Recent reviews by Domarius

Unfortunately, this game suffers from what a lot of open world survival games suffer from; it's good for the initial phase of the game while you're getting your feet under you. There are some elements that work really well and get you interested in trying to survive and improve your equipment and learn about cooking and crafting. Let me say that the structure building is excellent, and the art style is immersive and there's many beautiful scenes that show just how good artwork than having the best quality graphics engine (this game was made in Unity).

Eventually the cracks start to show and the game begins to fall apart. The huge intimidating ogre is confused by a couple of logs that (he himself knocked down) forming a particular arrangement that he can't work out how to walk around - when he's tall enough to simply step over it. Regular enemies have the same issue - ponderously stopping and turning on the spot to navigate around a simple log on the ground, when they could easily jump over it. But the ogre not being able to step over them is the most egregious.

Then it becomes clear that they just increase the damage output and hitpoints of later enemies to make them "harder" because they can't design difficulty (or program good soluitions to things, as evidenced with the path finding issues above.) I can't deny that it's terrifying to have the deathsquitoes one-shot you and have to build up to being able to defeat them, but why a little green goblin thing (Fuling) presents a bigger threat than a larger swamp orc thing (Draugr) requires a suspension of disbelif that breaks you out of the world and has you thinking "Ok, I guess I just have to level up to withstand the hitpoints on this thing".

And finally, once the stakes are really high, the real failings start to show. Anything with a large attack radius (like an ogre swinging its log) will clip through any defensive walls you put up, clip through the actual walls of your home, and damage and destroy all the precious contents inside with out first destroying the outer walls. The damage just takes hitpoints off anything within range, making walls pointless, so you resort to using the games's cheap programming against it - just put up smaller stone walls to "distract" the ogres away from your base because they will target those first even though they could just walk right around them. With the final dominant strategy being to elevate the terrain to make an impassible slope that the enemies can neither destroy, or walk up, just ending the conflict right there.

Another cheap thing is the way "raids" just kind of "happen" at your base out of nowhere, spawning whatever the most difficult enemy you've encountered is. It would make sense to build a heavily defended base in the snowy area where the flying creatures could fire their ice shots at it, but it makes no sense for the same cold-based creatures to spawn around your cosy little Meadows base and just obliterate it. This doesn't make sense and just isn't fun.

And ultimately, there's no strong story reason to push ahead and defeat the bosses. You start getting the feeling "what is the point of all this?" since the only motivation to go visit the next boss and kill it is because it's next on the list. They kind of seem to be minding their own business until you summon them and start bothering them. And there's no story besides a bit of cryptic text that pops up in the morning sometimes after sleeping, saying things like "You recall drinking and laughing with your friends around a table" or something like that.

With no reason to push forwards, there's no reason to accrue all these mighty powers, once you can one-shot an ogre (which we managed to be able to do only a few bosses in) there's no push to complete the rest of the game because the only motivation was survival. Obviously the "raids" were a cheap answer to this, and it shows - it's just frustrating, because it just "happens" at any base, with no course of action to mitigate it, so it's just frustrating and annoying.

I'll change my review when they put more budget into designing the rest of the game instead of spending it on flashy anime trailers. I used to love this game in the beginning but I feel like it was all a facade. There's no game there after you get a handle on surviving.



EDIT:

For the people hating on someone for leaving a negative review after nearly 200 hours, I guarantee you'd also be hating on someone leaving a negative review after only 10 hours. There's no winning with people like you.

I hate to leave a bad review but I'm spending time on my phone for the 5th night in a row while my partner does base management, because as soon as we get back to base, I can't help in any way.

Co-op is only half implemented. Half the game is combat, half the game is base management. The combat is great! But as soon as we get back to base I may as well disconnect the controller and go make a tea or get on the internet because it turns back into a single player game.

While it's possible to help in a minor way by cleaing up mess and harvesting plants, 90% of the base activity is done in single player menus that lock up interaction to whichever player opened the menu, so if you try to help you're constantly getting interrupted by the other player opening menus.

The frustrating thing is it's clear to see this is just an oversight, not a necessity, since while the menu is open, there's so much screen real estate free to have the other half of the screen still active for the other player to keep helping.

One of my favourite co-op games of all time is multiplayer single base mode in Age of Empires - base management is super optimised since you can have each player focusing on specific tasks making the most efficient base ever. This game could be like that, one player cleaning mess, the other player blessing followers etc. I would have loved for this game to make that possible.

Leaving a negative review on the chance this gets attention. I would love to change the review to positive if this is ever addressed.

Very underwhelming. It started off promising, and we did have fun along the way, but the characters don't develop and the ending doesn't seem to know what it's trying to say. The big "turning point" in their attitude just seems to happen during what was yet another visually spectacular, but emotionally meaningless task.

Yes - in practical terms, they're "helping each other with their passions", but this is functional in nature only - that only plays out in the gameplay. Their actual attitudes towards each other don't change. There's one moment during the snow sequence where they started to seem more intimate, but it turns out nothing really changed. From then on, their attitudes were so consistent in that it was a surprise that they started to act all lovey dovey to each other while floating around right before the end of the game.

And boy, does the game heavily lean towards trying to present May as the one in the right, and Cody as the bumbling fool - but in the process, May just comes off as patronising and heartless. Was it intentional? Hard to say, since it's never really called out in the game, only that she "works too much", whereas Cody is called out for being forgetful and not pulling his weight. They really didn't want to give her any flaws, or at least address them openly.

Take these examples, from the end section of the game which is most fresh in my mind - Right in the final music sequence, which takes place after the snow sequence where they seemed to be making progress, he says "I'm making a song!" and she says "Yeah - a song made by a lump of clay" (tone is
everything, it was like "Give it up Cody" as opposed to playful banter). And when he's already shielding her and my partner (as May) is running through, she needlessly calls out "Use your shield Cody!" My partner had to pause the game because she was in a fit of laughter at that point.

She said that summed up Cody and May's relationship perfectly - her backseat driving, never giving him a break, and most importantly - if the gender roles were flipped in this story, it would be outrageous, no one would have the husband constantly verbally beating down the wife the way it plays out in this story.

I think they never took a step back and looked at how all the individual moments and small comments in the dialogue come across as a whole.

And the ending, not much to spoil because there was no big revelation, the therapist book seemed to constantly be hinting at some big revelation that will happen, and nothing happens. They kiss for some reason, and then the focus quickly switches to the daughter. That's great, but nothing about their relationship had been resolved and they hadn't developed as people. It really feels like they will break up again not long into the future.

It's a very art heavy game - it's a visually beautiful game that presents itself as a story based game with a heavy focus on the relationship underpinning the gameplay - but it doesn't. The gameplay is good and the visuals are good, but the story and characters don't develop the whole time, which is crazy since the game is so darn long - but doesn't present many actual opportunities for them to learn something together or about each other - they literally just play different games together.

It sets up this relationship story and leaves you feeling empty - it really could've done with much more focus on having good writers, and consultation with actual marriage therapists to make a meaningful story with something in it for all couples to take away.

Don't buy if you expect to use 8 players, and more than 4 of your gamepads are Microsoft gamepads. This version suffers from the "4 microsoft gamepad limit" whereas Knight Squad 1 does not. KS2 is a step backwards from KS1 in terms of gamepad compatability. So KS2 won't be being played in our upcoming game night. Sticking with KS1.

I really hate to leave a negative review on such a good game. But this is for the people like myself who might be buying purely for the local multiplayer.

The local multiplayer interface - I was able to "get by" but my partner found it unplayable frustrating and I don't disagree with her. It's a bittersweet thing seeing local multiplayer in this game. For people who like to have visitors over to play games in the same room together, you always hope to see local multiplayer in a game. And this kind of game is the kind you might wonder aloud "Man, imagine if this game had local multiplayer!" and it would be a fantasy if it did.

And it seems the developers thought so as well, and they clearly have put a lot of work into trying to shoe-horn their obviously "desktop" designed experience into a local multiplayer, controller based experience. But you will be trying to navigate multiple "pop up" windows using your gamepad, which are just opposing design schemes. And these very convoluted popup windows will also be trying to cram themselves into your split screen windows. Some windows just don't care - they overlay both your split screens even though only one of you is supposed to be reading it. Also they've been designed with a really small font in mind - fine for reading on a monitor, but not on a TV. You can scale up the font in the options, but then the interface clearly hasn't been designed to support it, with a lot of text clipping out and even just overwriting other text so it's unreadable.

It's not just the popup windows either - there are some really odd control choices even for the things that are mapped directly to the gamepad buttons. The A button does most things, but B has (seemingly at random) been assigned to "climb through window" which is the thing you're likely to want to do most. So what keeps happening? I need help in a room, my partner comes to save me, presses the "action button" instinctively to climb through, and just shuts the window on me! Climbing through a window should just naturally happen when you walk against it using the analogue stick. And for some reason they DO do this when you want to leap over a fence! Windows are entirely different for some reason!

They seem to have bit off more than they can chew. And I know, it says "Early Access Game", but come on, the game literally released a WHOLE DECADE ago as of 2023! Kids have been born and are now in highschool since this game got released! The game is out, people are buying it, and this review is for those people looking for a local multiplayer experience.

Why are the characters locked under existing character slots?? So if you choose the eggplant, no one can play as the bubble tea, for no reason??

Or if someone chooses the banana, no one can play as the fries?? Etc. Etc.

This is insane, why add this content and then lock it away in this weird way?

Was it too much of a technical hurdle to give the new characters their own extra row of icons underneath the existing ones?

I'm not sure how to best enjoy this game. Went looking for a forum, Discord, even a Reddit group, and couldn't find anywhere to chat to others about this game. So I decided to shout into the void about this game, in the form of a review.

For context: This style of game is not new to me. I'm a big fan of "party" style local multiplayer games, and I have a lot of fun introducing new friends to Duck Game, Towerfall Ascension, etc. etc.

Just played this over xmas with some family and ... I think we had fun? It was certainly chaotic. Much of the first rounds was just trying to work out what the heck just happened and who "won" and why.

Right off the bat - the screen is chock full of stuff as soon as people start attacking. It can be very hard to see who's shooting at who and what to dodge. And then within seconds, the powerups "happen" and you have no chance of making sense of anything. The entire screen fills with flashing effects like laser blasts, particles, lightning strikes, and before you know it, 1 or more people are dead and the round is over.

We played a decent number of rounds (I would say somewhere between 10 and 20?) trying to work out the game and give it it's best shot. We were laughing and making alarmed noises, probably not for the right reasons - mostly just reacting to the sheer chaos and confusion and sudden end to each round.

In the end, the best tactic we came up with was trying to work out where the nearest person was, and charge towards them mashing the fire button hoping for the best. Actually we stopped trying to play and switched to another game, because we just couldn't make sense of it.

Possibly this is a game which requires a decent amount of skill to start enjoying, and the barrier of entry is kind of high. Certainly, for the reasons I described, it's not very clear what's going on or how to play the game effectively by jumping into it and trying to play. And yet I can't find any guides or anything online.

Started out this review with the "YES" option selected, then switched it to a "NO" when I got to the part where I realised we gave up on the game and switched to something that actually made sense. Until then, we were almost having fun. It's certainly frantic, and there's a lot to do.

To the developers; please tone down the size of the effects, and I get you want to keep it "manic" but slow down the speed of the projectiles, the size of the powerup abilities, etc. etc. just enough to make it clearer what's going on and introduce a degree of skill into the randomness.

I get the impression the devs have something good on their hands, but tweaked everything up to 11 as they got better and better at their own game. This needs more public testing!

TLDR; Underwhelming, but grab it on sale if you love co-op and artsy games, it has its moments, and the co-op grappling / swinging mechanics are awesome.

Completed the game with my partner. I feel like critiquing hard about what's wrong first, because what's right is so good and really feels squandered.

The devs put a message in the game that they are proud that the game was designed by committee. It really shows - in a bad way. The art style, story, and gameplay all get you hooked - and there are some great moments for all 3, but it remains directionless and there is no big climax, either for the gameplay or story.

Storywise, you're left never feeling sure what the concurrent storylines were all about, nothing is explained, some "things" are introduced at the end, and left us with the impression that it was mostly all for show and was never really going anywhere in the first place, (much like the "Lost" series).

Gameplaywise, it's extremely unique and satisfying, but never really gets challenging, except for the bonus levels, which spike up in difficulty and frustration so hard, with long stretches of difficulty and no checkpoints. Somewhere between those two extremes I think there's a lot of fun to be had.
And the flow of the gameplay; it peaks in the middle with a really exciting sequence, and then starts to wind down again, and finishes very weakly. After what they showed us in the middle, it felt unfinished - no big challenge, no climax, no "boss fight" that ties into the concurrent story, just ends on an easy level like any of the other levels...

It's this design by committee that leaves things feeling like a bunch of features rattled up in a can and poured out in a sequence that doesn't have any high level flow directing you through an experience, an adventure. it's clear there's no consistent high level vision over how the player moves through the experience.

Note to the developers:Hierarchies have a purpose, they're not some big bad evil thing to be avoided. They exist in nature for a reason; they're a very good filtering process. In any creative effort, you need one or a few people with a consistent high level vision to steer the ship while everyone else is focused on their respective tasks, doing a great job on the details, but unable to see the big picture clearly. Likewise, the people at the helm can see the big picture because their minds are uncluttered by the details. The human brain can only focus on so much at once. This is just how it is. It's natural, and useful. Together we create big, detailed experiences for people to lose themselves in.


Extremely beautiful, with a photorealistic look at times. Even that loading screen which is just the dawn sky reflected in a rippling lake, is mesmerising. The cutscenes set the bar a bit high with how soft the wollen characters look, which is a little disappointing when the actual gameplay graphics kick in, nevertheless, the woolen string physics look amazing and very believable. The scenery is amazing to stare at and some times you want to move through slowly and admire it, even though the platforming sequences seem to encourage some quick swinging moves, though this doesn't happen too often.

The "yarnies" story seems non-existant, and the cinematic for them at the end really comes out of nowhere, but watching the adventure the 2 kids are going through, playing out in the background scenery of the levels as you play the game itself, is a really cool idea. Sometimes the gameplay paralells the kids adventure in a way, which really makes you feel it's all building up to something. Shame it never seems to tie together (lol) in a meaninful way by the end. It just leaves you hanging by a thread (sorry, this is too easy...).

Seriously that string physics gameplay where you have to combine grappling, swinging, and "belaying" each other, rock climbing style, so that one holds while the other swings, is so damn cool. We had some really satisfying moments, some part of the gameplay, some seemingly emergent because of the way these physics features fluidly combine together. You feel like a bad-ass, or Spider-Man, in some sequences, flipping through the air between grappling points in sequence, to land safely with the grace of an expert acrobat. There is nothing like this in any other game I've played.

There are some "chase" sequences which are genuinely exciting and entertaining, and had us laughing out loud at the different ways we were dying and trying to keep ahead. Again, as mentioned, it's a shame they saved nothing like this for the end of the game. It really ends on a low after some of the exciting moments in the middle.

See the TLDR at the top. Hop you enjoy it. Maybe the devs will make a 3rd co-op game in the series, and designate a vision holder for the experience this time.

PLEASE please please do something with this game. I would pay good money to see this "SEGA Reborn series". It is the perfect idea who's value probably wasn't appreciated by the right people at the time. My hopes are that this is a popularity test and the SEGA Reborn hub world idea is resurrected.

Top marks for hardware support and interface - my obscure gamepad worked fine and was instantly detected and worked without changing any settings. I was able to navigate the ingame menu, figure out where everything is, read emails, get the character to do everything, jump, attack, climb, etc. Running on Linux via SteamPlay, no issues. Ran full screen, looked great.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love the Castlevania series. There are purposefully restrictive controls that the gameplay is built around. But then there are just bad controls and bad readability. You can tell the difference immediately. One communicates its intent through the level design, the other just seems poorly thought out and is not fun.

Why can't I jump off ladders? Why can't I climb ladders from mid air, why do I have to be standing on the ground? One example, right at the start, 2 screens to the left you have to climb a long ladder up, and there is a bird that may or may not swoop you, and you litererally have no course of action other than to cross your fingers and hope it doesn't happen before you reach the top. It's completely random, it's not based on line of sight or timing. If it hits you, you go tumbling all the way off the screen and have to try again. There is no skill here, just random torture. On top of that, there's no air control. Now, in a well designed game this might be a welcome challenge, but here it just seems to ensure you have absolutely zero choice in the matter.

What's with the randomly solid / not solid parts of the background? In every platform game preceeding this, a faded area of rocks/ground with lightly coloured grass at the top means you can jump up through it and land on top. Not here - for no good reason the grass is solid and you hit your head on it. This is nonsensical enough to try and navigate, but also some of the sides of the rock areas are randomly solid walls, and you can't walk through them! But sometimes you can! Look at any screen - tell me which ones you can walk across from one side to the other and which ones you can't - it's impossible without trying! Navigating is a frustrating guessing game.

And all this within the first few screens. I was pushing myself to enjoy the game but I realised there are much more enjoyable ways to play this kind of game. Check out "Thy Sword" for a pleasurable implementation of restrictive controls that you can get skilled at.