Recent reviews by TheDarkRoastGrind

It was a great run, Guardians.
We all did the best we could, and it achieved us victory, and peace, but at what cost?

Fly high, friends.

It's simple.

Gameplay- 3/10

Goods-
+Nice surroundings, good exploration, decent music.
+Smooth gameplay, even if the ai for mobs cause them to run around you in circles doing no damage.
+Vast Variety of lands and landmarks.

Bads-
--Running around for hours, hoping to find 1 star mobs to kill and get coins from so you can go back, not be able to buy anything useful, then run around again for a few hours.
--No beginner tutorial to help any new players along.
--No potential quest markers. You have to walk around and talk to every villager to find out where quests are.
--Even when you DO get a quest, you'll be lucky if its a 1 or 2 star. For the most part, if it's 3 star and up, you're dead in the beginning and won't be able to complete the quest.
--Removed skill tree and leveling. (Why in the HELL did anyone think this was a good idea?)
--Economy is imbalanced asf.
--Not worth playing solo at all.

There are WAY more bad things I can talk about it, but honestly, I'm starting to feel pretty bad for the developer. He's one man and his wife alone.

Some things that can be improved-
++Add a tutorial for new players. A lot of us "Veterans" know what to expect already.
++Optional hovering icons for quests, or a quest board in the town/tavern.
++Smooth scaling for beginning areas, or just scaled difficulty mobs and quests.
++Return the leveling system and skill try, by gods name. That was the best part.


Cube world has become a train wreck. I'm not sure what happened with the developer, and the route he choose, but it wasn't the correct one in the least bit. Yes, it's his game, but think of it this way-

Your followers have literally stayed with you day to day, waiting for this game to update and be released. Why?
Because they absolutely LOVED the way the game was. It was exciting to play with excellent progression and fun things to do. I have no clue what the thought process behind removing the most fun things out of the game was, but it was the wrong call.

Dev, you're getting a lot of flack for this, and it sucks, but you made a mistake that needs to be remedied pretty quickly.

Between the constant grind fighting the exact same enemies OVER AND OVER AGAIN, And the 1% drop chance, this game is absolutely not worth the time. Not even the 6 hours I put into it were worth it.

I've been with KOG for a while over 2 of their games, Grand Chase as well as Elsword (Well known for it's extremely heavy cash-grab tendencies) And I've never been so pushed away from one of their games in my life.

Quick pros-
It's "Decent" when it comes to graphics.
Combat system isn't actually unbearable.
Bosses are some-what well designed
The break/slay system is fairly decent.
-Can't really think of any more pros-

Cons (hold on to your seats, this is about to be large-
-The game is a massive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cash grab (As is the case will all their games)
-In order to actually get ANYWHERE, you have to grind the same dungeons OVER AND OVER, seeing the same damn bosses
again and again.
-HEAVILY PvP based.
-Extremely unbalanced PVP.
-Gear has a literal 1% chance to drop
-Upgrading ♥♥♥♥ is expensive.
-Grinding for the money to get ♥♥♥♥ is also expensive, sometimes taking upwards of 2-3 hours just to upgrade once at lower
gear level.
-Boss are inconsistent, and I'm not talking about parties. I'll play with the same person the entire time, but the same hard-mode boss that we just dumpstered in under 10 minutes will absolutely 1-shot us in the same hard-mode dungeon at a later time.
-In order to even TRY to get any resources boxes, you need a MINIMUM of 6k money (Around 60 dungeons, or 600 minutes of gameplay). To get larger boxes, its around either 12k, or 18k. Double, or triple the time necessary.
-While combat seems smooth, thanks to KOG'S money grabbing ass, the dodging and moving are extremely dodgy (Pun not intended) To the point that sometimes, even with perfect connection and tunnel, I'll teleport back to the spot I dodge from, earning me a quick death.
-There's no clear indicator on death, unless you either have eye's on your teamate, or they have eyes on you. If someone goes down, either you see them, or a life get's wasted.
-THERE'S NOTHING TO DO. Literally dungeons, or PvP, and they expect people to pay actual money for items for only 2 features.
-Reused story lines- Basically a 3D Elsword, including characters and ideas from Elsword/Grand Chase. They apparently can't think up any new faces or colors for any of their heros.

-EXTRA: During the beginning of the game's release, apparently their game featured DLC's that were so over-priced, that they had the WORST rating on steam for the longest time. Apparently they "Remedied" it by making 2 DLC's free.
DLC for new OP characters shouldn't ♥♥♥♥♥♥' be Pay to get. That's absolutely stupid. Those characters should be available to everyone in a game THAT LITERALLY FOCUSES PVP RATHER THAN PVE.
What the hell were you even thinking KOG? I know you're money hungry pigs, but damn son. Y'all greedy asf.

Altogether, the game is an absolute waste. I'd be refunding it if it wasn't free, but even free, I'd still like those 6.1 hours back. I'd literally only play this drunk just to laugh at the jiggle physics on the "women" in the game that are supposed to give you items and show up in dungeons, but literally don't.

2/10

Normal difficulty?
Nah, That's a little too intense for Normal.
Constant spawning enemies?
Check.
Inability to bring out enough damage to kill said enemies that spawn constantly?
Check.
Third level in a swamp with enemies that RESSURECT enemies that you can't kill easily, then get dumpstered when OTHER enemies continuously spawn making a swarm happen within the first 3-4 rounds?
Check.
Unable to do damage past walls, because you can't see enemies but enemies can somehow see you?
Check.
Being completely ambushed by random enemies for completing objectives, adding to the already present hoard you're unable to defeat because as soon as you kill one, they're either resurrected, or replaced by another enemy that magically spawns?
Check.
ALL of this happening within the first few levels, and on NORMAL (Yes, NORMAL) Difficulty?
Check.

It started off as a good game, I began in normal mode and though it was going to be similar to my childhood favorite, Final Fantasy Tactics, But if you're looking for something similar to that, DO NOT get this game. Their idea of "Normal" Difficulty is magically spawn repetition within a level to "Force you" Into the objectives, which spawns more enemies (Even BOSS enemies) To murder you. That's not normal, that's stupid.

Not to mention, Extra Objectives? How the ♥♥♥♥ am I going to clear extra objectives with a short timer as the ones I'm given, Multiple enemies on my ass, boss monsters spawning, Monsters being resurrected and my characters being weak? I'd understand if the extra objectives were saved for after you got more powerful, but here's the thing-

The maps give reduced EXP every time you play them, -50% the first time, -75% the second. I didn't get past that, because I found out immediately that it would be a complete waste of time. There's no reason to go back through maps at all, they WILL NOT help you in the game.

I don't understand where the idea of "Normal" came from when they created that difficulty. I don't understand where the idea of ANY of those mechanics being a good idea mulched together came from.

All in all, $23 wasted.

Toxic, but you can never get away from it.

Hoenstly, It's a pretty fantastic game for it's current development state. Between the easy to use controls, to the real-world crafting, it's enjoyable where it is. Obviously, with even more items and furniture/craftables, it would be even more enjoyable, but as a baseline for what the game will be later on in development, it's fantsatic.

Current gameplay-
You may chose to do one of two things in this current game build-
1. Embrace the tutorial and learn about the land you'll be spawning in -or-
2. Jump directly into the game, disregarding the tutorial and learn about the world on your own.
Honestly, after the 5 hours of gameplay I've put it, the second option wasn't so bad. I found out most things just by touching the controllers themselves. The physics are nice, crafting is easy and amazing (Once you create your own workbench) And hunting the animals is pretty interesting. It would be in anyone's best interest to create a make-shift work bench as soon as possible, and give it some enclosed walls. The blocks do have a mind of their own sometime, and trying to craft from the floor is a pain.

Postives about the game-
1. The graphics are astonishing, just standing ontop of a mountain and looking around the world is amazing. Nighttime in the game features the Aurora Borealis, which is fantstic.
2. It's smooth, and current crafting is easy and fun to do. Exerimentation is something you could do, but if you don't want to you can walk around for a bit and find the crafting pages for designs.
3. Building is enjoyable and easy to do. The ability to place blocks anywhere, as well as a slider to change the distance you can place them is phenominal.
4. PICTURES FRAMES ARE ACTAULLY AMAZING- Litearlly, you can cover up whatever walls you make with some nice pictures and make it look like a true masterpiece. (Or you can just throw and of your...Explicit photos on your walls...)
5. Game mechanics are easy to understand, and customizable. You can change whether or not you wan't to fall from a cliff, or keep your character from doing so. Cutting down trees is rewarding and easy, with 3-4 strokes you can remove a tree and then cut it into piecees, achieveing a large amount of resourse in a short ammount of time.
6. The difficulty of finding ores is honestly actually pretty Fun. In no time I was able to find both gold and copper and start to build some interesting things.

complaints-
(Whiles these are negatives, the game is known to be in development, so things will chage and that's understood.)
1. The crafting system seems a little TOO easy to achieve. The ability to walk around and find random pages on the ground that give you recipies is honestly a little too easy. For now, it's just more of a time sink trying to walk around and grab recipies.
2. The body tracking is a little awkward at times. You could walk forward, then run into a block on accident and be unable move unless you teleport out of it. I don't mind it too much, but it is slightly irritating.

I have a few more issues with the game as it stands, but it's still in early access, so I'm going to leave them to myself for now. There's no reason for me to throw them out there when they're more than likely already being worked on.

I hope this helped you guys out a bit, the game is phenominal as it stands. Enjoy!

After let's playing this, and putting in 390 hours in on this game, I can honestly say that I'm disappointed, But I entirely understand the situation they're in. They were bought out by Riot a while ago, which cause them to have to speed up progress on their game phenominally. Thanks to this they were unable to actaully impliment a lot of the things they wanted to when creating the game. They're DEV team is being split apart because RIOT wanted each one for diffierent occasions, and while that's understandable, it left Stonehearth without competent developers.

As it stands, the game is lacking a lot, from early game development promises to (And here's the biggest one) Multi-threaded game compatability. As it stands, the game will only run off of 3 threads for your processor. That literally bogs the game down, stopping it from using the full potential of your processor. In this case, it was laziness on the developers part because they said it would make adding more things a longer process in the future. Had they just gone ahead and multi-threaded the game, there would be far less issues.

Ontop of the multi-threading issue, they also ended up failing to put in a lot of the content they planned on adding. I can understand this though, due to the fact that that RIOT threw their team all over the place. They gave them a deadline and told them they had to be done by that point. I can't blame them for not being able to get it done.

My main, biggest issues is that, even with a powerful computer, none of it matters due to the game not utilizing the full potential of any device or machine.

Gameplay- Potential 9/10:Realistic 7/10

It's still an amazing game to play, if you can play past a civilization of more than 25+ people and don't make too big of a town.

Thank you for all the good hours though, Good luck on your new endeavors stonehearth team.