When I saw this and gave the description a read I was excited. I thought I was in for a real unpolished gem, an ambitious work born of passion. Sadly, while I certainly don't doubt the love behind is here the end product just doesn't work.

The initial impressions are very strong. The spritework, particularly on the prehistoric critters themselves, is fantastic. The music slaps and there's a great variety in the tracks, particularly in battle themes.

And then you have a couple of fights and realise they're all the same, they're all going to be the same. Encountering a menagerie of dinosaurs very quickly loses its luster when you realise all of them have the same two moves: attack and stare menacingly. I'm not expecting a hadrosaur to bust out a firaga or grand cross, but if the only way you have to interact with these ancient creatures is turn-based RPG combat then the experience of that should be engaging and offer a range of different tactical situations. Even ignoring the sameness of these encounters, the fundamentals are also off, with missed attacks by both sides frequent and status effects and weaknesses that don't feel like they warrant much use.

The world, once you get past the first four "chapters" opens up and you can explore it however you like. This would be a great set up if it were a better place to explore. Many sections are just too large and have nothing to do but find keys to other areas and dodge the dinos that will charge you as soon as notice you. The story is extremely flat, the characters half note. Some of that may come down to translation issues, but clearly not all of it.

Now, I would have persevered despite all this, but sadly the technical problems just got too much. Crashes were semi-frequent, button prompts like running or opening the menu wouldn't work and when one of my characters got a bleed condition I just couldn't bring myself to continue.

A real shame.

In terms of a strategy roguelike walking in FTL's footsteps you can do a lot worse. There's a lot of decent variety in playstyles provided by the different leaders, although you'll need to grind a bit to unlock said variety.

I think what prevents this from being truly great is the repetitive nature of the runs. Now, this kind of game has repetition as a core element, what makes it bad here is the core story elements. See, in FTL the only thing that is guaranteed to be featured is the boss fight against the falgship at the end of the run. In WaWB there's several mandatory boss fights with no variation, not to mention the landmarks appearing in the same place with the same choices each time.

This somehow felt too long despite only taking five hours to finish. Felt this particularly during the "comedic" portions of the game, which didn't start out well and only got worse the longer they dragged.

Combat was frustrating. The characters movements aren't fluid enough that it ever felt properly action packed, but there was too much happening on the screen for it to be technical either.

Combined with a kind of flimsy story, this was a waste of a decent enough setting premise and some fun music.

The story is whatever and the voice acting is still bad in an almost endearing way (I salute you, guy who voiced Duke Abele), but really you're here for the level design both aesthetically and mechanically.

The Clockwork Mansion is the obvious stand-out here, but Serkonos is a great place to explore overall.

You can tell the designers took the complaints about low chaos runs forbidding you from a lot of toys to heart and they give Emily a lot of fun non-lethal tools to use.