Recent reviews by Modified Bessel Function

Wow, I've really mixed feelings about this one. From one side, story is great, and the way it's presented is pretty interesting. From another, as a deck builder it is just decent and more annoying than fun. I'd say that if you're looking for time sink rogue-deckbuilder game I'd not recommend it. tho if you just wanna win once or twice, it's fine. I'm putting "recommend" since I enjoyed the game in general, but it's not a typical game for this genre.

Decent and interesting puzzles. Couldn't bring myself to finish since closer to mid/end puzzles became rather bothersome to do. Without any in-game reason to do puzzles elegantly and guides you start just bruteforcing them, which isn't that fun anymore. Still a positive experience overall.

Systemwide crash that locks down PC requiring hard(with power button) reset. 1 week into ea, no acknowledgment, nothing.

I can say many things about balance, gamedesign decisions etc, but I already had to fully restart my PC 5 times or so, so there's no point talking anymore, game should not going paid ea in such state.

Update: 3 weeks into EA, bug is still there and I can't really play game I paid for, so I guess review stays indefinitely.

Well made game that is just not fun.

Narration is great, visuals are great, except the story is extremely slow and pretty boring. It just doesn't hook the player.

Combat is kinde fine, except it's full of annoying mechanics and turns into mess quite fast, lots of punishing mechanics and tons of monster with high HP makes it quite a slog.

Balance is pretty much nonexistent. You have 2 playable ranged characters which with enemy HPs/amount and lack of aoe play like "kite enemies for years till they die", and melee characters(I unlocked 4) which are not satisfying to play at all despite having bit more DPS and better aoe since you have too little windows of attacking on melee. If the game had twice less characters but they were balanced better each one, it would've been way better.

Powers are cool but there's close to no synergy, you just get power from relics/blessings, and that's basically all.

Progression is cool, you have levels of each character, and levels unlock powers, except as I said it's absolutely miserable to play on melee, so if you want your powers upgrades you have to suffer. And lvling is pretty slow.

I did act one, it was kinda fun while I was getting upgrades and all, but closer to the end of it everything slowed down significantly, act two made me want to just run from enemies and instead of killing them.

I decided to drop on act two because I'm not seeing fun to kite enemies for 30mins and doing that for six (or maybe more) more dungeons.

Not great interface, too much RNG, not worth the full price but might be fine on sale it you want more boring than not timekiller.

Simulator of "have many synergies but good luck building them since RNG pool is too big and you won't have ways to adjusts it". Typical roguelike game where devs never bothered to make every run fun and only capable making you to play a lot until synergies work.

As for the price, game essentially is just some pictures, and spin wheel. No actual gameplay aside picking items and spinning, no animations, nothing. On top of that, UI is weirdly big by default, and font is weird.

Fun for a while, but not interesting to invest time.

EDIT: played a bit more, and finally can formulate what's wrong a bit better. The game takes itself too seriously considering amount and depth of content it has. It expects you to invest time, redo levels many times etc, but it has just 3 levels, only one of them has a "final boss", and all synergies and builds are easy to understand, so when you play it a big more you don't feel like there's replay value.

Really didn't want to put "not recommended", but there are just way too many weird decisions made by developer which make the game way worse than it could be.

Pluses:
1) Design. Characters look nice, the game has a distinguish style.
2) Fun in general gameplay. There are nice synergies between character/runes/powers and sometime weapon.

Minuses:
1) XP looting. Honestly, the genre exists for a long time, how can you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ this part? There are two major problems.
First, the typical "magnet" drop isn't in the game. In every game of this type when you play you'd find an item which sucks in all dropped XP, this is one of the most satisfying parts of games like this. But in this game that's not a thing, so it's kinda mandatory to pick "pickup range" powers. On top of that, since your character moves slowly when shooting it takes ages to pick XP unless you heavily invest in movement speed as well.
2) XP out-of-map culling. Two out of three maps has boundaries. If you kill enemy outside of boundaries it doesn't drop XP. Considering that many builds can easily offscreen kill enemies, this decision makes no sense.
3) Difficulty progression. You can unlock only 1 by 1 new difficulty levels. meaning the game wants you to spend at minimum 5 hours to do all difficulties. That's considering you won't fail any tries. Also, difficulties don't increase rewards, so you just do harder content for the sake of achievement, no faster unlocking or more XP for building more interesting build.

As conclusion I wanna say that it's a fine game, you'll have your fun, but it just left bitter taste for me, so personally can't recommend it.

As people have said, there's not that enough game elements for this to be enjoyable. You just put tiles, you do mini quests, try to reach far parts and do quests there, that's basically all. I played one round, and there's no desire to play another. All tiles are purely visual, you'd think that connecting settlements using tracks with trains or rivers with boats would do something, but nope, it's just visual.

Can't recommend tile placing simulator with barely interesting puzzles, especially for such price.

Not the best survivors-like game, but not the worst, arts are nice, in general enjoyable experience, albeit not that much to do. Big missed opportunity from devs to allow us to combine 2 different builds for extra arts, but still a fine game.

tl;dr: Game is quite good, but if the next big update will do the same to the progression as act 2 just did, I'll change my review to "not recommended" as the devs try to lock interesting stuff behind big and boring grinds.

About act 2 update: new skill trees, which are cool, but requires mandatory 9 fully completed runs(20mins) = 3 hours for full unlock for each character. No bonuses for playing the game before, you just have to grind 3 hours to unlock each tree, which is a bit insane imo. Content wise - act two is considerably harder than act 1, some enemies feel straight up unfair and on difficulty 0 are harder than difficulty 30 of act 1.

In general about the game: good game. Interesting talents, interesting items. Balance wise, new class on max lvl is op and probably everything else isn't even close to the power level, probably we will see balance passes for acts difficulty, talents and characters powers.

New talents/skills feel a bit rough to play around, especially since act 2 update moved all the fun talents into legendary tier - which even with buffs is impossible to target. Talents separation in strikes/power/spells category is interesting, but because you're limited by 3 gods, for many archetypes you're forced into 1 or 2 combinations of gods, otherwise you're losing a lot of potential power.

Simple enough but still interesting game, really satisfying game ARPG which plays lightly but still deep enough to not become boring really quick.