Approved
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2009
- Messages
- 217
So I set some time to play this because it seemed like one of those games where a lot of grinding has to be done to get anywhere and I see that I was right. While at first I thought it was a game that may have been a poorly made rpg harkening back to the dark ages of reign of chaos map making, I started to find some odd gems. The marine giving me a tip to drop serpent wards on the walls forced me to rethink the entire game. For a split moment, the game had an element of skill and strategy. You had to think about what creeps were in the room, target down the ranged units with your wards, and then kite the rest. But then things began to descend rather quickly. The game stopped rewarding clever play and instead incentivized grinding a room, leaving, and then coming back to grind again. This continued in a typical power creep fashion until your character was just attacking super fast and dealing lots of damage, everything just became auto attacking. This to me was a major disappointment, for a few minutes the game was absolutely intriguing, but then it gets pushed to the side.
After resigning myself to the grind as the game had too, I started playing it as such. After a few tomes my character had started to become fairly powerful. Yet this too was swept away the moment I leveled up, as I discovered that my Hero had been replaced with another from a higher tier with significantly lower stats due to the lack of tome bonuses. Simply replacing or moving over a new hero will not transfer stat bonuses granted from tomes, so now I was significantly de-powered and had to grind over again. There are simple ways around this, like storing an integer variable in accordance to the type of tome being picked up by the hero, and adding that integer to the new tier of hero upon transition. The fact that this was not added was rather confusing. The hero replacement woes did not stop there, the ability that had originally intrigued me to its versatility had been replaced by an aoe armor reduction. The game had descended into even more grinding with even less strategy, there was only the consideration of when to leave the room, and no sense of kiting. This was punctuated by the fact that there was only one room to clear before i could level up high enough to use a key, which replaced my hero again rendering tomes once again useless.
The game concluded with a boss battle that invoked the feeling of grinding through numerous levels and clicking the tome button every couple of minutes. It was a dps race involving divine shield, bash, and respawning regenerating aura machines.
My final feeling on this game is that I like the feeling I had when I was tier 1 and tactically clearing rooms with my abilities and kiting, it reminded me a bit of dark souls. If it were not for that feeling, I would not have continued playing the game personally. But this can be changed, adding variety to the abilities that can be used and a rescaling of enemies may yield interesting and fun results. It felt to me as though there was this really cool balance and challenge that was balanced and intriguing at the beginning but then swiftly thrown out the window.
This aside, here are a number of real issues that go beyond simple preference:
-The hero will often have skill points with nothing to spend those skill points on, early on this occurs at level 4, 7, and 16.
-The terrain has no variation and no real care put into it, there are boxed rooms and boxed hallways. At some point you go outside to a boxed woods.
-Power Ups do not transfer from hero tier to hero tier, this may be fixed using integer variables, check out Ralle's simple tutorial: Variables
-LEAKS! This is important if you are going to design this game to go the grinding route, EVERY time a unit is created in one of your rooms you are leaking the same location a number of times, check out Ralle's explanation of this: Things That Leak
-Some abilities are missing passive buttons that appear on the hero like lifesteal, having a passive button there to remind the player they have that ability is helpful.
-There is only ever one way to go and one room to clear, some variety on choice of direction would expand this games horizons significantly and actually make the dog useful later in the game.
There was a glimmer of real honest fun in there when I was using serpent ward, finding niche hints from npcs, and using my head for something other than smashing the keyboard. If you want to go the grindy direction that is on you and I respect that, but I will be watching for future updates with real interest on where it will go, and I will change my rating according to what I find in future updates.
After resigning myself to the grind as the game had too, I started playing it as such. After a few tomes my character had started to become fairly powerful. Yet this too was swept away the moment I leveled up, as I discovered that my Hero had been replaced with another from a higher tier with significantly lower stats due to the lack of tome bonuses. Simply replacing or moving over a new hero will not transfer stat bonuses granted from tomes, so now I was significantly de-powered and had to grind over again. There are simple ways around this, like storing an integer variable in accordance to the type of tome being picked up by the hero, and adding that integer to the new tier of hero upon transition. The fact that this was not added was rather confusing. The hero replacement woes did not stop there, the ability that had originally intrigued me to its versatility had been replaced by an aoe armor reduction. The game had descended into even more grinding with even less strategy, there was only the consideration of when to leave the room, and no sense of kiting. This was punctuated by the fact that there was only one room to clear before i could level up high enough to use a key, which replaced my hero again rendering tomes once again useless.
The game concluded with a boss battle that invoked the feeling of grinding through numerous levels and clicking the tome button every couple of minutes. It was a dps race involving divine shield, bash, and respawning regenerating aura machines.
My final feeling on this game is that I like the feeling I had when I was tier 1 and tactically clearing rooms with my abilities and kiting, it reminded me a bit of dark souls. If it were not for that feeling, I would not have continued playing the game personally. But this can be changed, adding variety to the abilities that can be used and a rescaling of enemies may yield interesting and fun results. It felt to me as though there was this really cool balance and challenge that was balanced and intriguing at the beginning but then swiftly thrown out the window.
This aside, here are a number of real issues that go beyond simple preference:
-The hero will often have skill points with nothing to spend those skill points on, early on this occurs at level 4, 7, and 16.
-The terrain has no variation and no real care put into it, there are boxed rooms and boxed hallways. At some point you go outside to a boxed woods.
-Power Ups do not transfer from hero tier to hero tier, this may be fixed using integer variables, check out Ralle's simple tutorial: Variables
-LEAKS! This is important if you are going to design this game to go the grinding route, EVERY time a unit is created in one of your rooms you are leaking the same location a number of times, check out Ralle's explanation of this: Things That Leak
-Some abilities are missing passive buttons that appear on the hero like lifesteal, having a passive button there to remind the player they have that ability is helpful.
-There is only ever one way to go and one room to clear, some variety on choice of direction would expand this games horizons significantly and actually make the dog useful later in the game.
There was a glimmer of real honest fun in there when I was using serpent ward, finding niche hints from npcs, and using my head for something other than smashing the keyboard. If you want to go the grindy direction that is on you and I respect that, but I will be watching for future updates with real interest on where it will go, and I will change my rating according to what I find in future updates.
