Shenobi
The best tactical RPG of all-time.
Also, the visual brilliance of watching ghouls try and nom-nom the genitals of giants never gets old.
Also, the visual brilliance of watching ghouls try and nom-nom the genitals of giants never gets old.
I beat the Mega Dragon in this game. Take that, Might & Magic: Gates to Another World!
1983
On the Top 10 Games With Traumatizing Spiders In Them, this game is probably in the Top 5.
2018
The Chiptune soundtrack is nice, at least for the Mines area. The Catacombs were a bit lackluster for music and the Gardens were decent.
I think the procedural generation can only take the game so far, as it's a fun idea, but it has distinct limitations imposed on it that hamper its ability to create fun and memorable environments. Honestly, some of the room designs were nice and if the game needed anything, it was polishing in terms of what/how many spawns in a given area and more unique rooms to add to the queue when generating an area.
As an example, there's a room in the Mines area that you can enter from the left side. It has an area below that you can drop down to, though you can't initially see the bottom. It also has an area above you with platforms letting you head up to whatever's awaiting you above. On the right side of the screen is an exit you can't go through yet because there's a metal barrier blocking the way that you need to find a switch for.
In that same room, you can drop down to the bottom and work your way over a very basic set of small acid pools and find the first switch, which opens a metal barrier all the way up in the top-left area of the room. On your way up to that area, you'll fight a goblin-like creature that throws rocks at you as you move across the platforms toward it.
When you get up to the top and hit the switch, you'll remove the barrier from the passage on the right side of the screen, across from where you initially came in. On your way back down, you might notice that there's a dead-end passage available on the right and also another passage in the top-right you can't reach yet.
Why do I mention all of this in several paragraphs? Because for all that environment, the goblin-like creature was THE ONLY ENEMY YOU ENCOUNTER IN THE ENTIRE ROOM. This is an issue that repeats itself depending on room structure, but the enemy count seems fixed to the room-type based on what I saw from watching speedruns where people got the same room I did.
The end result is that even if the rooms themselves might be clever, the sparseness of enemies leaves the rooms feeling rather lifeless...for some mines (and other locations) that are populated by monsters, there's a distinct lack of population density that creates an uninhabited look and feel for the areas.
I can't help but think that this game needed either to never be procedurally-generated or needed way more rooms and room care for the arrays. Instead, this is a very okay game and I might go back and finish it at some point, but I'm not in any hurry to do so with potentially better Metroidvanias waiting in the wings.
I think the procedural generation can only take the game so far, as it's a fun idea, but it has distinct limitations imposed on it that hamper its ability to create fun and memorable environments. Honestly, some of the room designs were nice and if the game needed anything, it was polishing in terms of what/how many spawns in a given area and more unique rooms to add to the queue when generating an area.
As an example, there's a room in the Mines area that you can enter from the left side. It has an area below that you can drop down to, though you can't initially see the bottom. It also has an area above you with platforms letting you head up to whatever's awaiting you above. On the right side of the screen is an exit you can't go through yet because there's a metal barrier blocking the way that you need to find a switch for.
In that same room, you can drop down to the bottom and work your way over a very basic set of small acid pools and find the first switch, which opens a metal barrier all the way up in the top-left area of the room. On your way up to that area, you'll fight a goblin-like creature that throws rocks at you as you move across the platforms toward it.
When you get up to the top and hit the switch, you'll remove the barrier from the passage on the right side of the screen, across from where you initially came in. On your way back down, you might notice that there's a dead-end passage available on the right and also another passage in the top-right you can't reach yet.
Why do I mention all of this in several paragraphs? Because for all that environment, the goblin-like creature was THE ONLY ENEMY YOU ENCOUNTER IN THE ENTIRE ROOM. This is an issue that repeats itself depending on room structure, but the enemy count seems fixed to the room-type based on what I saw from watching speedruns where people got the same room I did.
The end result is that even if the rooms themselves might be clever, the sparseness of enemies leaves the rooms feeling rather lifeless...for some mines (and other locations) that are populated by monsters, there's a distinct lack of population density that creates an uninhabited look and feel for the areas.
I can't help but think that this game needed either to never be procedurally-generated or needed way more rooms and room care for the arrays. Instead, this is a very okay game and I might go back and finish it at some point, but I'm not in any hurry to do so with potentially better Metroidvanias waiting in the wings.
2017
For all the extra stuff added in this game from the original, I don't know if it's an issue with the Switch version or in general, but it feels like one hell of a quality drop for the game.
Boatloads of lag and extra load times (especially for combat), unintuitive selection options for some scenarios, the UI being all over the place in terms of functionality...it's just kinda sad because I loved the original game.
Maybe I'll feel better whenever I go back to it again, assuming I ever get around to giving it a second chance. Three sections into the campaign and I'm not feeling particularly inspired.
Boatloads of lag and extra load times (especially for combat), unintuitive selection options for some scenarios, the UI being all over the place in terms of functionality...it's just kinda sad because I loved the original game.
Maybe I'll feel better whenever I go back to it again, assuming I ever get around to giving it a second chance. Three sections into the campaign and I'm not feeling particularly inspired.
Sometimes there is pixelation or mysterious blurring on visuals, sometimes the audio just isn't present in some scenes for some characters.
Sometimes, failing or succeeding in a QTE has the exact same result, making the relevance of them artificial, at best.
The worst offender, though...is that the dialogue doesn't make me particularly invested in Batman, Catwoman, Harvey Dent, or others as we're introduced to them. Maybe it's just me, but I absolutely loathe the writing presented here. I had no interest in pursuing the last four episodes. Hard pass.
Sometimes, failing or succeeding in a QTE has the exact same result, making the relevance of them artificial, at best.
The worst offender, though...is that the dialogue doesn't make me particularly invested in Batman, Catwoman, Harvey Dent, or others as we're introduced to them. Maybe it's just me, but I absolutely loathe the writing presented here. I had no interest in pursuing the last four episodes. Hard pass.
2020
Maybe I'll go back to this if they ever update it, but it's an Early Access title that hasn't had any bug fixes or updates since August of 2020 and has some very weak souls-like mechanics. For now, it's not really worth playing because it's so far from polished content (the last bug fix patch put them at 0.12, for reference).
It's a five star game for me still, but with some issues on the Switch.
I played while docked and there was notable slowdown at times, particularly during evolutions or the end of fusions.
There was a really strange refresh that would happen when picking up items that would cause the screen to flash black once for a few frames -- it didn't cause performance issues, but it was weird and worth noting.
I don't mind all the archaic aspects of the game save for one -- if this game ever needed one updated feature, it would be to either have a way to move quickly through phases of Kagatsuchi, or
(USEFUL SPOILERS IF YOU'RE PLAYING THIS HERE)
a simple redesign on mystic chests so that they have better odds of producing the good fixed item on non-FULL MOON phases.
(USEFUL SPOILERS IF YOU'RE PLAYING THIS END HERE)
Tons of optional bosses, enemy formations that will actually challenge the player to think at times about party composition, optional areas, multiple ending paths (although we all know the real path to take), frustrating dungeons.
I love it and can live with the design decisions made in each case for the most part. Still glad I got to get it again and play it again many years later.
I played while docked and there was notable slowdown at times, particularly during evolutions or the end of fusions.
There was a really strange refresh that would happen when picking up items that would cause the screen to flash black once for a few frames -- it didn't cause performance issues, but it was weird and worth noting.
I don't mind all the archaic aspects of the game save for one -- if this game ever needed one updated feature, it would be to either have a way to move quickly through phases of Kagatsuchi, or
(USEFUL SPOILERS IF YOU'RE PLAYING THIS HERE)
a simple redesign on mystic chests so that they have better odds of producing the good fixed item on non-FULL MOON phases.
(USEFUL SPOILERS IF YOU'RE PLAYING THIS END HERE)
Tons of optional bosses, enemy formations that will actually challenge the player to think at times about party composition, optional areas, multiple ending paths (although we all know the real path to take), frustrating dungeons.
I love it and can live with the design decisions made in each case for the most part. Still glad I got to get it again and play it again many years later.
Having come back to this later after playing the Dusk Trilogy, I can say that it feels like later games did it better, but this was a fun time.
Synthesizing was fun, there were some interesting characters, exploration was the usual, but I enjoyed it for the most part.
My only major gripes with the game:
-- The soundtrack (the merchants having four versions of the same track I didn't like definitely didn't help)
-- Some aspects of organization and sorting in the UI weren't that intuitive.
Looking forward to playing Totori and Meruru in the future.
Synthesizing was fun, there were some interesting characters, exploration was the usual, but I enjoyed it for the most part.
My only major gripes with the game:
-- The soundtrack (the merchants having four versions of the same track I didn't like definitely didn't help)
-- Some aspects of organization and sorting in the UI weren't that intuitive.
Looking forward to playing Totori and Meruru in the future.
Just didn't really scratch the dungeon crawling itch I had.
If this game needs one thing improved without a doubt, it's the really goofy mapping system. It draws like it's on a sheet of paper, but it won't fill in rooms unless you step into every single square in the room and make sure you're looking at the appropriate walls.
Why yes, you can walk backwards into a room and into a wall and it will simply suggest that there aren't walls there because you haven't turned around yet!
Other than that, it's very...eh. I've got too much backlog to go through to be interested enough to finish it, though it definitely wasn't difficult in any fashion up to as far as I progressed (end of Floor 3).
If this game needs one thing improved without a doubt, it's the really goofy mapping system. It draws like it's on a sheet of paper, but it won't fill in rooms unless you step into every single square in the room and make sure you're looking at the appropriate walls.
Why yes, you can walk backwards into a room and into a wall and it will simply suggest that there aren't walls there because you haven't turned around yet!
Other than that, it's very...eh. I've got too much backlog to go through to be interested enough to finish it, though it definitely wasn't difficult in any fashion up to as far as I progressed (end of Floor 3).
2017
This game oozes charm and fun.
UPDATE: Finally went back to this in my backlog and played it to completion. I had a lot more fun this time around, though I don't know that I could tell you why.
Exploration gets a little crazy with this game because the non-linearity of it and the ease of fast travel between locations can leave you missing out on entire sections of the game by complete accident. I kept trying to figure out how to get into the mines for the longest time and ended up doing the lake and mines right next to each other long after I was already so overpowered from exploring everywhere else by accident because I just missed some simple paths.
The bosses were still a mixed bag for me -- there's a huge difficulty spike toward the end of the game, but the game felt way too easy before that point.
In all, it ended up being a worthwhile venture and I'd say for the sheer amount of time you can spend with this with exploration alone, it's probably worth picking up at full price and definitely worth picking up on a sale. I finished the game just shy of 20 hours and that was while missing out on at least one extra boss and separate ending.
Previous review below:
----------------------------
Metroidvania taking some Souls-like elements and trying to cobble the best parts together to make a good game but accidentally making it worse (for me).
PROS:
--Whether intentional or not, you can go quite a bit non-linear in your exploration if you master the art of swinging an axe weapon multiple times at the top of an arc when jumping. You cover about double your single-jump distance when jumping left-to-right or vice versa. You also move slightly upward vertically on the first swing if timed right and this opens up access to some places you probably shouldn't be at first. But that's why we explore!
-- Once you get the double jump, jumping feels more enjoyable. More on that later.
-- There's some fun flavor in the item descriptions.
-- I appreciate that there isn't an encumbrance level in this game, though that might actually be why there's a bit of a problem for me with it, too. More on that later, as well.
CONS:
Metroidvanias have a lot of things to measure in order to feel good. Controls, interesting bosses, neat abilities for gating, a good soundtrack, etc. Vigil fails here for me, and here's why:
-- Regarding controls, there are two big issues I have with Vigil. The first is that the single jump feels raw and clunky. It's very off-putting and I had to try and enjoy the game in spite of the jump. Once I got the double jump, I noticed this significantly less.
-- Also regarding controls, the choice to set a dash ability as mapped to your analog movement stick isn't a great one. Worse still, is the decision to put in a significant time delay check for when those motions are executed. The end result is that quickly double-tapping analog left or right to dash just results in walking, while trying to ease Leila to the edge of a ledge can result in inadvertent dashing. Also, the fact that the dash can't be executed after a jump seems absurd, but that's just me. It would have been an easy choice to set item usage to one of the other three directional slots that wasn't healing and let your Circle/B button be dash or remappable.
-- Bosses...are okay. They have a few interesting abilities in some cases, but they most fail because of the nature of this game for achieving damage. More on this shortly.
-- Gating is fine in this game other than the dash ability (at least up to where I've played). Which is ten hours in, with the Mines and the top of the Depressing Forest as the next areas to check. This isn't really a negative, but I needed to talk about how much I hate the dash ability again based on how it was implemented, so here's me complaining some more.
-- The soundtrack starts and stops randomly. Like, REALLY randomly. At first, I thought it was tied to moving in or out of certain areas, but it will just suddenly cease for no reason. I had thought maybe non-combat music was significantly quieter than music when enemies were on-screen, but I eventually found that it would just stop while enemies were on-screen, as well. Weird.
-- Not a big deal, but there's some text issues where an editor proofreading would have been nice. Encountered at least two instances of "I heard from (missing name) that X happened."
-- The UI is really clunky, at times. This is one of the "less great" things that this game copped from the Souls series, because nothing is worse than thinking you've backed out of a menu as you start running only to try and jump and find yourself back in a menu. You can argue this is on the user, but with the menu being shoved all the way over on the side, it's not always apparent if you've left or not if you're just trying to get right back into the game. It's also not a colorful menu, so it's easy to miss when you have dark-on-dark.
-- Another minor issue, but sometimes you can walk way too far into a wall that has no secrets. Spent way too many times swinging at or sliding into pointless walls because it just seems like I should be able to get further in.
-- Monsters sometimes spawn in inaccessible areas off-screen and just die. This is really noticeable in the cult area that you return to later in the game, with some monsters that can poison trying to make attacks from off-screen, then just instantly dying and you getting currency and experience for it. Whoops.
-- The skill systems is broken in both directions. Part of this is because the poise system is so powerful that it makes using anything other than an axe/halberd pointless. If you can do enough poise damage, you smash through anything that isn't a boss.
-- Continuing on the skill system, some skills will have hardly any impact on things while others will straight-up break the game. Reflecting 100% of damage received if you strike an enemy within three seconds? Big impact. Increasing recoil on an enemy from an additional 0.1 seconds to 0.15 seconds? Not so much.
-- One more thing regarding the skill system is that there's no explanation of how some abilities work. With the halberd, I invested in an ability that gave me a finishing move after a "whirlwind attack". I had assumed it was just part of my regular swing combo until I realized there's no actual swing combo for the halberd...you just press Square/X over and over to keep wailing on enemies. Looked to see if I had unlocked another ability that was whirlwind attack -- nope.
-- Minor gripe and this might only be with the Smithy, but having EXACTLY 3000 gold on hand when going to enchant your weapon will cause you to not be able to enchant your weapon. I thought maybe I had not unlocked the actual ability to enchant things yet and ended up spending about 30 minutes online looking through threads to solve this before thinking about it and selling an arrow to bring myself up to 3003 gold, at which point it suddenly worked.
------------------
In conclusion, I might go back to this and finish it someday, but five or six bosses in with no real excitement beyond exploring and lots of little frustrations have kinda put this on the backburner for me. I've got too much backlog to focus on this at the moment. If you're going to pick it up, do it when it's on sale. Probably 50% off.
Exploration gets a little crazy with this game because the non-linearity of it and the ease of fast travel between locations can leave you missing out on entire sections of the game by complete accident. I kept trying to figure out how to get into the mines for the longest time and ended up doing the lake and mines right next to each other long after I was already so overpowered from exploring everywhere else by accident because I just missed some simple paths.
The bosses were still a mixed bag for me -- there's a huge difficulty spike toward the end of the game, but the game felt way too easy before that point.
In all, it ended up being a worthwhile venture and I'd say for the sheer amount of time you can spend with this with exploration alone, it's probably worth picking up at full price and definitely worth picking up on a sale. I finished the game just shy of 20 hours and that was while missing out on at least one extra boss and separate ending.
Previous review below:
----------------------------
Metroidvania taking some Souls-like elements and trying to cobble the best parts together to make a good game but accidentally making it worse (for me).
PROS:
--Whether intentional or not, you can go quite a bit non-linear in your exploration if you master the art of swinging an axe weapon multiple times at the top of an arc when jumping. You cover about double your single-jump distance when jumping left-to-right or vice versa. You also move slightly upward vertically on the first swing if timed right and this opens up access to some places you probably shouldn't be at first. But that's why we explore!
-- Once you get the double jump, jumping feels more enjoyable. More on that later.
-- There's some fun flavor in the item descriptions.
-- I appreciate that there isn't an encumbrance level in this game, though that might actually be why there's a bit of a problem for me with it, too. More on that later, as well.
CONS:
Metroidvanias have a lot of things to measure in order to feel good. Controls, interesting bosses, neat abilities for gating, a good soundtrack, etc. Vigil fails here for me, and here's why:
-- Regarding controls, there are two big issues I have with Vigil. The first is that the single jump feels raw and clunky. It's very off-putting and I had to try and enjoy the game in spite of the jump. Once I got the double jump, I noticed this significantly less.
-- Also regarding controls, the choice to set a dash ability as mapped to your analog movement stick isn't a great one. Worse still, is the decision to put in a significant time delay check for when those motions are executed. The end result is that quickly double-tapping analog left or right to dash just results in walking, while trying to ease Leila to the edge of a ledge can result in inadvertent dashing. Also, the fact that the dash can't be executed after a jump seems absurd, but that's just me. It would have been an easy choice to set item usage to one of the other three directional slots that wasn't healing and let your Circle/B button be dash or remappable.
-- Bosses...are okay. They have a few interesting abilities in some cases, but they most fail because of the nature of this game for achieving damage. More on this shortly.
-- Gating is fine in this game other than the dash ability (at least up to where I've played). Which is ten hours in, with the Mines and the top of the Depressing Forest as the next areas to check. This isn't really a negative, but I needed to talk about how much I hate the dash ability again based on how it was implemented, so here's me complaining some more.
-- The soundtrack starts and stops randomly. Like, REALLY randomly. At first, I thought it was tied to moving in or out of certain areas, but it will just suddenly cease for no reason. I had thought maybe non-combat music was significantly quieter than music when enemies were on-screen, but I eventually found that it would just stop while enemies were on-screen, as well. Weird.
-- Not a big deal, but there's some text issues where an editor proofreading would have been nice. Encountered at least two instances of "I heard from (missing name) that X happened."
-- The UI is really clunky, at times. This is one of the "less great" things that this game copped from the Souls series, because nothing is worse than thinking you've backed out of a menu as you start running only to try and jump and find yourself back in a menu. You can argue this is on the user, but with the menu being shoved all the way over on the side, it's not always apparent if you've left or not if you're just trying to get right back into the game. It's also not a colorful menu, so it's easy to miss when you have dark-on-dark.
-- Another minor issue, but sometimes you can walk way too far into a wall that has no secrets. Spent way too many times swinging at or sliding into pointless walls because it just seems like I should be able to get further in.
-- Monsters sometimes spawn in inaccessible areas off-screen and just die. This is really noticeable in the cult area that you return to later in the game, with some monsters that can poison trying to make attacks from off-screen, then just instantly dying and you getting currency and experience for it. Whoops.
-- The skill systems is broken in both directions. Part of this is because the poise system is so powerful that it makes using anything other than an axe/halberd pointless. If you can do enough poise damage, you smash through anything that isn't a boss.
-- Continuing on the skill system, some skills will have hardly any impact on things while others will straight-up break the game. Reflecting 100% of damage received if you strike an enemy within three seconds? Big impact. Increasing recoil on an enemy from an additional 0.1 seconds to 0.15 seconds? Not so much.
-- One more thing regarding the skill system is that there's no explanation of how some abilities work. With the halberd, I invested in an ability that gave me a finishing move after a "whirlwind attack". I had assumed it was just part of my regular swing combo until I realized there's no actual swing combo for the halberd...you just press Square/X over and over to keep wailing on enemies. Looked to see if I had unlocked another ability that was whirlwind attack -- nope.
-- Minor gripe and this might only be with the Smithy, but having EXACTLY 3000 gold on hand when going to enchant your weapon will cause you to not be able to enchant your weapon. I thought maybe I had not unlocked the actual ability to enchant things yet and ended up spending about 30 minutes online looking through threads to solve this before thinking about it and selling an arrow to bring myself up to 3003 gold, at which point it suddenly worked.
------------------
In conclusion, I might go back to this and finish it someday, but five or six bosses in with no real excitement beyond exploring and lots of little frustrations have kinda put this on the backburner for me. I've got too much backlog to focus on this at the moment. If you're going to pick it up, do it when it's on sale. Probably 50% off.
2016
EDIT: Finally finished this and it's mostly fine.
Didn't bother getting all the hidden souls.
I can state that the game has a hugely obnoxious section that is skippable near the end (you're quite literally about five minutes from endgame when this hour-long borefest is thrust upon you). It's about controlling much weaker bots than yours on the fly and getting booted back to previous checkpoints if you can't do it fast enough. It even includes a boss fight that is just repetition ad nauseum for the sake of padding out a section. I think the fact that you can pause the game and just skip that entire section of the game speaks volumes to how lacking in quality it is compared to the rest of the game.
I didn't realize I was most of the way through the game last time I played, as there was literally only one real boss left when I came back to it and the final fight, which is more of an enhanced alarm battle (which you should be used to by that point).
Still think it's worth getting, but it's not going to hurt you to wait and grab it in a sale. Original review follows below.
---------------------------------
There's a lot of potential here as Metroidvanias go. The idea of possessing your enemies is a great one, but as another reviewer pointed out, it really is underutilized. Using them to fulfill the "Hidden Souls" qualifications is nice, but that means you're using them more for puzzles and less for taking control of difficult situations.
I think the only times I really got to enjoy control beyond puzzles was when I would jump into a room with a horde of bots and would safely hang out somewhere while controlling the other bots to fight each other. Great as that is, it's less frequent than you'd hope and completely not happening if you trigger any alarms because there's nowhere good to hide.
The writing is passable and I appreciate the level of commitment to nerddom with the "Geek" items you can find in some rooms to simply mess with aspects of the game for fun (I REALLY loved the Batman one...for about five minutes).
Several of the boss fights were fun and creative, but puzzling out the bosses wasn't quite what I anticipated and in at least one instance (the boss of the Labs), I feel like understanding what was asked of me wasn't intuitive and that I succeeded more because I just gamed the system...unless what I did was accidentally what was intended of me? That's how unsure I am.
Other notes: I like the soundtrack -- I'm not sure if I'd just heard the tracks before or not, but I feel like at least one or two of them either reminded me of other tracks from other games or at least felt really familiar. That's not a bad thing, per se -- I'm down with a good soundtrack because it really does elevate a game and there's nothing more detracting for me than subpar music.
Creature diversity is probably fine -- I spent a lot more time than expected in areas because I wanted to find all the Hidden Souls in each room, so diversity FELT less distinct than it might have been. Realistically, if you push through the areas quickly, I imagine creature diversity feels a lot more natural.
I like the subweapons and item concepts, but I found myself less interested in using most subweapons instead of just upgrading one and sticking with it as much as possible.
Also of note (as was stated by the other reviewer here), losing all your currency when you die is the worst. And sometimes the save points are far enough apart that you're just going to eat a death by being caught unaware at a bad time. I was trying to save up currency after leaving The Labs to head to the next area of the game so I could see any new shops that might show up and I got diced by an alarm room that just got out of hand. Went from 4500+ cubes to respawning with just 500. Take that as you will, since I guess you can chalk it up to risk vs. reward.
Is it worth purchasing? On Steam, it goes for 13 bucks. I'd say it's worth a full price purchase just for the amount of content I've experienced so far. If it's on sale, snatch it immediately if you have any passing interest in Metroidvanias, because the core concepts are at least fun enough to merit a dozen hours of fun potentially (or less if you decide you're not interested in fishing for Hidden Souls). I'll come back to this and finish it after I shave down some more of my backlog, for sure.
Didn't bother getting all the hidden souls.
I can state that the game has a hugely obnoxious section that is skippable near the end (you're quite literally about five minutes from endgame when this hour-long borefest is thrust upon you). It's about controlling much weaker bots than yours on the fly and getting booted back to previous checkpoints if you can't do it fast enough. It even includes a boss fight that is just repetition ad nauseum for the sake of padding out a section. I think the fact that you can pause the game and just skip that entire section of the game speaks volumes to how lacking in quality it is compared to the rest of the game.
I didn't realize I was most of the way through the game last time I played, as there was literally only one real boss left when I came back to it and the final fight, which is more of an enhanced alarm battle (which you should be used to by that point).
Still think it's worth getting, but it's not going to hurt you to wait and grab it in a sale. Original review follows below.
---------------------------------
There's a lot of potential here as Metroidvanias go. The idea of possessing your enemies is a great one, but as another reviewer pointed out, it really is underutilized. Using them to fulfill the "Hidden Souls" qualifications is nice, but that means you're using them more for puzzles and less for taking control of difficult situations.
I think the only times I really got to enjoy control beyond puzzles was when I would jump into a room with a horde of bots and would safely hang out somewhere while controlling the other bots to fight each other. Great as that is, it's less frequent than you'd hope and completely not happening if you trigger any alarms because there's nowhere good to hide.
The writing is passable and I appreciate the level of commitment to nerddom with the "Geek" items you can find in some rooms to simply mess with aspects of the game for fun (I REALLY loved the Batman one...for about five minutes).
Several of the boss fights were fun and creative, but puzzling out the bosses wasn't quite what I anticipated and in at least one instance (the boss of the Labs), I feel like understanding what was asked of me wasn't intuitive and that I succeeded more because I just gamed the system...unless what I did was accidentally what was intended of me? That's how unsure I am.
Other notes: I like the soundtrack -- I'm not sure if I'd just heard the tracks before or not, but I feel like at least one or two of them either reminded me of other tracks from other games or at least felt really familiar. That's not a bad thing, per se -- I'm down with a good soundtrack because it really does elevate a game and there's nothing more detracting for me than subpar music.
Creature diversity is probably fine -- I spent a lot more time than expected in areas because I wanted to find all the Hidden Souls in each room, so diversity FELT less distinct than it might have been. Realistically, if you push through the areas quickly, I imagine creature diversity feels a lot more natural.
I like the subweapons and item concepts, but I found myself less interested in using most subweapons instead of just upgrading one and sticking with it as much as possible.
Also of note (as was stated by the other reviewer here), losing all your currency when you die is the worst. And sometimes the save points are far enough apart that you're just going to eat a death by being caught unaware at a bad time. I was trying to save up currency after leaving The Labs to head to the next area of the game so I could see any new shops that might show up and I got diced by an alarm room that just got out of hand. Went from 4500+ cubes to respawning with just 500. Take that as you will, since I guess you can chalk it up to risk vs. reward.
Is it worth purchasing? On Steam, it goes for 13 bucks. I'd say it's worth a full price purchase just for the amount of content I've experienced so far. If it's on sale, snatch it immediately if you have any passing interest in Metroidvanias, because the core concepts are at least fun enough to merit a dozen hours of fun potentially (or less if you decide you're not interested in fishing for Hidden Souls). I'll come back to this and finish it after I shave down some more of my backlog, for sure.
2021
This review contains spoilers
I didn't want to write a review on this until I made substantial progress in the postgame. This game is very specific in who it caters to, and that essentially is anyone who wants to try and do teambuilding with monsters with tweaks to the most minute of details in order to overcome future issues.
It excels at this.
It's quite a grindfest in terms of how important every single resource ends up being for everything. At the same time though, the game will reward you even in failure because levels gained on a floor where you perish stay with you, resources gained stay with you, knowledge gained from enemies defeated, favor from gods, and so on.
And you need them, because once you get far enough in the postgame, you're rewarded with what is essentially more postgame, and then EVEN MORE postgame. I think you hit accessibility to about 99% of stuff around floor 415, which is staggering to think about when the regular portion of the game ends at floor 63.
Siralim Ultimate encourages you to explore different fusions for your teams, different specializations to overcome issues, or just trying to find that one strategy that seems to cover enough bases that you can persist in spite of your shortcomings (for me, it was playing Pyromancer with an auto-spellcasting team that would just buff themselves while debuffing the enemy so the enemy would never get a turn).
If you're a completionist that wants to acquire all the achievements in the game, you should avoid this game like the plague because it will demand your commitment to it. For reference, I put in several hundred hours into the game and am somewhere around floor 600, but one of the achievements asks you to visit realm 10000. A number of achievements also ask for damage dealt/received or stats lowered or raised to reach a total of 1 OCTILLION points. As of where I stopped at in the game, I think only one of those values was close to a trillion, which is a far sight from an octillion.
So yeah, the game is a grindfest, but its fun lies in what you want out of it. If you want to try and play mad scientist and build lots of crazy combinations of monsters or just to try and find a team that will break the game in some way after dealing with fusions, artifact socketing, spells, relics, and anointments to add to your specializations, you're in for a treat. Between nether bosses with different behaviors over three encounters, gods, and false gods, you're looking at near a couple hundred boss fights you can get some mileage from just in the postgame.
If grinding and experimentation of that nature are NOT your thing, just move on. I think this game did an excellent job at letting players grind and test their way to a great time, but it's definitely a niche game, no matter how well it did what it set out to do.
It excels at this.
It's quite a grindfest in terms of how important every single resource ends up being for everything. At the same time though, the game will reward you even in failure because levels gained on a floor where you perish stay with you, resources gained stay with you, knowledge gained from enemies defeated, favor from gods, and so on.
And you need them, because once you get far enough in the postgame, you're rewarded with what is essentially more postgame, and then EVEN MORE postgame. I think you hit accessibility to about 99% of stuff around floor 415, which is staggering to think about when the regular portion of the game ends at floor 63.
Siralim Ultimate encourages you to explore different fusions for your teams, different specializations to overcome issues, or just trying to find that one strategy that seems to cover enough bases that you can persist in spite of your shortcomings (for me, it was playing Pyromancer with an auto-spellcasting team that would just buff themselves while debuffing the enemy so the enemy would never get a turn).
If you're a completionist that wants to acquire all the achievements in the game, you should avoid this game like the plague because it will demand your commitment to it. For reference, I put in several hundred hours into the game and am somewhere around floor 600, but one of the achievements asks you to visit realm 10000. A number of achievements also ask for damage dealt/received or stats lowered or raised to reach a total of 1 OCTILLION points. As of where I stopped at in the game, I think only one of those values was close to a trillion, which is a far sight from an octillion.
So yeah, the game is a grindfest, but its fun lies in what you want out of it. If you want to try and play mad scientist and build lots of crazy combinations of monsters or just to try and find a team that will break the game in some way after dealing with fusions, artifact socketing, spells, relics, and anointments to add to your specializations, you're in for a treat. Between nether bosses with different behaviors over three encounters, gods, and false gods, you're looking at near a couple hundred boss fights you can get some mileage from just in the postgame.
If grinding and experimentation of that nature are NOT your thing, just move on. I think this game did an excellent job at letting players grind and test their way to a great time, but it's definitely a niche game, no matter how well it did what it set out to do.
1994
There might be something really good here but the game feels like a slog at times. Every scene transition is several seconds long (including to and from battle) and battles feel really slow.
Although leveling might make a difference, it feels like smithing your weapons is more important than levels (other than extra HP). Might go back to it again someday, but as it stands, I'd rather play through some other games in my backlog ahead of this.
Although leveling might make a difference, it feels like smithing your weapons is more important than levels (other than extra HP). Might go back to it again someday, but as it stands, I'd rather play through some other games in my backlog ahead of this.