[u] [b] Rating: [/b] [/u]
[list]
[*][ ] Recommended at full price
[*][ ] Recommended at a discount
[*][ ] [b] Recommended but only at a discount
[*][x] [b]Not Recommended[/b] UNLESS you have a patience for bugs, in which case I recommend it at a discount
[/list]
[h1] Buggy as all hell, but surprisingly enjoyable nonetheless [/h1]
[b] Closest comparison: [/b] Children of Zodiarks (both are grid turn based tactical games with deckbuilding and linear storytelling)
[b] Duration: [/b] 20-30hs (depending on how many sidequests you do, it has 3 difficulties to choose from but I doubt they will be enough to hold your attention for more than 1 playthrough)
[b] Short description: [/b] Tactical RPG with each character having it´s own unique deck, with cards defining the abilities to use. There is some deckbuilding since you can expand each character´s deck with new cards (all of them unique to that specific character) by buying them with "trills" (the currency of the game)
[b] Best features: [/b]
+ Solid combat system, with some cool possibilities by combining smart positioning and the terrain together with abilities and passives in interesting ways
+ Good amount of variance, getting one card or another in any given time can drastically alter your strategy and the flow of battle
+ Good presentation, colorful aesthetic, nice 2D character portraits and enjoyable cutscenes in quite a decent amount of story moments
+ Good characterization and plot, the characters aren´t amazingly written nor anything like that and the plot suffers from saturday morning cartoon villains, but the worldbuilding and narrative are quire well done and it seems a lot of effort was put into them. As a whole I enjoyed the world, story and characters and they were enough to hold the game structure together
[u] Feedback [/u]:
- Extremely repetitive encounters, the enemy variety isn´t bad and it does have a decent number of battlefields, but not decent enough to support a +20hrs long game, there are [b] lots [/b] of rehearsed battlefields in the main story, sometimes making you fight the exact same battle multiple times in the exact same battlefield with some small enemy variance in them, it feels extremely stretched
- The sidequests are an abomination, nothing but kill quests with the exact same 4-5 scenarios used over and over again, as a positive they can be entirely skipped, as unless you want to unlock EVERY card in every character´s deck (which I did midway through the game btw, and definitely don´t recommend) there´s no reason to do them
- Worthless economy: the "trills" are a meaningless currency, and by the end of the game you´ll have a lot more than what you need (there are no weapons/items to buy, only cards)
- Grinding: every new unit starts at level 12 or so, the level cap is 40 and you still get units at about 10hrs in (9 units total) so getting them to usable levels requires grinding, there IS level scaling, mind you, so using these low level characters in a high leveled party can also trivialize any encounter, but passive slots get unlocked every 5 levels and what makes or brakes a character are the combinations of their cards and their passives, so they would only be there to provide weaker enemies, not to meaningfully contribute to the fight
+/- Level Scaling: Your characters do get new passives and passive slots to equip them every 5 levels, and you can further increase their power by combining them with the right cards that you unlock with "trills", but it does make the start of the game somewhat frustrating as the trills you gain per battle are really scarce and the enemies keep getting tougher so it feels like leveling at all is a mistake
+/- LOTS of RNG: It comes with the deckbuilder territory, but I believe it deserves a mention as depending on your and your opponent´s first hand the fight can go in extremely onesided ways
+/- Bad AI: Extremely exploitable, easy to mess with it´s pathfinding, sometimes it will one turn kill a character, sometimes it will literally attack the air
- [b] Bugs [/b],lots of them, so here´s a list of the ones encountered during my playthrough:
[list]
[*]Broken animations (Like characters running in place or against the wall)
[*]Sometimes the Wait button didn´t work and the End Turn button wouldn´t appear until I selected another character, I think this is because the game expects you to use your character in a specific order but allows you to use them in any order, so when you use the "last" character first it kind of breaks, not a big issue but definitely annoying
[*]Broken Achevements, I´ve finished the game, collected every card, leveled all my characters to max level and so on, but the game still fails to acknowledge that I´ve gotten even 1 character at all, it did recognize me getting to max level and finishing the game tho
[*]Dead bodies sometimes would still keep standing and moving as if they were alive, specially spiders, they were dead, they had no visible health bar and you could move to their grid no proble, but it was a jarring view and sometimes confused me
[*]One time I pushed an enemy and he flew to the wall (he was far from it) and [i] into [/i] said wall... that enemy became unreachable for my characters and didn´t attack or move animore, but still counted as "alive" so I had to restart the whole fight because of it
[*]No more cards bug: One day I loaded my save and started a fight with the usual stuff, I got my starter 2 and then... nothing, no 3rd card for any of my characters, never, every turn that should´ve given me a card gave me nothing, and all cards with draw effects just did nothing, I quit the game and started it off again but the bug still remained, I turned off and on my PC but the problem persisted, and worse still: [i] the game autosaves to only 1 slot [/i], so I had no way of "rolling back", I came back the next day and the problem was still there, I was about to give up, already thinking of quitting right then and there due to this gamebreaking bug (as challenging fights are simply impossible without using cards) but I came back to the game for curiosity and the problem was... fixed? how? I have no idea
[*]Sometimes it had no sound, at all, randomly (which is actually hard to realize because this game inherently lacks sound effects and or music in some cutscenes/fights)
[*]After dead skills: Sometimes the enemy would kill one of my units, said unit would disappear as normal but the next turn... I could still use it´s cards, and said cards would still do damage to enemies
[*]Sometimes the taunt skill would simply not work, it would appear as if it were working with the taunt symbol above the enemy and all, but the enemy would completely ignore it
[*]Sometimes the enemy would attack the "air"/space adyacent to my unit, and I don´t mean it in a "the animation was bugged way", I mean it as a "the enemy would literally attack at nothing and do no damage" and waste it´s turn in the process, keep in mind that it is NOT possible for the player to select an empty space to attack so I am pretty sure this is a bug.
[/list]
[b] Overall thoughts: [/b]
This is a VERY hard one to recommend, I did play almost 30hrs, unlocking every card, finishing every "important" sidequest (of which there are only a handful) and leveling all the characters to max, so I DID enjoy my time with this game, or at least most of it... let´s say... around 60% of it.
The thing is: the parts that work are fun and interesting, the story has some very enjoyable moments, the characters are cool enough, the combat mechanics are solid and allow for some very original tactics.... at least when the stars align and rng doesn´t spit on your face.
This is a very ambitious game and truth be told if this had just A LITTLE more polish, just a few less bugs, it would be an easy recommendation, sadly that´s not the case.
