Wheel of Fate

This game is a mess - pure and simple. It has some neat ideas, but as I've said before and will say again: having ideas, no matter how good they are, do not automatically make a game good if they're poorly implemented. Unfortunately, this is [i[very[/i] much the case here. First off, I will admit that the premise is interesting - you get branded an Avatar of Fate after a mishap while hunting down cultists who laid waste to your village. What this brings is an ever-shifting dungeon that gets different modifiers applied to it... if you can even [i]get[/i] back to said dungeon after your first outing. You see, instead of letting you explore this dungeon, it instead throws a whole bunch of busy-work at you to set you up for the other major - or what I would assume would be a major - part of this game: town management. The cult that you're hunting is dead-set on destroying the town that is nearby this dungeon... for, I dunno, reasons? It doesn't really make sense especially since it's the main character that they're after and not so much the town. Regardless, it's up to the player to manage defenses, take care of requests and improve the town. While this is all neat, it's handled in an awkward way - and the one defense mission I got to participate in bugged out on me and didn't allow me to complete it, so... yeah. Stonewalled there. All this wouldn't be such a bad idea if the combat wasn't tedious. It essentially uses an ATB system similar to that of SNES era Final Fantasy games (although the way turn order is shown is more akin to Grandia's IP system, but without any of the neat things that that game brought along with it). However, the enemies are so much faster than your party and will continually pelt your party with quick attacks while you're sitting for longer attacks to be cast. What this means is that combat takes two to three times longer than it really should, and considering the amount of combat I faced in the 2 or so hours I played, it starts to add up. Plus it doesn't help that some abilities are [i]drastically[/i] overpowered, such as the cleric's Clarion Call spell, which had no issue wiping entire groups of enemies in one go. Plus, every action outside of using items has a timed button prompt associated with it, which isn't a bad idea at all, but it's implemented without the grace that Square brought to such a system in Super Mario RPG. And most abilities require multiple timed button presses to do any sort of real damage, so add that to the "things that cause combat to drag out far too long" pile. Plus almost every single combat gave me 50 experience points. Trash pack battle with 2 enemies? 50 EXP. Midboss battle with 4 enemies? 50 EXP. Actual boss battle? 50 EXP. It definitely deflated me when I saw a longer boss battle reward me with [i]less[/i] experience than I got from an earlier midboss fight. A lot of the areas I encountered outside of town were [i]far[/i] too large - and it didn't help that they all hung over a black, endless void, which made things feel far less immersive. I mean, I get it, it's an indie game that probably didn't have a large budget. But at least try to nail out some of the jank, especially since this spent time in EA before it hit its full release. Honestly, I don't mind some jank, but this... this was all too much. It's rather unfortunate that this game only got 1 post-launch patch 2 days after it went 1.0 (or 1.4.0 in this game's case), as with some tweaking and bug squashing, this could have been a good game, since I actually did want to see what the whole shifting dungeon situation was. But between the bugs, the overly large areas and the tedious busy-work before the game lets you get to the good stuff, it's a miss, a big miss.