The Guardian Fox の最近のレビュー

Edit: Matchmaking in this game now forces you to use the Oceania board, which adds a lot of stress to the experienc. I want to get more games in before I decide how I feel about that, but early impressions are that I don't care for it.

So, be warned that there's currently no way to matchmake for the original game board experience. The expansion also adds bugs. The following review was based on the original board, before Oceania.

---------------
Fantastic board game video game. It's so rare to get a board game video game that isn't cheaply made and/or full of game-breaking bugs, but I've yet to encounter any bugs, and the presentation here is really great!

I only have a few hours of experience so far, but the game seems pretty deep and strategic. Has online, crossplay, and asynchronous multiplayer, which is practically all you could want from a game like this!

So pleased to finally own it, and that it exceeds expectations.

If you like this genre, I think you'll like this game. It's not stingy with resources, I feel like I have the time needed to advance at my own pace while also staying busy throughout, the voice acting is a great touch and adds a lot to the experience, and it both looks and plays way better than My Time At Portia.

My biggest complaint is that the combat is shallow, which is pretty typical in this particular hybrid genre space. I also think it throws a lot of machines at the player a bit quick, which felt kinda overwhelming at first, but once you have a grasp for the flow and what everything does it's fine.

A bigger, better version of the classic flash games. Several hours of fun, with some chore and bore at the end of runs when as you get OP. Did two runs, the second with negative modifiers. Probably won't play it again, but still worth the sale price paid.

Leaves me wishing someone would try to make a deeper and more strategic version of the same concept.

Recommended with a BIG ASTERISK. If you just want to chill and make fake stickers for a dozen hours or so, cramming as many onto a page to print as you can, you can have fun with this game in that way. It's well priced at $10 for doing that.

But for anyone else I would say this is a pass. The game is lacking in features, content, and QOL. You can not mechanically manage your shop beyond adding and desisting stickers. You can not put things on sale, you can not mark things to only sell the stock you have to get rid of stock, and you can not manage prices at all.

You can not edit stickers you made, including moving/copying a sticker to a different type of sheet. For example if you have a design selling well on plain white paper, you can not copy the design to sell a holographic version, or even edit the sticker at all. Stickers do not tell you the price will be set as you make them, so you could be just shy of having the size for a 3 coin sticker and end up with a 1 coin sticker, with no indications of how big it needs to be.

On the content side, I was really hoping for a bit more too. Basically people post wanting a kind of sticker and when you make them they will buy it. Problem is that customers are not at all demanding, so there are no real goals. Just keep making different types of stickers and you will go through all story-lines with no effort or intent. And there is no difficulty option to make them more picky, nor are there many story customers anyway. There is a decent variety of stickers, but a lot of obvious options are missing. For example you can't easily make your own words, and there are no individual letters.

So again, if you can have fun JUST creating the stickers and doing page space management, there is some chill relaxing fun to be had. But there's a lot of really basic features missing, and not much to the game side of this "game",

Edit:
Having 100%'d and gone deeper into some of the mechanics, I feel the gameplay is even weaker than I first thought. Making neat elaborate stickers is actually worse for you mechanically, because your XP is spread out across the sticker parts you use. Meaning the more you use the slower they rank up, and takes a lot more sales to earn hearts, making it take longer to unlock more sticker elements. There could have been a nice balance here, perhaps randomly award one sticker part full XP and then give the rest a smaller percentage.

The time element is also pretty meaningless. Never was I threatened with being late with a delivery, nor did the time element change how I played beyond forcing me to create stickers more slowly. It's possible this helped with dictating the flow of the game, but I question if I would have enjoyed myself more if I had just turned the timer off to begin with. And if I had to guess I would say I would have. Something to think about.

Something else I forgot to mention in my initial review was the lack of information found on each page. You can't see how many stickers you have in stock on the store page. You can't see how many orders of each sticker you have on the printing page, or how many you have printed. You can't see sticker element levels on the creation page. And also why can't we just click the ordered stickers to put them in the box when we have them in our inventory, rather than having to sort through a hundred stickers in a single file line along the top? All of these would be HUGE QOL improvements.

With nothing left to do, it makes me wish even more that there was a mode where customers were more picky, but would order more stickers when you met their standards.

Edit 2: Nominated this as a cozy game GOTY. In spite of things I wish would be improved, I liked it a lot.

Remember that episode where Bandit asked Bluey if she was done, and she said yes.

But then it turned out the whole task wasn't done, she was just done working on it?

Welcome to the seamless world update.

I waited on it to buy the game, thinking the reason it took so long was that they were going to push it out in a more finished state. At least everything that was in the old game, into the new world... right? But I immediately noticed many translations were either absent or unintelligible. The current island is a nice size, but apparently doesn't even have all the old content on it? The sound effects were either absent or bad. And the combat is way too easy.

Let's be real here, the bulk of their resources are probably going toward Palworld, and have been for years. This game, and the seamless update needed a full staff, and with this result I highly doubt it got it. In turn, my expectations for future updates, and the speed of them, is not high, so I refunded.

Everything this game promises is a game I want to play. But it just isn't ready, and I'm unsure if/when it will be. I will probably buy this game if it ever hits a proper launch state... and by that I mean something resembling finished. Fully translated, fully polished, and doesn't feel like shovelware.

First of all, I appreciate the attempt to give people an alternative to the mediocre state that Pokemon is in. And an MMO Pokemon is what fans have wanted for decades. Unfortunately this game isn't the savior I was hoping for.

I have to address one of the biggest points of contention first. The microtransactions are a big turn off to be sure, but without playing it more, I can't say if there's enough free cosmetics in the experience to think that they're fair. However, I will never support limited time battle passes in any game, because they're designed to take advantage of FOMO, and make you play a game like it's a job instead of escape from reality. I shouldn't have to play a game at a specific point in time to get cosmetics I like, and if I PAY to get those cosmetics, I shouldn't get locked out of earning them because time has passed. This is beyond scummy and I do not support it, because no matter how good the base game cosmetics are, having this system in place makes the game worse.

But I have to admit to myself that the biggest problem I have with this game, and why I have yet to be able to bring myself to play it more, is that the monster designs are mostly crap. I could grab 10 random fanmon makers, and 7 of them would have better designs than the monsters in this game, and that's saying something. Monster games need good monster designs as the driving force to want to explore and progress and find and catch, and to want to train up a team of monsters that you love so much you would die for. Even the starters, who should be the headlining monsters that everyone wants at least one of, are just not good. Picking my starter is, which one do I dislike the least, and that's bad for starting your adventure. 9/10 or more of monsters in trailers and promo art just do not make me want to play this game, so I've had a lot of trouble wanting to play it at all. A good starter alone would give me motivation to start and continue my experience.

Seems even the ones I like the general form of, I hate the color scheme choices. Which seems to be an equal problem across most of the game, so many of the colors are muted, and there are so many greys and tans and doodoo browns, and just weird choices for monster coloring. And, again, that's on top of form designs that are mostly just bad.

If this game had REALLY GOOD monster designs, I would play it even if it wasn't a great game. That's why SO MANY people still play Pokemon, even though it's soooo mid. I hope one day I can force myself to play more in spite of these problems, but until then this is what I have to say about it.

Great game.

The gameplay is unique and interesting. The characters vary just enough to spice things up.

The difficulty is very well balanced. Hard is just hard enough to keep you thinking on most turns. I can tell that a lot of people with negative opinions about the game just don't have a desire to learn the system. (Or don't have the smarts to figure it out.) Sad, but I can't tell you how much I appreciate that they didn't muddle it down and homogenize it for mass appeal, like basically every other game out there. WE NEED MORE GAMES LIKE THIS. With an identity that doesn't fear to be unique and takes actual effort to be good at. Over the last year I've learned to quit looking at steam reviews in any kind of authority, because so many of them mean just as little as reviews you'd find anywhere else, and the amount of people that can not handle any level of complexity or difficulty is way too high.

The main story is alright, but I love the characters. I appreciate that the arc for Fleet was exactly the kind of antihero I was hoping for when I played the demo. Reminded me so much of overzealous twitter activists, except those usually just never learn their lesson. The character design and appeal is phenomenal, pretty much across the board. I think Hamir has both my favorite story and gimick. The design appeal for Artemis and Slade are very high. Probably not a character I don't like among them, though I would have disliked Fleet if she hadn't had the arc that she does. While I love foxes(obviously), and want more foxes in Aether, I almost wish they had kept her as a bat... I feel like that would have been super fitting for this town, the main story, and Fleet's general idea.

The amount of content is pretty good, but its variety may be where my biggest complaints are. The enemy variety is super low in the main biomes. 4 or so of the same enemies show up on each of them. I think it was probably difficult to come up with good and unique gimmicks for enemies in this type of battle system, but I really would have appreciated reskins of the same enemy types for each of the biomes, especially when the character designs is one of Aether's biggest strong spots. Maybe even with some slight tweaks that fit the biome or just to spice things up.

The gimmicks of each biome are just busywork and not especially fun. The Lava biome's gimmick was not well relayed, and because it's Art's starting stage and her gimmick is to take damage, initially thought the idea was to take damage and heal through the biome... I realized this mistake pretty quickly, but had it been appropriately explained I wouldn't have taken damage at all. But this is just a small complaint.

I did have a couple other problems with this game, but they were patched out. The team has been working super fast to address both bugs and balance complaints. As of this review they have yet to over-correct/over-adjust, like a lot of indy games seem to do at the slightest sign of reviews from these players that literally just want push A to win experiences. While I haven't seen any talk of post-launch content, I am hopeful for some, because they definitely have a room to make a great game even better.

The story concept is GREAT but the execution of it was really bad... like typical bad horror movie bad. The acting was also bad(except Taylor).

But I like games like this, simulating apps, spy work, and IM conversations with some puzzles sprinked in, and if you do too I think you'll find fun. This one barely gets a thumbs up from me, but only because I got it dirt cheap and don't regret playing it. Hoping the sequel is better.

Advance wars, but more lovingly crafted.

Great ideas, great animation, good character design, wonderful soundtrack.

No challenge, no difficulty options, some clunky design decisions. Devs immediately nerfed half the game for people that essentially want an endless or casual mode, when the game was already too easy. That doesn't give those people what they want, and drives the game in a negative direction for those that already found it easy.

I remain hopeful they will put difficulty options into the game so that people can customize their level of challenge, and will update my review if they do. Until they do I can't really recommend it.