The Sealed Ampoule

Игра сразу же встречает уродливой графикой. Причём в режиме "упрощённая" умудряется быть _ещё_ страшнее. Ну, не беда, думаю, прорвусь, это ж рогалик. Ага, рогалик. С примитивным лабиринтом и оригинальной фичей "лабиринт виден сразу, а все активные объекты - только на миникарте". Впрочем, ерунда, потому что прокачка "схлопывает" этажи, в пределе, до квадрата 10х10 клеток. Хотя на самом деле это не предел - предел, в полной прокачке, слепляет этажи вместе, убирая монстров, зато добавляя лут. Да, кстати, лут. Это рандомные предметы, которые нужны только, чтобы прокачать этажи и иногда героиню. А монстры крутеют от этажа к этажу, поэтому нормальный геймплей - "дойти до максимального, пока ещё живой, и свалить нафиг". Впрочем, учитывая мизерное количество вариаций монстров, нормальным этот геймплей я бы не назвал. Ах, да, там ещё и карта не крутится. Как камеру повесили, так и живи. В общем, будь это "нормальным" плоским рогаликом с видом сверху и условной графикой, на coffee-break игру бы потянуло. Особенно на телефоне. А так - нет, нет, и ещё раз нет, спасибо, лучше не надо.

[h1]Mindless and repetitive grinding[/h1] [h1]6.5/10[/h1] It does exactly what it says on the tin—[b] the entire experience is just mindless grinding[/b] like clicker-style games. [b] And it not only gets repetitive after some hours, but also has the audacity to increase the grind as it loses its freshness[/b]; clearing the first 50 floors doesn’t take nearly as long as the journey from 51 to 100. [b]As for the combat[/b], in the early game there is some sense of strategy and excitement, as the difficulty curve is well-paced, making you slowly adapt to what the game throws at you and making you change your inventory priorities as you go deeper into the dungeon. [b]But once the game is done introducing stuff, the combat starts to lean toward how much damage you can tank[/b]. Progression becomes just about enemies hitting harder to give you a goal to grind toward. Status effects recovery and healing items may still be useful in specific situations, but as enemies that inflict status effects become more common, you will end up getting hit by them so often that wasting an item slot with a recovery items is not worth it; you also get passive skills to mitigate them, which just encourages more grinding. And tanking damage becomes your only real option as situations where you have enemies lined up waiting to attack you, or where the game spawns you surrounded by enemies that hit hard and stack 2–3 status effects on you, become more common - using healing items may just leave you in the very same situation after every enemy take their turns to attack, and they can also inflict the same status effects again. And it’s not a matter of getting lucky or avoiding those situations to progress the story—[b]the game expects you to grind enough to brute force[/b], since boss fights are mindless and beating them relies solely on how much you’ve grinded. [b]The dungeon crawling itself doesn’t change at all in the 22–25 hours that it takes to beat the base campaign[/b], having the same environments and layouts from the first hour for the entire game. [b]Even the agriculturalization mechanic becomes less and less useful and exciting[/b], until it turns into something that you don’t really pay attention to. Overall, it doesn’t make the game more fun—it just tries to give you dopamine, and eventually fails at that, since the things you really want are usually on floors you can’t agriculturalize yet because the mechanic is tied to story progression, so you will end up just manually grinding higher floors. [b]Hoarding items in your room also doesn’t feel rewarding[/b], since most of them eventually become useless. And the two that are useful require a lot of grinding to actually be effective, because your HP and MP increase significantly as you progress. [b]The storytelling and plot are pretty minimalist[/b] and the true ending is locked behind an incredibly grinding post game; [b]it’s not worth playing solely for the story honestly[/b]. [b]As for the visuals and soundtrack[/b], you already experienced the best the game had to offer by taking a look at the store page; [b]the game doesn’t offer variety in any of its aspects.[/b] [b]The game also lacks more graphical settings[/b] other than full-screen mode and choosing between either high or low settings, it's missing things such as resolution options; I ended up stuck with a lower resolution for my entire playthrough.