Recent reviews by Tourmi

This game has a lot of time put into it, but no care. Typos galore, tons of just, non-existent story, no resolved plot points, lots and lots of filler along with a slower-paced combat and 20-second looping songs.

I was hoping for a sequel that would visit a different theme with the same gusto as the first game, but I'm just really disappointed

Contains predatory microtransactions that only exist to make you save time, along with a daily-reward system (thankfully, this system does not reset upon missing a day) which gives you a small amount of the premium currency to encourage you to spend.

Around the mid-game, the game pulls off a new system with a bunch of very very ugly AI-generated animals which almost single-handedly made me stop playing it on their own. Simple squares with numbers and the animal's name would have been enough

The very late game slows down to a crawl, and makes you lose progress (without gaining anything) whenever you respec a tree, which you will need to do a lot to improve your gain of the different currencies in this game.

Copies a bunch from Antimatter Dimensions, without bringing anything else truly interesting to the table

I can't recommend this, and don't really plan on revisiting it.

This game's main loop is a survival crafting game, it is hard to recommend if you are fatigued by the genre, but despite this, I've loved playing it a bunch.

Your car's your lifeline, and 90% of your resources will go towards creating parts for it, and repairing it. It makes the crafting aspect of the game feel pretty fresh. Resource gathering is kinda meh, with tools that break a bit too often, but that's what will actually make you leave your car, and force you to interact with the anomalies, so I think that it is a pretty good means to an end.

Fully customizable difficulty options is always a plus, although I ended up playing on the preset that makes your car break down a lot more often, which, is actually a lot more fun than it sounds, I swear, haha. I had a ride where my tires got a flat or got loosened like 6 times total. By the end, I was forced to scavenge a tire from a broken down car while the storm was closing in on me. Honestly, lots of moments where your car will annoy you (in a fun way), with its quirks, and random breakdowns, which will put you into tough situations, at least, if you're playing on a higher difficulty. It is a good game to be streaming on Discord to friends, or to watch someone else play idly, paying attention when stuff happens.

Very good writing and good characters. Reading about the anomalies was fun, and learning how they work also was. Spoiler for one of the early game anomalies: The first time I saw tourists, I tried looking away, and looking at them again, thinking it was obvious that they were gonna move, but never saw them move. I wasn't close enough to aggro them. Because of this, I spent, half of my time in the first biome thinking they couldn't move, and kept gaslighting myself whenever I thought one of them moved. Learning strategies for dealing with different anomalies while also looting areas was very fun.

The game does an excellent job at making you feel attached to your car. Making you both love and hate it at times, depending on what's going on. It also does an excellent job at making you take last-minute choices. You will rarely have enough time to loot and entire area, and when the storm closes in, you will end up having to both drive quickly, and carefully, else you damage your car even more, or lose your life. You will have to pick between driving down the cliff to go more quickly, or take the long way around, and risk the storm.

It is not a flawless game, but I've enjoyed my time with it a whole bunch, and it has brought about emotions that I haven't felt in a while in a game. You may want to skip this if survival craft games are not to your taste, but otherwise, I can't do anything but recommend this game.

I had some fun with this, mostly when I went against the dev's intended solutions. (Using Stone to permanently block off an emitter, or staying in the "unwinnable" 15 minute mission, and completely clearing the map of its self-replicating creeper)

The game introduces mechanics, level after level, which had me hopeful that I'd end up with some mission which would test me on those, but this never happens. The penultimate mission introduces Ixeide, a material that destroys IXE buildings, but this material does not do anything against the final boss. Instead, the final boss is just "hold down the left and right mouse buttons for 10 minutes and win". The sidescroller mode does not have anything going on to make it interesting (it has a singular mission), and kinda feels like it took away resources to make the rest of the game better.

I trusted the dev after having played Creeper World 3, a game which had good progression, good design decisions, and non-linear gameplay. But this game does not deliver on that front, instead building up new mechanics, that are never given more depth down the line. This feels like an alpha build, solid proof of concept, fun elements, but zero substance outside of the penultimate mission. Community missions and a map editor are nice and all, and I had fun playing some of the community maps, but, the main game needs more interesting missions for it to be worth it. It feels like the community has to take up the game's slack, and fix the lack of content issue.

I have a few (rethorical) questions that summarise my thoughts about this game.

Why is there only one mission out in space?
Why isn't the concept of creeper gravity explored more?
Why are there only 3 alchemical recipes? 4 if you count the hyper-specific one?
Why is there always a singular easily cut-off digitalis maker?
Why do phantoms even exist in this game?
Why does the 2D platformer mode even exist?
Why so so so so many one-off concepts and mechanics, that are introduced, and then forgotten about?

Why is this game so short?

Since the game is fully-released, I'm not holding my breath that the story mode is ever going to be improved, which makes me very sad, because this game had so much potential

This game feels like it does not respect your time. You either speed up the game, deal with the annoying sped up music and risk losing your XP multiplier by taking damage, or play it at regular speed, and deal with a very very slow game up until the last few nights. And once you do finish a run, at best, you will only unlock 2 mastery levels, out of 25. Each mastery level only adding a slight difficulty increase. Sometimes, you only unlock a single mastery level. Best of all, you need to unlock all 25 levels for each character.

There should be 5x less mastery levels. Make each mastery level actually meaningful, instead of "enemies get 5% more health every night".

The game is extremely easy. The only way you'll ever lose, is if you're careless playing at higher game speeds, or if you only get health, knockback and range upgrades in the early game, all three effects being very inconsequential.

If you take a single point of damage, you lose your XP multiplier, which is, very very bad, forever handicapping your run. It makes health upgrades feel like useless filler, meant to drain your talent points before you get to the actual useful skills, since you need to avoid taking damage at all costs anyways. Knockback basically does nothing. You kill everything in 1 to 3 projectiles. It might as well just be an empty square on the skill tree. And Range does not benefit you much. You'll always have some enemies within range to shoot at (except at the start, where enemies come in very slowly).

The early game is always identical, there are no early skills that will make it feel any different until you reach one of the purple "epic" skills. After 4 hours, I've only just gotten to mastery 13 with the starting character, only having lost a single run ever due to playing on 2x speed. I don't want to deal with going back to mastery 0 with a different character.

Each run always finishes riiiiiight at the point where, in other roguelikes, you'd start getting synergies and interesting effects. I got a run where I managed to grab 2 legendary skills, and got to use both only for a single night. You don't have an option to go endless after the 20th night, just start a new run, at +1/2 mastery level, and deal with the awfully boring early game again.

I wanted to give this game a chance, especially for the very generous price, but yeah. I don't want to play another 4 hours just to reach Mastery 25 with one character, and have to repeat that for the others.

EDIT: I'm not sure if that was a known issue beforehand, but devs patched in metal grates conducting electricity within a day of my review. It wasn't what got me hung up on the game, but seeing active devs makes me hopeful that they're actually trying to make a fun game. I'll give it another chance come 1.0 release, and put in more time in my review then.

Original review:

Metal grates do not conduct electricity

The game is very simple, and doesn't have much going for it. It doesn't feel unique compared to all of the dungeon defenders, orc must die and sanctum games out there.

The game is releasing pretty soon, so I don't think it can do much to improve by then.

I don't think a QA team even touched this game. Or playtesters for that matter. Filled with so many annoying issues, on top of having tons and tons of side quests that don't lead anywhere with overly simple and sometimes bad writing.

Every single building in this game has been copy-pasted a hundred times over, so much so, that when you do some of the Courrier sidequests that have you delivering mail to different places, within the same quest, you'll be visiting the same copy of the same building three times. Every single metro station is copy-pasted. Including the one in the DLC. Every single water tower is copy pasted. Every single power plant is copy-pasted (though those actually have some variation on what you need to do, and the obstacles inside, thankfully)

Ziplines have an autograb mechanic now. But they also show a prompt for you to grab them. Sometimes the autograb works, sometimes the prompt works. Sometimes you'll try to press the button for the prompt, but end up jumping off the zipline because the autograb kicked in. No way to turn off the autograb mechanic. Also, sometimes your jump input is completely ignored when trying to jump off the zipline, which makes tranfering between ziplines, just, bad.

The DLC had just, such a bad ending, good gosh. No resolution, no lasting consequences, no signs that what happened at the very end changed anything.

Dying Light 1 was a blast to play, I might be a bit nostalgic for it, since it probably wasn't perfect. But this game really feels more like a list of chores to do, to maaaybe unlock sidequests that are actually fun or interesting. If you end up playing this, just rush the main story, and have fun with the parkour mechanics, those work pretty well, outside of some issues.

I didn't intend on making this review a rant, and had to cut myself off, because gosh. I'm just really disappointed. I guess I shouldn't be surprised with how sloppy this game is, since Techland now calls themselves a "AAA" studio

Randomly saw this game in my discovery queue, and gosh. This game has extremely fun movement and just, makes you feel really great while you shoot through enemies, ram them with the hoverboard, grapple them up in the air, or just do drive-by pickaxe hits.

Sadly I did not play this in co-op, but I imagine it to be even more fun with friends

Very very fun, if a bit short (I've 100%ed the game in 10 hours while playing solo), though the devs plan on doing more updates

100%ed the game, but I haven't gone and done all achievements ( Though I did do the boss rush ) Excellent and unique combat system, mediocre platforming and metroidvania. This game had a really good start, with a lot of mystery, and extremely good environments. I fell in love with the fighting system immediately, very unique, somewhat fighting game-reminiscent. The art is just, amazingly unique, and the environments really look great. Extremely well polished game

However, by the mid-game, the game slows down, you get barely any fights, you keep unlocking new combat moves, but you don't get to try them out because the game simply does not throw any fights at you, instead opting to give you more upgrades where a fight could have been. Eventually, yeah, there's moves you completely forget even exist because it's been too long since you've had a proper fight that didn't finish in seconds.

The late game though? Gosh. Okay. The late game fights are all extremely rewarding, they're fights that ask for actual execution and thinking about the attacks you use. I really wish there would have been more of those fights, but I'm still very satisfied with how tough and how rewarding it was to finally beat the optional superboss

Outside of combat, platforming is pretty standard, nothing really jumps out or makes the game feel unique, which is somewhat of a shame. However, the game has a very natural way of teaching you new movement mechanics, where it sets up situations that you end up accidentally using said movement mechanics. There's something really nice about these moments when you finally realise that you've always been able to do something, you just hadn't done it yet.

Puzzles are alright. You need to pay attention to the environment to solve them, and some of them were pretty satisfying to solve, but most of the time, they're really easy to solve, or even accidentally solve.

Honestly? I think the game is worth it for its combat system alone, but if you think that having to do parries and dodges as well as timed inputs to do optimal damage is not for you, or the only part that brought you here is the metroidvania tag, I'd recommend looking elsewhere. Otherwise, it was a very unique and wonderful experience, if somewhat short due to the lack of fights.

It's an interesting game, and was fun when I played it. But when any decently interesting build you come up with ends up affecting framerate, it starts feeling very limiting. I don't think the game is worth to be played right now, especially if the performance issues are never resolved.

The moment-to-moment writing is pretty bad, and I wish the facial expressions were anything other than what they currently are, but at least the game is fun for the first few runs.

If you're a big fan of Noita, I don't think I'd recommend this game, as it has a lot less mechanical depth.

I feel a bit bad about rating this negatively, since the game could definitely fix a lot of its issues, being in early access and everything, but yeah. I'll have to update this review when the game actually updates