty close to a 1 to 1 of the NES release.

This isn't the greatest game ever made, but at $3 it's hard to argue it isn't worth every penny and then some. I've paid ten times as much for games I didn't enjoy half as much.

Rogue Heroes is a otherwise very solid Zelda/Rogue-lite mashup marred by several technical and design issues. So, first thing first, be aware of what your getting with this game. The state the game is currently in, is not what should be considered a finished state. There are a number of quite severe bugs in both single and multiplayer that somewhat ruin the experience. Many of the bugs that existed at launch have already been fixed (1 week after launch) which gives me hope the remaining issues will also be fixed, and this recommendation is based on that.

The core gameplay in Rogue Heroes is solid. It's fun, and the controls, audio, and graphics are all very satisfying. The challenge is fair, and the grind isn't too terrible, so it's easy to simply level your way past any obstacle that your skills can't handle (which is the lite part of rogue-lite). Playing in the overworld or any of the dungeons brings back memories of the best of the 16-bit era of Zelda games. So, with that out of the way, lets dive into the issues that still need to be addressed.

On the technical side the worst unaddressed problem currently (at time of this review) is a network de-sync problem that makes the online co-op mode at best a frustrating experience, and at worst unplayable. Slightly less breaking but equally annoying when using steams play together feature to stream local co-op the audio is often horribly distorted and very loud leading to a physically painful experience until the remote players mute the games audio.

On the design side, there are a few choices that are going to be much harder to fix as they'll require some re-evaluation of core gameplay. First, there are the power spheres. These are effectively collectibles, and finding all of them currently represents the primary end game activity in the game. The problem with them design wise, is they're utterly pointless. As you collect them, they allow you to retain an ever increasing amount of gems when you enter a dungeon (where normally you lose all unspent gems), but that's an utterly pointless effect. By the time you have enough power stones to where the effect is noticeable as more than a rounding error you don't actually have a use for gems anymore. Considering you'll likely have "beaten" the game by the time you have even a quarter of the power spheres (unless you've been going out of your way to specifically hunt them down), and also likely have purchased literally everything you can buy using gems, being able to retain more gems is utterly and completely useless.

Secondly, there's the lack of end game content. There are 5 dungeons, and a final endless dungeon in the game (the devs are working on adding more dungeons though). Beating the 4 of the 5 dungeons (the 5th is optional and unlocks one of the classes) unlocks the final endless dungeon which is effectively the end of the game. Beating those 4 dungeons will take somewhere in the ballpark of 10 hours or so the first time. Once you know what you're doing it's probably doable in as little as 5 or 6 hours for most people. The endless dungeon is, honestly rather pointless. Yes you can keep pushing deeper and deeper into it, but there's very little point to doing so. Aside from an achievement at level 25, you get nothing by going deeper, and the dungeon doesn't really change much either. It's just the exact same thing over and over again against slightly stronger enemies for resources you have no use for. Rather than an endless dungeon, a new game+ mode that increased the difficulty of the original 4 dungeons probably would have been a better design.

Great deckbuilder/rogue like mashup. Reminds me a lot of Slay the Spire, but I actually prefer Monster Train. So, if you liked Slay the Spire, you'll probably love Monster Train.

Fun little rogue-lite FPS. Has a good sense of humor, and a unique visual style. Unlike a lot of games in the rogue-lite category I think they've done a pretty good job of balancing the risk/reward curve on this. Nearly every time I died I felt it was because I made a poor choice or just wasn't paying attention, rather than because I happened to get a bad roll on the RNG dice.

This game has gone through major revisions over the years. I was an early supporter because I saw the potential in it and it has largely lived up to my expectations. It has its rough patches, but the developers (Digital Extremes) are always working on fixing and improving things and they usually do a good job of listening to the players, even if they sometimes dig in their heals about certain things and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into implementing them (looking at you uni-vac). Their community managers are active in their forums and on reddit, and they host weekly streams where they showcase new content and talk about what they're working on next, as well as provide feedback to the community.

As for the game itself, it can be grindy, and there's a distinct lack of documentation about important mechanics of the game, but the core mechanics are all solid, and there's a good bit of depth and a ridiculous amount of content to work through. The community maintained wiki is practically a necessity, so check it out ASAP (even if its chock full of ads and runs slow, make sure to pack an ad blocker), and for the in game market, one of the several community maintained auction sites will help match you up whether your looking to buy or sell (importantly I'm not talking about sites selling platinum, or items for real world money, that's against the TOS and WILL get you banned, these just maintain searchable listing of who's looking to sell what).

The games lore is great, and is still being revealed, although I think most of the major details have come out now. For a really long time the lore was really nebulous with just little hints here and there about major aspects of the game, but several cinematic quests later and a lot of the details have been hashed out. The community is usually pretty good about spoilers, but be on the lookout, since the big reveal in the second dream and war within quests really should be experienced spoiler free.

Best $4 I've ever spent. This game is the most fun it's possible to have with only two buttons.

If you like terraria, you'll like this game. The gameplay is very similar to terraria but with a sci-fi twist to it. Unlike terraria however this is cross-platform and the scale is massive. There are litterally entire galaxies of planets to explore. Each planet is smaller than a world in terraria, but collectively it's magnitudes more content. There are still some rough spots and issues like memory leaks, but it's an early access game still in beta, so that's to be expected. I can't wait to get my hands on the finished product though, I can see myself getting many hours of fun from this.