Steel Knight's ARMIS

เกมหุ่นโรกไลค์ที่มีเจสัน สเตแธม เป็นเกมที่เล่นแก้เซ็งได้สำหรับสายหุ่น แต่เป็นแนวโรกไลค์รีเวิร์สบุลเล็ทเฮลที่ศัตรูต้องหลบนรกกระสุนของเราแทน เราเก่งเวอร์จนบางทีอาจจะเซ็งไปบ้างสำหรับแนวนี้ แต่ก็มีในส่วนเนื้อเรื่องและปลดล็อกฉ่ำๆมาแทน ข้อดี ภาพถือว่าสวย ทำอาร์ทออกมาได้ดูดี ไม่ต้องพยายามมากในการเล่น มีเนื้อเรื่องและเสียงพากย์ที่ดูจะเกินราคาและรูปแบบเกมไปไกล ราคาถูกเวอร์ มีเดโมให้เล่นแล้วซื้อมาเล่นต่อจากเดโมได้เลย มีอะไรให้อัพให้ปลดเยอะอยู่ ข้อเสีย สำหรับคนที่ชอบความท้าทายหรือความอินตามเนื้อเรื่องจะค่อนข้างดรอปมากๆ เนื้อเรื่องเสียงพากย์กำลังพีคๆ เจอยานแม่ศัตรู แต่การเล่นก็คือเรายืนเคลียร์ม็อบโดยมียานแม่บินเป็นพื้นหลังรอเวลาหมดแค่นั้นเอง ไร้ซึ่งความท้าทายอย่างน่าเสียดาย จบด่านแล้วออกมาหน้าเมนู ทำให้ความต่อเนื่องขาดช่วง แลดูทำเป็นเกมทุนต่ำผิดกับหลายๆอย่างในเกมที่ออกมาดูดี น่าจะตั้งเป้าสูงๆหน่อยแล้วทำให้ออกมาดีกว่านี้ รวมๆแล้วอยากให้ชาวหุ่นกดมาเล่นกันยามว่าง

[h1]Falling short of immense potential.[/h1] Steel Knight's Armis is an astonishing example where excellent gameplay gets dragged down into mediocrity by a lack of awareness for competing products in a fast evolving genre. I'm barely giving it a pass, like a 5 or 6 out of 10. I recommend to play this underdog game for anyone who likes bullet heaven, already had completed the big names in the genre, and is looking for something fresh to play, buys only at a discount and has mild expectations regarding completion lenght. I don't recommend the game to anyone else. You can now stop reading if you wanted the quick rundown, or dig into the upcoming wall of text to find out why. [u][b]A beast in gameplay enjoyment.[/b][/u] These devs truely managed to capture the picture perfect feeling of piloting a mech in space. It is so good, I'm struggeling to find the right words. The movement of your machine is not exactly snappy and direct, it's floaty, you are fighting the inertance of space with a jetpack on your back. But it is also predictable how you gonna fly, what a full stop will do, what angle you gonna drift around. In addition to that you can evade dash actively, the size of the dash bar depends on the machine you're flying. What's more is how smaller aircraft, space fighters etc behave as the classic bullet heaven creep simply flying towards your position in the middle of the screen, but enemy Armis/mech units actually go full on dogfight with you back and forth. It just feels so real. The dream of mecha anime fans come to life. I haven't gotten any 3rd person space game nail this feeling as perfectly as Steel Knight's before. [u][b]Barebones in every other aspect.[/b][/u] I just don't understand how a development team can deliver this level of enjoyment in raw gameplay, and then topple over their upcoming masterpiece by showing zero awareness for what the genre standards are and what their competitors do. This game has no: -Reroll or skip function. If you don't like your level up options there is nothing you can do other than picking poorly. -Indicators on the map for when a treasure chest appears. If you hit the special ship out of visibility range, you're not gonna find it. -Character stats within the run. You can not see how much damage, range extension, attack speed etc you exactly have. It's all guess work. -Post battle evaluation stats for each weapon. So you can not be sure how much DPS each thing you picked contributed and will not exactly learn from it. - Alternate game modes, such as endless, boss only, increasing waves survival, no hit challenge. There is only story mode as only option. These things are in every single bullet heaven I played so far. How can you just ignore this? Like... dude! [u][b]The interface...[/b][/u] I have several gripes with it. - The game has English text as an option, but the default is Japanese. However upon every restart it snaps back to Japanese. While you still got English selected. Then you press on another language and back onto English and it's fixed. Every single restart. Furthermore, the graphics option dropdown menus are not translated at all. You literally have to Google lense with your phone camera over the Kanji to see what your settings are if you can't read Japanese. This should be an easy fix. But nobody bothered. - You can restart your run while on pause in the game. But you can not restart your run after dying. If you died, instead of offering the option to go again with the same settings, you have to go through the main menu, select the mission, select the pilot, select the mech and confirm twice again. Why? - If you don't play windowed fullscreen, the game defaults back into 1920x1080 after restarting. Then the option to select 3840x2160 doesn't appear anymore because the dropdown menu is greyed out. Then you restart the game a second time and it magically re-appears. [u][b]The story.[/b][/u] I would describe it as servicable. It's not total dogwater, a very average story about a rebellion against the occupation of Earth, without any deep character building. Pretty much mobile game levels but without the visual novel part. I'd never expected to say this, but I feel like the game would have been better had it included a visual novel part. The way they are currently transmitting the story is mainly through dialogue during battle. However, since the voiceover is Japanese and the dialogue boxes pop up on the left and right end of your screen while you are busy fighting mobs and not get hit - you're missing a lot of what happened. A few cutscenes are in but they are mostly big things getting blown up, new enemy appears, flying to the mission objective and so on. [u][b]Mission design flaws.[/b][/u] There are two things that I want to point out here: - While the fight against enemy mechs is super cool, the fights against enemy capital ships is a huge letdown. They appear and you think ooooh snap, only to find out these ships are just moving background objects and the way to defeat them is to deplete their health gaunge without directly hitting, instead you keep on killing the same trash mobs as before to achieve that goal. The capital ship shoots lasers but they have no hitbox. -In later levels, way too often the game utilizes the apperance of invincible enemies while you get a countdown to survive. It just feels bad when you know you could delete them from the map, but you are not allowed to and they keep going after your HP bar. - The game loves the cliché "you won the stage, but you lost" kind of storytelling. It's just not a good way to involve the player. - There is not enough build variety, because there are not that many weapons to chose from. The passive skills are poorly balanced and so you end up picking the same ones most of the time if possible. [u][b]Content size.[/b][/u] It's not bad, a mid sized game. But again, the genre has a lot of games that offer absurd amount of stuff and Steel Knight's Armis can't compete there. - The story takes about 12 hours to complete including grinding a bit for harder stages - You can unlock 26 pilots, 44 mechs, and 9 NPCs. The pilots are just stat boosters with a different picture, battle voice and differently weighted attribute max amounts, but they do not offer any special skills. The mechs decide your starting weapons and the maximum weapon- and passive slots, so they are most important. The NPCs are pointless, you can only look at their picture with a short description, basically an encyclopedia entry but in character select - why? I don't know. - After you are done unlocking everything you can spend a lot more time farming to buy character stats upgrades. But you gonna repeat the story missions. The way it works is first you have to complete them once with a set pilot/mech combo, then you are free to engage it with anything you own. - Somehow the game has only five achievements. Usually in this genre they shower you with them so that's another odd decision when you lock out achievement hunters from the potential customer base. So yeah that's pretty much everything I had to expain about the game. If you continued following my thoughts until here, thank you for reading it all. And if this review helped you please consider giving it a thumbsup.