Recent reviews by ruff1298

A lot of roguelikes tend to transform into "walk around and kill everything" simulators. Not much is needed for the player but to walk around, and sometimes, when you hit critical mass, even standing still, you kill everything.

Not so much this game.

Please consider buying this if you enjoy fast, reactive, and tightly-timed and tuned controls and reaction. You will get hurt if you suck at the game, you need to manage the crowds of enemies and prioritize threats, and you will get a variety of interesting tools and equipment bonuses to devastate them.

The key adventure mode of stage by stage clearing is fun, with interesting bosses and varied enemy types with unique threats past "This one hits harder than that one." Treants, for example, will consistently try to entrap you to make you easy prey for everything else.

There is plenty of reward for skilled play. You can't just idly move your fingers over WASD or thumb on the joystick of choice to move around. There's so much demanded of you, and the beautiful pixel art, the reactiveness of the skills, and the variety in how you dispose and are disposed of by enemies is incredibly good.

There are numerous English localization quirks, however. Clearly, devs are ESL and did not or could not hire professional typesetters and translators. There are some things like cramped, shrunken text; awkward item names, and confusing descriptions where you have to decipher what everything actually does.

But, underneath that, there is a great high-speed action roguelike with incredible art and animations and plenty of juice for the flash and spectacle. You will feel like a badass, but you have to play like a badass.

This is a game you buy for the "special" content and the writing and comedy. The characters are quite cute and endearing, the story is nothing special, but there's so much in the way of comedy, absurdist humor, and some genuinely heartwarming moments to keep you going. Wolfia's running gag of leaving commentary on her dungeon construction from useful to useless tips were so fun, I explored maps just for them.

The hack and slash part of the gameplay is incredibly simplistic, to the point where you can get so overpowered, you can just face tank and button mash. This isn't Dark Souls even with the dodge, you can just run through everything and get OP just by making sure to run through the areas grabbing anything.

So, if you like the promise of F/F main content, the story of an immature brat becoming the demon queen she is, and plenty of absurd comedy like the stone mason needing a magazine full of stone-cut abs to get inspired--please, do get it.

Ignore the time played. I had the DLsite English version for WAY longer.

This game is basically just the "at home" version of Summer Memories. Everything's not nearly as polished, the contents aren't as expansive, the mechanics and the interactions are a lot more simplified, and the art isn't exactly the greatest compared to that. If this is your first time in the simulation game genre with a summer theme, mini-games, and wooing some attractive older ladies, please consider buying Summer Memories first.

That game, that is the gateway into this sort of game, and will help you decide if you like this particular adult game "flavor" and gameplay style.

Now, what if you played Summer Memories, you like this genre, and you want more of it from a different creator? Try this game out. It's obviously not nearly to the same caliber, few will ever match Summer Memories in those respects, but it most definitely still has the heart and the soul. You get the fantasy of living in a house with other ladies, who are all sweet and kind to you, you can have some fond summer memories like fishing and building your own secret base, you can live in an idyllic Japanese countryside, fall in love, and eventually with the endings, get married and maybe sow your seeds both figuratively and literally.

The writing and the scenarios really capture that "cozy" adult game feel. There's a running timer with Hiro's energy being limited and constantly counting down--about my only gripe with this game, we shouldn't lose opportunity while just thinking of what to do--but otherwise, the game is very laidback, it's easy to max everyone and unlock it legitimately, and for the impatient among you, clear the prologue, save your game, go to the memory room, and talk to Oba-san to unlock all H scenes right away.

I bought this game for what is probably thrice already. First, the original JP, then the official English patch (translators get many, yo), and finally, here on Steam, both as dev support and as a way to diversify from DLsite considering how much the credit card raters are trying to destroy the creative expression that drives the doujin market with how they will absolutely NOT touch certain adult game flavors.

If you are like me--fond of passionate projects, like the heart more than you mind the lack of polish, and have way too much disposable income/poor impulse control--buy it.

It's not that long, it's not too expensive, and boy, do I love older women.

It's a very good short JRPG, with a steady stat grind, difficulty curve, and some interesting decisions. Nothing impossibly difficult, the game is very generous about grinding, and it's made to be replayed with systems specifically for permanent upgrades for NG+ to unlock various scenes and endings.

I could play through this without the H scenes, though the H is what I bought it for. Our main heroine is such an irresponsible lout who's nonetheless a talented mage, and it's very endearing to see her tackle a massive conspiracy and interact with the others and manage her mountain of financial debts. The story isn't anything particularly new, you can see a lot coming from miles away, with no particular interesting twists. But, I saw it through to the end and enjoyed myself, especially for this price.

Brilliant short game. The core gameplay loop of deliveries is very smooth, very fun, and has a decent difficulty progression with each new zone and difficulty. The areas of the city are all very distinct, well designed, and each have a unique hazard or concentration of hazards, such as the suburbs many unpaved roads potentially destroying your bike if you run over them too long. Nothing felt like a challenge where you have to get the optimal strats and best upgrades, but it was satisfying to beat the clock and recognize you're learning the routes and where everything is.

The H scenes are fantastic, as are the conversations and personalities of the ladies. There's 4 different flavors here, and each have a rather humanizing moment that speaks to how much deeper they go, such as Sakura's issues with her mother and her drive to become a licensed fitness instructor, or all the magical madness with Ekwa. "Miss Moo" is one of my favorite moments, I love cows and a friendly cow that hangs around in a kid park letting strangers milk her is very fun.

There's a decent amount of variety with the minigames. Nothing complicated or that you'd come back to, but there's a great selection of things to do other than pedal bike, avoid dogs, don't get hit by cars or fall into manholes. I really enjoyed the milking mini-game the most, though the Cooking Mama-esque sequence with Ekwa's penultimate minigame was quite cute. The visuals for each are fantastic, so much love, passion, and detail put into things that won't last more than 5 minutes at most.

The sound and the music design is top notch. I love the feel of the delivery themes and riding around the city, the "ring ring" of your bike bell when you've stopped moving is a great, easy way to tell when you've crashed into a wall, and there's so many funny sound effects and little details, such as how attacking Shiba Inus will get sent flying if they're hit by cars, angry chickens can fall into manholes, and you yourself will do the Wilhelm scream if you accidentally fall in yourself.

Great price, great gameplay. It's top notch hentai and dating sim with lovable characters that doesn't forget to have interesting mechanics and makes full use of its multimedia aspects. Please, buy it.

This game understands "juice" and strategy. It's an idle battler, so there's not much mechanical input demanded of the player, but there is a wealth of theorycrafting, strategy, and understanding of the meta systems. There are so many cards, so many different characters, and they all play so differently, and above all else, everything feels so good to play.

The character designs are endearing, the enemies and music is great, I never feel bored with the spectacle, the fun, and the variety here, like the roulette wheel, the matching cards, and how ridiculous the ways you cause damage are. It's cheap, it's got the addictive loop down pat, and it's a great showing of the all important art and sound design in your multimedia game.

Please, do consider dropping the handful of your local currency to get it.

One of the most important things for a game to stand out nowadays is "game feel." Does it feel good to play? Is it satisfying to do the core gameplay loop, with appropriate sound effects, cool factor, and visual/audio feedback that makes great use of the multimedia format? This game has a great, satisfying core gameplay loop, but since so many survivor-likes have done it well while being stylish and fun, is it worth cracking open Sodaman?

Yes, yes it is.

One of my favorite settings are cyberpunk and sci-fi, with all their glowing neon and unnecessary cables and shiny bits. This game does that well, especially with the opening comic book style sequence that really catches the pink-and-blue hues of your cyberpunk city. There's a serious love for the 80's-90's that oozes through everything, with such intense passion and nostalgia that it's endearing. I especially love the Bladerunner-esque "Japan is the cutting edge of everything" style.

The character designs also ooze personality. I really love how each character is distinctly designed, you can see who they are at a quick glance, and both their full body dialog images and their pixel art are very well rendered. The voice acting was also a nice surprise, hadn't expected it out of a 4-head team, but it's well done, especially Sodaman's one-liners from time to time.

The enemy designs are also appropriately alien, with their strange angular shapes, mechanical designs, and the variety of the enemies you see here. Every style is clearly visible from their silhouette and their color, you can easily tell what they do, and even though they often have a similar palette to the background, nothing gets lost in the background or washes out due to the strong use of colors and overall design.

The upgrades so far as I've seen are incredibly varied, interesting, and have their specific niches. There are sodas that rely on bleeding and crits with specific bullet patterns, ones that weaken enemies and are much better for running straight into enemies and getting hurt while minimizing damage, there are DOTs that increase the chances of summons and destroying enemies. It's so easy for bad roguelikes to just go, "Damage, but in a different color" but Sodaman makes the great effort to have highly varied and meaningful decisions to your builds, right from the start.

The labels for each soda and the names are also hilarious and well done. They have punchy graphics, you can almost taste what each soda is supposed to be like, and tell what target audiences they have. The guy with the mullet and the flannel shirt doing a flying karate kick is one of my favorite designs, you don't get more Karate Kid-era nostalgia than that.

I'm not much of a music man for these roguelikes, since the one repeating track is good for me, but I really enjoy Sodaman's Bladerunner-style, psychedelic music that embodies the "outer space, far into the future" vibe especially since you're beaming down on a planet.

I've barely had a sip of the game, but it matters a lot to see that for an EA game, they've put out their best foot forward and served up quite the glass of fun and passion. There's so much I've yet to dive into, and there's so much more the team can do with how competent they've already shown they are. They know how to

• Make interesting upgrades,
  
• Make a good progression of the level difficulty where it doesn't feel like even the first level is impossible without upgrades
  
• Design a reasonable reward treadmill for the drops and how you collect, and
  
• Craft an addictive and satisfying core gameplay loop, where you will want to go back for another run for the fun of it, and you do feel like you'll go back to the harder levels.

I hope they can keep up this momentum from the great start, as it's too easy for an EA title to go out with a strong entrance and then flub getting to the finish line, if they even get there at all. But, this game barely costs more than a handful of cans of your favorite soda or drink of choice, so please, do support these devs and let them show what they can do.

I'll be cracking this game open again once I have free time again. Maybe I'll grab my favorite mug and my 2 liter bottle of Mug in the fridge, just to be more thematically appropriate.

This game is really good. It's got great art, sound design, voice acting, and the story is intriguing. The sci-fi dystopia vibe is too terribly underused, and I really enjoy the mixture of the decadent Roman-esque Senate, the more modern-day outfits, and the sci-fi coolness with Sigma's outfit and the sheer horrific alienness of many enemies.

The core gameplay loop, which is the core, is very good. There's a lot of fun in combat, the bosses have varied and interesting mechanics, and the fighting is smooth and fun. On controller, I suggest flipping X for primary Fire, RT for Charge Shot, and RB for melee into RT for Primary Fire, RB for Charge Shot, and X for melee. Whenever I died, I felt like I lacked knowledge and mastery over the systems, and now the first bosses that kept kicking my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ass, I can now get through with ease and then get my ass kicked by an entirely different, even worse boss, which is how you like your roguelikes to be.

However, the issue is, the depth and roguelike elements need some looking into. The default weapon, the Pulse Rifle, is a very good starter weapon and can be upgraded to be an efficient constant DPS machine that works very well with the movement, dodge-and-pattern heavy nature of the fights. However, the balance to make the other weapons orthogonal (distinctly different with specific niches and unique experiences) is pretty poor; I like the idea of the Combat Shotgun, but its balance for DPS, fire rate, and the reloading issue make me go back to the Pulse Rifle, because the latter is just better DPS overall. Especially on Controller, many run choices of weapons don't feel like much choices at all, since the Pulse Rifle is just too useful for everything, and alternatives are too gimmicky for their own good.

They really need to take a more Nuclear Throne approach, I think. The starter weapon is "meh" and fine, but the additional options can be absolutely ridiculous, because the entire space is trying to kill you NEED that excess firepower.

There's also issues with the roguelike elements. The negative run modifiers oftentimes have conditions that you can use to avoid them and keep the benefits. But, they are selected from a random pool, and map layout can ♥♥♥♥ you over. I once got "Clear the next 2 battles in 180 seconds" and the next room was a boss that required at least 180 seconds to complete without a broken build. ♥♥♥♥ sucks.

The progression is also a little funky when you're learning and constantly dying. There is a bar on the bottom right with your cooldowns and abilities, but you only get one to start, turrets, and you struggle to get anything else until you reach the 3rd map. I spent like 3 hours trying to get to the 3rd map, so I feel like I spent most of the game without a sideways power booster and much of the game locked to me. Now that I have the research center, it all feels a little "meh" as I've boosted everything else to much more significant degrees.

Anyway, it's a good deal. Clearly AA, with all the issues it has such as great presentation, great ideas, some polish, but not enough for a totally smooth, issue free experience. This is the power of a passionate team that is given money, but as always, dreams have some trouble when they're bought into reality.

Try it. It isn't really a big expense and it's good if you're looking for a new sidescrolling action roguelike.

This is basically Risk of Waifu 2. The devs have very explicitly mentioned their inspiration, and the game plays almost identically to it.

The good news is that they have taken all the best parts about it.

• There is a varied and deep selection of characters who all play uniquely to each other, with a mix of melee and varying forms of ranged attacks.
  
• Awakenings are very impactful, not just raw stat bonuses but help you unlock more of your character's power as the run continues.
  
• Skills are very creative, fun, and have both good spectacle and practicality. My favorite is Shibako's dropping a giant Shiba Inu statue on enemies to crush them to death.
  
• There is a wide variety of interesting items with varied effects and drawbacks that aren't just "do X amount more damage," it's "shoot lightning with every shot, that helps you do X amount more damage, in a cool way."
  
• They nail the feeling of power climbing and stacking items till you get to that OP build where you can't really die.
  
• There are absurdly powerful enemies and spawn tactics like new move sets, optional difficulties, that will guarantee you will die anyway despite that OP-ness.

It also has its unique pros.

• Anime tiddies. Yes, I'm a pervert. The characters are designed very well, they've got appealing character designs, and I enjoy all the adorable battle cries they make and how they move.
  
• The environments are very well crafted, with its own take on 90s synthwave and anime themes such as Techno Feudal Japan, being inside an "Aesthetic" level, and ROR2 references with the frozen wasteland.
  
• There's a wide variety of unique enemies that aren't just "generic bad guys and goblins." There's a design philosophy to each stage, so you can understand why you're being attacked by walking sound equipment and 80's computer speakers or cyberdemon ninjas.
  
• There's clearly a lot of passion and will to innovate on the ROR2 formula, than make it "This game, but with anime tiddy."

It has plenty of flaws.

• English translation is poor. MTL, poorly formatted despite that, and sometimes outright missing or inconsistent.
  
• Levels have preset layouts without any building blocks connecting each other, there's some obvious bandaiding together or disparate pieces with jump pads and teleporting you to dedicated boss arenas.
  
• It's obviously not as tightly wound and designed as ROR2, with its many secrets, item combinations, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you can pull off.

These flaws can both be attributed to their small team size and the circumstances of their studio going bankrupt and needing to release this to get revenue. I'm not saying this to guilt you into buying it to help the poor indies; this is a Steam page, not a Kickstarter, judge this based on the product they offer you, not what it could be in time. I'm just saying this to warn you that, if things go wrong, there is a very good chance that this product might be all it ever could be, like what happened to another indie EA title I backed but never got off the ground, Neon Echo.

However, I think the game is worth it still.

• The core gameplay loop is solid. Very addictive, I've played for hours nonstop.
  
• Even with the lack of competent translations, the game has enough of a visual language and clarity to tell what the hell is going on.
  
• The developers clearly have skill, talent, and the drive to improve, being active in the forums, being open and honest about their struggles, and I believe they can turn this around, market favors them.

So, I say, if your appetite for risk and disappointment can handle it, grab this game if you like ROR2 and want to reward developers that don't just copy, they make a GOOD copy with their innovations and flavor to it. Even if, knock on wood, this is all the game will ever be, it's still a well-made endless looping roguelite where you blow ♥♥♥♥ up and ♥♥♥♥ blows you up just as quickly.

There comes a game that defines a genre, and then countless other developers chase after it. There's a sea of cheap knockoffs and reskins, then there comes this game which decides to innovate on Survivors games like so many after Doom did:

Fuse it with some other genre, never thought of before.

The mechanics are incredibly fun and well done, a very different feel to the "walk around, kill things, try not to get stuck in terrain or get killed." You can only fire so many pinballs at once, they will easily go off screen, and you only move so fast, so you have to position yourself well or find a good spot where it's less "woops, my ball disappeared again" and more "I'm not trapped here with you, you're trapped here with me." There's nothing quite as satisfying as the sheer amount of raw destruction that comes with setting up a good ricochet, where your ball hits one enemy, bounces off another, then starts a chain of massive kills.

The upgrade system is incredibly good despite this being EA, too. I like how each archetype is very clearly defined with a niche, interesting synergies, and rare upgrades that feel more than just "Plus X damage" (though those do still exist). They feel impactful, with them increasing your DPS and defense in a significant way, having conditionals that rely on the game's core mechanics (such as building bounces or ricocheting off your character), or just have that satisfying massive power boost where you know the run is won.

My favorite so far is the True Jizo, where each enemy hit by a pinball spawns a new pinball. It sounds as hilariously broken as you think.

There's also an incredible amount of heart and soul in the visual design and the writing. Characters, like the representatives for each element/pinball specialization, are incredibly well done, especially the icy beauty Lin Ai. The vibe of an inner city, rotting urban center where all the world's worst have gathered together for lack of anywhere else to go is very well done. There's so many creative and playful elements to the UI design, such as the gachapon machine design in the hub, the vending machines for upgrade lotteries, and the postal stamp design for skill icons. There's so much creativity with the artifact system, being random gachapon machine prizes you stuff into one of those clear window bags.

The writing is a bit hampered for me because of a decent, but not great, English translation, but when I open a random character's page, and find several paragraphs worth of eloquently written story, you know these developers love these characters and put a lot of thought in them. Interactions are a little limited right now, but they have very strong character writing; from those little interactions, their designs, and what little they say, you really get the feeling that these characters are not just faces for the upgrades, they have lived very complex, difficult lives, and are trying to get by one more day in a world that couldn't care less about them.

Overall, I look forward to seeing where this game goes. It's currently at a very low, reasonable price for a handful of levels for an experimental game with incredible amounts of heart, style, and great ideas already. Please, do support it.