Recent reviews by TwistedBOLT

BIG BOOBA!
With that aside... Let's start with the cons:
* The base difficulty is laughable and there's no additional difficulties. Meaning you're stuck playing an easy game that keeps getting easier the more you invest in to upgrades.
* The combat feels clunky at times, especially when it comes to sub-weapon projectiles near scenery where a shelf that's behind you can delete projectiles you shoot in front of you.
* Apart from the boss upgrades that impactfully change your attacks most upgrades feel dull but this might be a direct result of the low difficulty.
* The upgrade pool is small enough that during a run you'll probably find anything you need resulting in runs feeling same-y. A trait of a great roguelike is the uniqueness of each run and that's not really something you feel in this game.
* Swapping characters requires you to start over. It just feels like an artificial way to inflate game time. The upgrades are already split between ones specifically for that character and others so why not just let me swap characters and keep the non-character-specific upgrades?
* The story overall is kinda just... there?

So with all that said, why a thumbs up? Because it looks great, the soundtrack rocks it's mechanically interesting and it's just 8 bucks. I really hope that the development on it continues.

Although the game is incredibly short the experience provided is worth its low asking price. The puzzles were very well constructed and offered an interesting and novel experiences.

apology for poor england

when were you when bots dies?

i was sat at home eating sandvich when Volvo ring

‘bot is kill’

‘yes’

One of the rare games I'd consider perfect. Any criticisms of it would just be nitpicks. If you're looking for a game that truly exudes the sense of exploration and discovery, this is the game for you. For the best experience go in blind as even the tiniest details can be massively detrimental so I won't be going in to any more details here.

Good job, community.

Game's near perfect and although I could spend time praising its creative bosses, great visual design, unique weapons and skills, all while reminiscing about C:SotN nostalgia I'd rather focus on the negatives.

Almost all criticism I can levy against the game are tied to two things: The in-game economy and the 100% completion. Both of these boil down to tiny drop chances for items, an exorbitant amount of gold and/or farming needed to craft everything (even with a maxed out build specifically for farming) and what the most optimal type of farming looks like.

If the luck stat greatly affected drops of items, shards and gold to the point that you'd never be stuck between two rooms for 10 minutes at the time just killing and respawning 1 dude the 100% completion rate would feel a lot better to achieve. Another solution would be giving some sort of combo system for killing unique enemies in different rooms exponentially rewarding the player with more item, shard and gold drops. Anything to prevent the mindless, single-room-farm.

I've needed about 20 hours to clear the game and get to the best ending and 20 more hours of mindlessly killing the same enemies (and statues) over and over again in order to get all achievements and although I got relatively close maxing most shards, I've given up on that goal as it's borderline masochistic.

Conclusion: Play the game for as long as it's fun but don't force yourself to go for the all-clear as it's just not rewarding enough to justify the endeavour.

It's short and sweet. There's frankly not much in terms of criticism I can offer. The game is well polished, runs smooth (apart for a few caves where the FPS dropped to 20ish) has an amazing soundtrack, is visually fantastic and tells an interesting story with overall great game mechanics.

It's neat. I'll do a proper review when I finish the game but for now this is just to appease the steam gods for the GOTY thing.

Overall the game's a solid turn based RPG. The art and music are great albeit the latter slowly got stale over my 50h run.

My weird run:

RPG's tend to be a genre where I try to experiment with unusual, funny builds rather than going for something that obviously works. In this game I decided to kill Hell itself with fisticuffs so I built around unarmed combat and quite a large chunk of my criticism stems from this decision as in retrospect I don't think the game was designed with someone actually playing this way, especially not on the hard difficulty.

The start of the game was great, every single step mattered and being forced to drink dirty water just to survive along with the oppressive atmosphere really hammered in the point of just how screwed I was, unfortunately this feeling doesn't really stick around for long as farming for resources becomes trivial rather quickly and always having food, water and a flint for a campfire becomes a non-issue.

So let's talk about the turn order and how it influences everything in an odd way. Instead of buffs/debuffs lasting for a specific time and turns then representing how much both combatants can do in the said amount of time the concept is sorta flipped on its head. For example, if the enemy heals 1% every turn, by increasing your initiative/speed and being able to act multiple times compared to your opponent you're inadvertently boosting said regenerative ability as the heal doesn't care whose turn it is. Furthermore if the enemy hits you 4 times in a row and the first attack inflicts poison you're losing a large chunk of your health to it before you can act. Another example is that if the enemy triggers an on-hit damage buff that lasts 4 turns in a 5-hit combo by the time you can use it it's already expired. Without reworking the entire turn system all this could be fixed by buffs and debuffs only ticking down on their appropriate turns. Enemies healing from regen only during their turn (increase value to compensate the overall healing) and buffs/debuffs only ticking down when appropriate.

The upside of having low damage and high speed is that almost every fight ended in a massive boost in blood drops which I later exploited by dropping pianos on all my problems via a maxed out rune spell.

The main issue with the build was the aforementioned regen which meant I was simply unable to kill a specific, buffed tree enemy forcing me to grind levels to the point that, once I could overcome its heal I was overpowered and the rest of the game was sorta mindlessly easy.


Pros:
* I cannot praise the monster art enough. The spider enemy is especially a delightfully screwed up creation and I adore it so, so much.
* Incredibly oppressive atmosphere.
* The magic system. Although I didn't use many of them in combat, the sheer variety and lots of utility spells probably make a magic build much more fun than what I played.
* Huge map with lots of neat secrets although all puzzles were on the easy side.

Cons:
* The turn order system has issues especially on quicker builds.
* Melee combat seems dry compared to spell combat.
* Bad balance when it comes to traits. 2% chance on hit for a short damage buff? Really?
* Low variety in environments. Either forest or dungeon.
* My hand hurts from all the movement you gotta do to cross the giant map, a quick-travel option or more shortcuts would be much appreciated especially considering there's no random encounters while just walking about.


Final thoughts: Just play a spell build and you'll have a fun time.

Because of games like this I'm not a fan of steam's binary rating system. I don't want to give this game a thumbs down because I want to encourage indie devs but on the other hand I don't want to give the game a thumbs up because of the sheer number of nitpicks it has going against it.

With that being said, Force of Nature 2 is a 3rd person, survival RPG in which you alternate between base building, crafting, farming, feeding animals and hoard killing combat. Most of the systems are rather basic and you'll be spending a lot of your time just re-doing the same things over and over again and although it's arguably calming it's equally part irritating.

Pros:
* The music is expertly done and it didn't get boring even after 120ish hours.
* Functional. I've not run in to any bugs or issues with performance.
* Satisfying at times. Completing any of the larger tasks feels alright.
* Potion crafting. Genuinely interesting and cute puzzle that rewards those who want to invest additional effort.

Cons:
* The game is quite frankly a slog to get through. Areas you explore are massive and your movement speed is honestly painful even with all the (non-temporary) movement speed buffs.
* The combat is very dry and the sheer amount of it is mind numbing. You pick your weapon of choice and click on enemies, casting 2 skills when off cooldown (crit and speed) while spamming HP and stamina items. Later you get access to magic but using it effectively further increases your grind as you now have to add mana potions to the pile of stuff you're constantly spending every time you go in to combat.
* The progression is entirely too linier to call this game an RPG. There's no real class system or creativity in what you use to progress. Just use whatever's currently the most effective.
* The ghosts don't do enough. If a lot of prep for combat could have been automated then it wouldn't have felt like such a slog. Why can't the ghost tend to animals? Plant and harvest crops? Harvest pearls? Craft items passively?
* The totem puzzle. The order of it being trial an error means about 2 hours of building teleporters and walking long distances. It should have been a small puzzle on a piece of paper that once solved can just be inputted once.
* The boss fights were mostly uninteresting. The game's clunky movement doesn't really allow for depth in these fights. Most of them boil down to "do you have currently best gear and a stack of healing items?".


Nitpicks and stuff that can easily be fixed:
* Base stamina regen and stamina regen items pre-potions need to be buffed. Usually in games like these they're not really a requirement for playing but rather there to allow you to be more aggressive with your skill usage. Here they are mandatory and something that you'll constantly be using.
* There's more tool-types than tool-slots, and more spells than spell-slots why? Two more slots of each could have saved a bunch of needless fiddling about.
* The AOE hammers are ungodly slow for little payoff. Increase their damage or speed or both.
* No endgame inventory item. In a game with magic there's no magic bag meaning you're never really done playing the inventory management game.
* The dodge roll should make you invulnerable and have a faster animation. Having a dedicated dodge roll button that's more of a hindrance than a boon is rough. Nothing feels worse than pressing your designated defensive key on time and still getting punished for it.
* Miserable 100% completion, mostly because of the 365 day achievement which required me to have my PC on for 5 days straight to get it after completing everything else.

Final thoughts:
If you're just looking to have something to do with your hands while watching TV shows and zoning out, there's far worse games than this one. But if you're looking for an engaging and trilling experience there's far better ones as well...