Recent reviews by Twi

gay rats say no gods no masters

(Just finished the campaign when writing this).

Torn between "yes, but" or "no, but" for this review.

It's a neat refinement of what we saw in Creeper World 2. The ships are interesting, though it feels like you never really have enough in the campaign and it's more annoying than interestign to lose a bunch of stuff to a Phantom that you didn't have the Phantom Ships to cover, for example.

There are a lot of little annoyances, most notably digging being bound to the same click as selecting units, the lackluster tutorialization (what's the point of a campaign if it's not a tutorial!), a couple other minor things?

The chemistry/particle mixing system could be great, but actually using it ends up being very tedious - you only get two of the producers during the campaign, which are seperate from the diggers you need to collect the pixels, and you have to do a whole bunch of stuff and it gets very annoying at the semi-final mission when the game expects you to do the Ultimate Four Step Chemistry Process and in practice you're just waiting and mixing and mining and it takes like ten minutes.

I don't think anyone playtested the actual final mission? It's tedious more than it is challenging or fun. The lack of visibility could be atmospheric if used correctly, but obviously it is not. The controls are fine I guess? The weapon is annoying to use, and the final boss in particular is just a sloooog. Is it neat that you can program this in the game? Sure. Would I actually want to play it more than once? Heck no.

Also the story is completely meh, but I've come to expect that at this point. Still, there was a moment when I said out loud "wow, he really CAN only do Mass Effect plots, huh?" which is never a good sign.

Overall, I'd say it's more of the same. If you want that and can deal with the various annoyances, sure, buy it. But if you're not a hardcore Creeper World fan (or if you are, but you're satisified by other entries in the series), I'd wait till this goes on sale.

It DESPERATELY needs a zoom for the larger puzzles, and there was one puzzle (48, I think?) that came down to a guess in the end for me, despite my best efforts. But it's a really fun concept and very well put together!!!

Some of the user made puzzles are cursed, but some are great.

also the procedural puzzle generation is pretty alright I guess

I have a lot of fun with it, even though I'm not very good at it! Only complaint right now is item bloat making it hard to guide your builds. Adding some banish options or trimming of the loot pools would go a long way towards that. (Or reroll or seal, but banishing makes a lot of sense to me from a gameplay perspective - gives good player agency, and is easy to integrate by just giving the player the option to banish something from the loot pool when you get to pick orbs or relics - and loot pool trimming per character should be very easy since there are already character exclusive orbs and such.)

spooky scary skeletons send shivers down your spine

I enjoy the gameplay loop well enough, but it's too buggy to recommend in good faith right now. Especially since the bugs make already difficult artifacts/achievements even harder to get to, and there's really not much else to work towards in the game.

I really really like this game! It takes the survivors/bullet heaven-style trappings and brings them closer to a twin-stick shooter, giving just enough moment-to-moment gameplay depth to eradicate the slog that bullet heavens can eventually become, without being so demanding as to overwhelm.

The visual style is simple, bold, and overall great, I love the high-contrast style and the character designs.

The upgrade system, similar to the gameplay itself, is just complicated enough to challenge, without going to the insane lengths of build diversity you get in, say, Nova Drift. It has a similar system to Nova Drift, where each upgrade tree consists of a base upgrades, two middle upgrades, and one final upgrade, and it has a similar system of special synergy upgrades if you have the two required upgrades from different trees. Almost every upgrade tree has clear synergies - for example, all three of the Magic Scythe's upgrades scale with another upgrade tree (Move Speed, Curse, and Bullet Damage). The result is that you can usually find something that ties into your build, even if it's not the exact upgrade you were looking for.

Additionally, there are 12 different characters, each with their own special ability as well as three character-specific upgrades that drop from certain bosses; 11 weapons, each of which has 3 evolutions that unlock at level 20 (about halfway through a typical run, give or take); a number of tomes that drop from the other kind of bosses, which offer powerful upgrades but usually with big drawbacks for further specialization; and runes, which offer a number of small meta upgrades you can level up to refine and improve your runs.

Standard run length is, as the name suggests, 20 minutes, and it's pretty well tuned with the experience curve. Even on higher difficulties (which eventually reduce EXP drops), there's enough time and levels to get your build into a good place before the end. There's an accelerated 10 minute mode, as well as an endless mode - the latter I don't recommend, as once you get your build going past the 20 minute mark, there's usually not much that can stop you, and the game can't capture the same joy of a completely busted build that you can get from, say, Vampire Survivors.



Now, all that said, I do have a lot of quibbles and minor issues, though they don't really detract from the experience for the most part. In rough order of least important to most important:

- Grenade explosions hurt you, and thus grenade projectiles are colored red. But if you get the Blast Shield evolution, they no longer hurt you, but they remain red, instead of becoming white like other player bullets?

- A few upgrades are just not that great. In particular, Wind Shield, a level 4 rune that gives you a projectile blocking shield on a cooldown, is almost always inferior to the alternatives (Growth gives you extra XP and heals you every 5 levels, Body and Soul gives you Soul Hearts and raises your cap, which is huge if you get the Soul Heart upgrade that makes them give you bonus bullet damage).

- Your build can feel slightly too hard to control sometimes, but your mileage may vary. Personally, even on the harder difficulties (one of which removes an upgrade choice!), the normal upgrades can be tricky to work with sometimes, but usually fall on the side of rewarding rather than frustrating. Given how many tomes have been added, I kind of wish that there were 4 choices for that instead of 3, though.

- It'd be nice to have a bit more visibility into stats, to be able to see your character ability from the pause screen (or weapon evolution, once you unlock it), to be able to look at your current upgrades while you're picking new ones, that sort of thing.

- Because most of the upgrade trees are so flexible and interesting, the ones that are just okay or lackluster stand out. Aero Magic only has one upgrade that shows any synergy (the one that makes it scale with Move Speed), and is otherwise completely self-contained; some more openness (something that adds Dodge? Maybe somethign with the Wind Shield, above?) would go a long way. Glare/Vision Range, meanwhile, does have some decent synergies (there's a couple of runes related to vision range, there's a Pickup Range upgrade that also increases vision range, Shana has an ability that lets her get a huge bonus to it if she can collect her three halo pieces, Sight Magic triggers on-hit effects and can be good for elemental builds), but there's not much that you can make it the centerpiece of a build with because none of its upgrades give it any scaling; the best you can really do with it is enabling an elemental build through Sight Magic. While it kinda makes sense that it's normally a support upgrade, it'd be nice to have a character (cyclops/gazer?) or weapon (beam/laser?) that could focus on it.


I may revisit this review as the game progresses; now that it's in 1.0 I'm not sure how much work is still being put into it, but we shall see!

After completing the game, holy heck it's really good? My little traumatized gay blorbos, I love them so much?

The gameplay's aight, action commands add a lot even if I had trouble figuring out the timing osmetimes, and even once my old ass had to turn them off, there's still enough tactics to make things interersting.

Story's definitely the highlight here, and it offered one hell of a story for the amount of game that's there. I kind of expected 'standard coming of age story but queer" and it delivers on that, but it also gets surprisingly deep into things like grief and trauma, the overall passage of time and historical amnesia, all sorts of interesting interpersonal dynamics in a way that feels earned?

I still can't words right but ahhh it's good

be gay, do crimes