Recent reviews by Amethyst

This game is definitely over-hated for what it is. It's a solid game for the most part, but of course, it's not perfect.

While the premise itself is good, backed up with some rather good music and such, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the stage design and the difficulty curve.

The former starts off well enough, but starts to slip in the second half of the game, straight to unpolished/unfair territory towards the end, which leads to my secondary complaint about the game's difficulty curve.

It starts off slow enough, but by the time you get to around Stage 15-20 or so, it starts to speed up rather quickly, coincidentally enough, with the drop off in stage design quality.

Combine slipping stage design quality veering towards unfair territory, with difficulty getting out of hand and also veering towards unfair territory, and you get a painful end game, capped off by one of the harder bosses in general I've ever fought against, let alone one of the harder FINAL bosses.

Do I like this game even in spite of all that? Yes.

Does it deserve all of the hate it got? Not entirely.

Did the game need a lot more polishing? Definitely.

I wish I could put a neutral rating on this, but I'm going to begrudingly give it a recommended, since they're at least in the process of fixing what I'm about to mention in the Cons section.

Pros:
+ Pretty cool concept of incrementally building a tower to take on a wide range of enemies
+ Progression feels like you're actually getting somewhere in parts
+ Microtransactions aren't needed to make it to the end of the game

Cons:
- The difficulty curve ramps up stupidly quickly, with major spikes around the mid-game and the late/end-game
- Most things aren't easily automatable, which for a semi-idle game is painful when you spend most of your time in tower testing mode
- Easily prone to extremely long waiting times when you have to wait over a day, up to the game's cap of a WEEK to turn idle progress into actual active progress, which gets worse the further you go.

Allegedly they're working on adding more tiers up to Tier 20, which hopefully should alleviate the progression woes, but I'll stick to cautious optimism for now.

If the game could have an easier curve to deal with, and rewarded/gave you more options for automation so you can focus more on tower testing instead of micro-management, I would give this my full recommendation.

For now, it's just barely a recommendation at worst. Maybe I'll edit/redo my review later if things improve, but this is my opinion as of right now.

I played this a LOT on the PS4, so don't mind my playtime, but this game is pretty solid all-around, even on the PC.

The whole team element is rather nice, and there is a bit of extra content in grand prix mode and time trial if you're into that, once you covered just about everything in the main adventure mode.

TSR walked so Crossworlds, it's successor, could run. And both are good games.

In either case, I do recommend this game, especially if you can pick it up during a cheeky sale. But even at full price I can still recommend it easily.

I gave this game the benefit of the doubt, even wishlisted it, but it fell short of expectations.

As others have said, this is less of a management game, and more of the same mobile gacha lottery madness.

At least in other games like Umamusume, you get to manage the player(s) better without having to rely on so many crazy RNG-driven mechanics or microtransaction hell.

This game doesn't even have that. It's just "click button, get result, click button, get another result, click button" etc.

And even if you can grow a team, only the "Prime Players" mean anything. The rest might as well be training plyons borrowed from the training grounds, because literally everyone else doesn't matter if they're not from the gacha.

The most baffling thing for me is that when I tried using the word "Phoenix", it said it was prohibited, despite it being a normal word to use, and not anything offensive. Like... why? Just why?

In any case, I strongly do not recommend this. I also strongly don't recommend going to FM26 either, because you'd get screwed just as bad. Which is fitting since this game was allegedly powered by Football Manager. Go figure.

This game made me think. Like... legitimately think.

This is one of the deepest, most philosophical games I've ever played. And it only takes less than 90 minutes to play.

Pick this up. Play it. And let your mind just... think.

Highly recommended, without question.

Doesn't even work. I tried to edit a nation, and it basically soft locked my game.

When even the IGE doesn't work, that's damning. Even more damning that you're charging $9 for a DLC that doesn't even work.

Like I said in my main game review. Shame on you, Sports Interactive.

FM25 died for this. And for what?

A game that is a sharp downgrade to the older FM's? Really?

And yet I'm the dumb stupid idiot who put down $60 hoping the franchise would recover from the FM25 debacle.

Nope. It got worse.

Shame on you, Sports Interactive.

I played this during the Open Network Test (ONT), and saw a lot of potential in the game.

Come the time of the Advanced Access and today, and holy hell was I right about the massive gobs of potential.

This game perfectly captures the raw essence of kart racing while also providing incentives to playing as other characters with the Rival System.

On top of that, the game just runs so, so smoothly, able to consistently hang at 60 FPS like a champ, even when things get crazy out on the track, both online and offline.

SEGA learnt their lesson after the rather mediocre Team Sonic Racing, and it shows big time. And I mean BIG time.

I highly recommend this, especially if you want to see SEGA do what Nintendon't in 2025.

I tried this game during it's demo period a while back before it released in 2023. At the time it looked like a charming, minimalistic golf game.

Expectations wound up being kinda ruined when the game came out and I got to play it for real. Simply put, it just didn't sit right with me.

It just doesn't scratch that itch that I was expecting, plus the fact that the game was harder than it was advertised, making it more of a slog.

Add in the fact that you can't really upgrade your stats without other aspects of your game getting worse... for some reason... and you have yourself a game that is basically begging you to suffer.

What a shame.

Got introduced to this game by friends.

Got invested into silly horse girls.

Got rewarded handsomely by good RNG.

Is it a gacha game? Yes.

Does it do it's job as a game outside of the gacha elements? Also yes.

I never thought a racing game about silly horse girls would be a good F2P option for me.

I stand corrected. Pick the game up and enjoy the silly horse girls and their dreams to be #1!