#the gameplay was by far the weakest element (which was disappointing)

[amplexadversary]

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[aotopmha]

I did the first two wings of the Pandemonium raid series.

I think Asphodelos is the less interesting wing narratively and more interesting wing gameplay-wise while Abyssos is the more interesting wing narratively, but has the less interesting fights overall.

Out of everything Endwalker did, I've seen the most negativity on the savage version of the Abyssos tier (people seem to *hate* P7S) and I think looking at the normals, I actually was disappointed by P7N because it looked so unique in terms of the arena in any footage I saw of it and in the end that unique arena didn't seem to end up mattering at all on a gameplay level.

I think P6N and P7N both felt underwhelming, really, but P8N wasn't far behind, either.

All three kind of were just really basic AoE dodging fights and felt strangely incomplete.

It's really wierd.

It felt like I was back doing some of the Alexander stuff, where some bosses just sort of fell over. And Omega and Eden didn't really have any of those in my eyes.

I say this because I think P5N is a really cool, complete-feeling fight with a strong identity: the use of shields on the quadrants, a cool transition, neat dodging.

P1-P4 are all also pretty neat. P1 had the crystals and triangle-dodging, P2 the sewers and head and body, P3 is probably the weakest, but it still at least had the phoenix stuff even if it was from other fights and P4 had the elemental effects with Pinax and the whole theater theme.

It's so wierd to feel underwhelmed by fights like this cause technically P6-P8 had their own thing going, P7 had that really cool arena, P6 had the snake debuff, P8 the transformations.

I think it actually are the dreaded massive hitboxes (which is another thing people seem to be annoyed about) that make it underwhelming because you can basically hit the boss from anywhere, so, as I said, that cool arena in P7 doesn't really matter because you can hit the boss from basically anywhere, so you don't have to think about positioning much and in turn hitting the boss doesn't feel as satisfying.

But as I said, all of them also feel wierdly incomplete. I feel like P8 suffers from this the most because it's the final fight and I feel it just kind of "ends". P4N feel like a very complete end, with mechanics gradually complicating, but P8 never seemed to do that.

It feels like all of them needed more time in the oven, so to speak, which is so interesting because it's really rare I've felt like this about a piece of content in this game.

I want to run them a few more times, to think about this issue a little bit more.

But to talk about the story a little bit, I really like the theme of burying your problems and the negative feelings within you that is developed throughout it.

Lahabrea's arc is entirely about him burying his issues in the most literal way you can think of: he cuts the bad stuff out of himself and seals it away and the embodiment of all of those parts, which also has festered on its own for a while, comes back to cause him and everyone else around him issues.

It's such a good alternative exploration and elaboration of the ancients' tendency to not address their issues, particularly anything emotional. In particular, I think the narrative is a really good companion' to Hermes' and his frustrations with the society of the ancients.

And it all ends with Lahabrea confronting the embodiment of all of the negative, unhealthy feelings within him and then finally opening up to his son and being direct and honest with him.

Awesome!

Except Pandemonium is now in the Aetherial Sea in the present.

I love that our actions actually had a negative effect this time around.

And I love that you can actually see it when you go down into the Atiascope.

It's such a good cliffhanger because it opens up so many possibilities and thus a whole bunch of speculation opportunity.

[kyogre-blue]

2.0 livestream impressions complaints (this is pretty much entirely negative): 

Huge decrease in quality from my perspective. I never watch FGO livestreams because they are long and subtitled. I don’t have the patience to watch all the pointless back and forth while having to read what it is, so Genshin livestreams being in English (so I can put them in the background) was basically 80% of why I actually watched them. This one being in CN is a huge downgrade. 

This development stuff would be mildly interesting written form, but in video? Awful.

I’m really glad I watched this after it had aired and not simultaneously because at least I could skip through all the pointless fluff like piano for ten minutes, talking, more talking, "we gather everyone to discuss ideas” which is a novel concept about how large scale projects work for sure... There is basically like one sentence out of five that contains some kind of meaning, and I don’t have patience to sit through the other four. My problems with Genshin aren’t in regard to their technical work to begin with. This is all very nice, but perhaps you should hire some writers. Otherwise, all this nice work is basically wasted. 

“Inazuma is known as the Nation of Eternity” is kind of a joke considering that the oldest nation and Archon are still Liyue and Morax. How eternal can you possibly be when your Archon is a baby compared to Morax?

For some reason, a lot of the Inazuma shots look more like a play set compared to previous videos. Maybe I’m just biased against it though. 

Given the environmental issues, I kinda wonder how people even live there. Dragonspine specifically was a place people can’t really go. 

I am... hm about Baal’s tyranny being framed exclusively through the Vision Hunt so far. Allogenes are only a small fraction of the population. We’re going to focus on this purely fantasy concept of taking Visions and nothing else? Also, what about people who directly give up their Visions themselves? How does that work in regard to it “leaving you empty?” 

Yeah, Yoimiya’s voice is annoying. 

“Euthymia” in medicine is “a normal, tranquil mental state or mood.” In philosophy, “one of the root aspects of human life's goal.” Other definitions are “cheerfulness, a condition according to which the soul lives calmly and steadily, being disturbed by no fear, or superstition, or other passion," or “believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path, and not being in doubt by following the myriad footpaths of those wandering in every direction.” This is also the name of a Greek and Roman goddess. 

They actually called “freedom” and “contracts” themes for Mond and Liyue, which is kind of embarrassing to hear. I could understand if they just didn’t get the idea of including themes in their writing, but they really meant to and just completely failed. 

They wanted to represent Inazuma’s “eternity” theme in gameplay. So how was “contracts” repressed in Liyue gameplay...? 

They have learned from previous regions and abandoned challenges that require certain characters or elements to complete them. 

The sacred sakura has a fox head shape... but otherwise it just looks like reskinned Azhdaha tree. 

2.0 will have Act 1 and 2 of Inazuma (but not Act 3) and also Ayaka’s and Yoimiya’s character quests. 

Baal is “austere.” In that outfit? She will be a major focus of the Inazuma story, so we can presume this is just how Genshin main story will be rolling. It’s disappointing. 

Thoma is specifically called out for having blonde hair which is unlike other Inazuma characters... liiiiike the silver haired Ayaka and Kazuha, or the extremely pale brown hair for Yoimiya and Sayu? Are they seriously making this distinction? In any case, he’s either a foreigner or not all human, I guess. 

Sara is a tengu and has black wings, which I guess she can magically hide. 

Kokomi’s design is a new level of ridiculous, tbh. 

Gorou “looks like a young man” (he is a shorty who looks maybe 13) but based on this I guess he’s also somehow way older. His shirtlessness is actually... pretty off putting. He’s the only character in this bunch I had any interest in, but that pathetic excuse for a shirt...

They really talk up how all these characters are actually so smart and so capable, which is very ominous given what Genshin’s demonstrated writing level is like. If they at least stuck to writing dumbasses, you could excuse the nonsense as being IC, but they insist that all the characters are smart, so... 

Teapot farming is a bit exciting, but the gardening plots look so ugly, haha. VERY excited for the teleport points tho.  

I don’t roll of the weapon banners, but good to hear they did something about that. I saw the video of the dude who blew $1000 trying to get Staff of Homa and only got six Gravestones. 

I don’t understand this thing with crafting artifacts. 

The whole thing has ONLY Aether MC. As a Lumine MC player, I am not impressed. 

Overall, this is basically the weakest livestream of the ones I’ve seen, despite having the most content. 

[mister-maiden]

Pikmin 3 Is a Wonderful Gem

Pikmin 3 was one of my most anticipated games for the Nintendo Switch. I didn't have the good fortune of owning a WiiU, so I never got to experience the third game for myself. After spending 60 dollars on the title, fixing myself up for a long weekend, to my surprise I beat the game in two days...but was I disappointed?

Absolutely not. 

Gameplay: Pikmin 3 forces you to take control of three captains who had crash landed on the planet of PNF-404, a planet encompassed with dangerous fauna, familiar faces, and delicious fruit. Using the captains to form smaller groups of Pikmin, you can effectively multitask across each of the diverse maps available. 

Several puzzles force you to use this feature by giving you the ability to flung captains alongside Pikmin, effectively allowing you to reach new areas both high and far. This ability is best used with small groups performing tasks across the map. Having one captain destroy a gate while another keeps charge of pikmin harvesting berries. Meanwhile you can have your final pikmin harvesting the corpses of enemies to make even more pikmin! 

In this regard, you can play in anyway you want. If you want to keep your pikmin together to keep an army of 100 so you may overpower all in your path, you are certainly free to do so..you may just be hurting a bit on time in comparison to if you divided and conquered. To add onto this, there is a familiar special ability which allows you to split your army apart into the specific elements at your disposal so you can clearly choose the best group for the job.

The objective of the game as you quickly find out is to gather as much fruit as you can to bring back to your home planet of which is having a rather serious issue: starvation. So you'll be looking in every nook and cranny for each piece of fruit you can find to juice and bring back home. 

The fruit are finite, and each gives you a specific amount of juice for fruit. Some fruits have enough juice to give you two days worth of sustenance while others barely give half. It is certainly a welcome change from the first game's finite time limit. It allows players to be rewarded for how well they are performing instead of giving them a deadline. This is a huge gripe many had with the previous installments as well as other games with a similar time limit (Dead Rising comes to mind)

Alongside the fruits, powerups lay hidden amongst the maps which give you certain abilities. I won't dive into this as not to spoil it for any of you new players, but all I'll say is it is worth it to check every corner. To retrieve these treasures, you will have to use a specific amount of pikmin for each item. You can use a bit more than the maximum per treasure to make the journey back to the ship far more quicker. During this time, I recommend traveling with your pikmin so none shall perish to the random hazards of elements and enemies that may have slugged in the way of the path. 

With a lot of multi tasking and pathing involved in this new installment, it seems the developers worked more with the pause menu. A map allows you to see the areas you have explored and seen, marking a small green blip for each creature you spot. This was done intentionally so the player would be unaware of what lay in a path and to determine their best plan of action. To walk through the shorter parh with several blips and pray they are not too dangerous, or go around. A new feature with the mapping system also works alongside how you will be controlling three captains. You can now go to your map, scroll to an area, and press where you would like your captain to walk to. This will trigger whatever captain and pikmin group you have selected to automatically path to the point you selected. This allows for large scale multitasking in which you can have two captains traveling to destinations while your third deals with an entirely different task. A very welcome development for people such as I who want to use their time as wisely as possible.

Combat is roughly the same as the previous installments: overwhelm by sheer number while also avoiding the attacks that have a potential to wipe your armies. Picking the right pikmin for each battle is crucial...but to be honest I felt like this game gave me a bit too much leniency for making mistakes. For instance, there wasn't too much punishment for throwing an incorrect pikmin at an opposite element. You can just whistle them before they perish and all will be okay. Maybe it's my new game wisdom I have earned from thousands of hours of gaming, but I don't remember pikmin 1 being so easy.

Pikmin 3 also brings back the system in which you can slay your enemies...and use their bodies as mulch to grow your garden empire upon.

Your empire is stored in a pikmin bulb! In previous games you would have several bulbs, each being a different color representing the different pikmin types. In this game, there is only one bulb which is chromatic and swirls with different colors. Although I miss the triple pikmin bulb threat and getting violent/white pikmin from the ship, this is a welcome change since it allows the player to quickly populate a group instead of wasting time going to each bulb. 

You can carry the corpses of creatures you kill with your pikmin to their bulb to create even more pikmin! It's always been my favorite part of the pikmin games because it rewards you for playing intelligently and conservatively. 

An interesting development from Pikmin 1 and 2 to this new game is the replacement of the C stick directing agility of the pikmin to a new ability which allows you to send your pikmin forward all at once with a ravenous screech of war. It's great to quickly swarm an enemy, or to feverishly collect fruits and other valuables by surrounding them. While I shall miss the previous agility to accurately create a tendril like construct with my pikmin, I absolutely love the new battle rush!

Each pikmin, as the previous games, have their own situations they are best in. Reds are best at fighting situations, when things get heated up. Yellows for digging and reaching high spaces. Blues are good at swimming...yeah. Then this game introduces two new pikmin at the cost of two of the previous types introduced in Pikmin 2. Stone pikmin and flying pink pikmin replace the fat sumowrestler purple pikmin and toxic white pikmin. Stone pikmin are best when cracking open the defences of enemies or crystal rocks found around the maps. Hell these are my second favorite pikmin because of how they attack. Rather than use their leaves utop their hard heads, they just RUN INTO the enemy as hard as they can. It's amazing. Then my favorite: pink pikmin rule the sky..though they are the weakest in combat (though never underestimate the swarm >:] ) you can have up to 100 total of a combination of the pikmin. My personal favorite is 20 of each, as something special happens as you walk with them.

Spicy berries and bombs make a return in this game. Shrouding your pikmin in a special dust created by the planet's berries gives them a special buff that lets them go mad with energy, moving quickly and hitting harder. What's important in pikmin 3 is that the berry mechanic is much different than the previous games. This game allows the process to be automated. Berries are grown back in minutes, so pikmin can constantly move back and forth from the ship to the plant to harvest more juice in comparison to the previous games where once you harvested a berry plant, it was done for the day.

Bombs allow you to do 'tons of damage'. Throwing a pikmin with a bomb makes the pikmin drop the bomb and run in terror to avoid the massive blast. These are typically used to take down the toughest of obstacles- be it wall or wild creature, nothing shall stand in your way.

These bombs allow you to go forward so you may find shortcuts to shorten your time traveling...and now the final feature I would like to mention is the time system. Each day you are given a specific amount of time to explore the map before day changes to night...and the nocturnal predators awaken from their hungry slumber to feast. Before this time, you must gather your pikmin up as they are helpless without you. If you are unable to gather all of your pikmin, at the end of the day alongside a cinematic of you leading your pikmin to safety, you will have to watch the pikmin you left behind consumed by the hungry beasts of the night...it's rather sad and I would recommend to take track of each pikmin you send out. I have heavy attachments to even these little guys and it pained me just to lose one :c...BUT!

To combat this sad ending, the developers did something wonderful and added a brand new feature to your ship. You can walk to your ship and select a massive whistle option which will attempt to call back EVERY single pikmin on the map granted they can path their way to the ship. This was such an excellent feature as I always had one or so random pikmin in each map getting caught on something random and being stuck. With this tool, it gets rid of a lot of the stress of poor npc pathing which plagued the games before. Sure the pikmin can still get caught, but now there is a proper solution.

Also: there are missions and side content to do if youd like. I enjoyed it! Certainly felt alright...but i still enjoyed the main story more. I never was a huge fan of these types of side missions...didn't really feel like Pikmin.

I also understand there are harder difficulties, but truthfully I hate having a difficulty meter review, so I typically play on normal.

VISUALS and AUDIO 

The Pikmin series has never looked so beautiful. It still holds the familiar cartoon wonders we all loved. Those small moments of captains sticking their eyes out in surprise or pikmin expressing themselves in cute little squeaks of joy or terror. The water is gorgeous, the plant life is vibrant, and the wildlife is horrifying. Seriously, the creatures in this game have never looked so revolting yet adorable at the same time. 

You can take pictures of the world with the camera feature which is nice. It gives you a complete POV from the captain's point of view which is quite hilarious to see pikmin right in front of your face. Adorable little things just staring at you both full of wonder and waiting for direction. I really don't know what else to put here since I can't describe the game by any point except cute since the game isn't about its visuals in the slightest, so I'll leave it at the game absolutely nailing what it was going for.

Overall:

I really enjoyed this game, no matter how little time it took to finish it. It was a happy gift to my childhood in which I got to experience another mouthful of happy juice. It was something I was really looking forward to and I have a certain someone out there who can attest to that. 

Nintendo did a fine job in tuning the nobs of the game in a way that made it better yet still paid respects to the previous installments. I can't explain just how quickly I was taken back to my childhood with the familiar Pikmin themesong that I could sing at any moment on the spot because of how many times I've heard it. I think we all have those sensations that bring us back to moments when we were kids...mine always seemed to be sounds and music, be it the login music of Runescape to the Pikmin themesong. I almost have tears listening to some tracks...but regardless!

Pikmin has always been one of those games I can look at and just say "yeah. that's fun". I love the ability to command troops, make friends, and explore, and this game did all three in a cutely brutal way that I can respect. While I found some disappointment in how short my journey, nothing shall ever beat my love for Nintendo's Gem that has been in my memories for years. I highly recommend you give this game a shot.

[u23art]

A Look At Kingdom Hearts 3.

Kingdom Hearts 3 is an epilogue. 

         Kingdom Hearts 3, is sadly not the resolution we, or at least I, had hoped for. I wanted this to be a celebration of all the things that made Kingdom Hearts great, instead we got a Kingdom Hearts title that frankly is missing a few pieces.  Though there were elements in this game that I adored, it sadly doesn’t overtake Kingdom Hearts 2 in terms of the quality the best titles of the series can achieve. 

         The wait was long, the wait was arduous while fans of the series were drip fed morsels of information about the game. I counted down the days until the day of release, and on the day of release I counted the seconds until Gamestop open while I waited beside the door in below zero temperatures. My excitement didn’t cease as in addition my preorder for the limited edition PS4 Pro arrived the very same day, and since I had no internet due to extreme cold conditions I sat myself down for 3 days and played through Kingdom Hearts 3.

The gameplay, is smooth, I had my worries after 0.2 with its overly speedy movement through stages and at times “lumpy” action, but in 3 though Sora moves fast but the stages are wide and vast, and action inputs are responsive and attacks can be sequenced together with ease from keyblade swings, magic and shot lock commands. My only complaint was that I wasn’t given an option like in Kingdom Hearts 2 to turn off some of these activation commands, cause I could have done without Attraction Flow attacks popping up as often as they did.

  One cool additional feature however, was the ability to upgrade keyblades, rather than just switching to the next new keyblade after each world, each keyblade has a unique play style and you can power it up if it suits your approach to combat. I primarily found myself switching between the Shooting Star and Favorite Deputy keyblades.

The best stages to me, were Olympus, Toy Box and Monstropolous, they were wonderful to look at with tons of spaces to explore. The weakest worlds on the other hand, were Arrendale and San Fransokyo. Arrendale is white, Arrendale is covered in Snow, this is annoying when trying to differentiate areas and either find your way or find lucky emblems. San Fransokyo, is a city block, with grey buildings the blur into one another and it’s ESPECIALLY hard to find things like treasure chests. And then there’s Twilight Town, we are allowed ONE area of Twilight Town to mingle about in. Perhaps they should have put resources into making Twilight Town bigger instead of rendering music videos for "Let It Go" and......"Do You Want To Build A Snowman"......

Story wise, Sora is tasked by Yen Sid to achieve the power of waking in order to bring back Ven. Instead of being a teacher, he sends Sora out guided by his heart to various Disney worlds to get stronger and get the power of waking. Riku and Mickey on the other hand, are tasked with dropping into the world of Darkness to find Aqua.

Addressing this first, I was disappointed with the Riku segments, I expected brief adventures but instead we get two fights. I would have accepted reusing stages and assets from 0.2, we’re looking for Aqua anyway, why not go through places she did as we retrace our steps.

Going back to Sora’s story, it feels far too much like a straight line though points A through B and ect. Kingdom Hearts 2 worked as well as it did thanks in part to Hollow Bastion, a world with an expanding narrative to unravel after beating certain numbers of Disney worlds. On top of not having Radiant Gardens available to visit here, there wasn’t a single Final Fantasy character to drive its plot anyway.

I mentioned earlier that this game felt like it was missing pieces, there were signs that this would be the case when it was evident the first world would be Olympus and not an original world for the narrative to revolve around like Traverse Town, Twilight Town or Radiant Gardens. Upon starting up the game, my fears were further affirmed when I played through the entirety of Olympus’s narrative and Phil hadn’t said a single word. After visiting Olympus a second time, I was further saddened that there was no Hades cup or tournament. There are multiple instances of this throughout the game, this gnawing feeling that something is missing. Kingdom Hearts has always been known as an amalgamation of Final Fantasy and Disney, and to not have an FF character beyond some mentions of Cloud and Auron makes the whole experience feel disingenuous to what Kingdom Hearts is instead of celebrating what makes it great. There are MENTIONS of FF things, like some of the gummi ships, a cactuar and Leviathan from Final Fantasy V, but sadly the restoration committee is a no show.

One of the main selling points of this game was that the worlds are vast and seamlessly interconnected with the exception of a few points. This is cool, however without having separate areas and no brief pauses and transitions between them, the campaigns feel like they just breeze on by despite the fact that each one is a little under 2 hours. This creates a similar sort of problem that Final Fantasy XV had, where there was a focus on making vast open areas but sadly there’s no meaty substance to fill them with.

On a personal note, this game could have been fantastic-ish had they just replaced the shallow Frozen and BH6 worlds with worlds from Pocahontas and Treasure Planet.

The story should have enforced the story of Kingdom Hearts 2, which was immensely fun to play, INSTEAD it enforces THE MOBILE game which is not fun to play and personally I had quit after being sick of road blocks that kept me from progressing. Heck, this game actually undoes a lot of good KH2 did for the overall narrative. Union X stopped being especially fun since it had a habit of creating more and more questions without providing answers, a quality that has been passed on to Kingdom Hearts 3. 

Here is a list of questions that this game created without answering them.

What keyblade information did Larxene, Luxord, Demyx and Marluxia divulge to Saix?

Luxord and Demyx had Keyblades?

Axel and Saix became apprentices to Ansem to Wise to find and save a girl? 

Who is this girl, WHO are they talking about?

If Riku’s inner Riku whisked away Replica Riku to heart heaven, how could Xehanort still have the right amount of Darknesses.

When did Roxas leave Sora’s body to enter the replica body?

How did Roxas fly into battle from the sky?

How did the Norts get Xion’s heart from heart heaven to put into a replica?

How did Ansem the Wise get Namine from heart heaven into a replica?

How did Ansem the Wise conduct experiments on children and keep that hidden? That happened?

Where did Xehanort learn about the stupid requirements of 7 lights and 13 darkness to make Kingdom Hearts appear?

Where the H did Demyx go after he dropped off a replica and Ansem the Wise?

Why did Kairi shatter from Xehanort’s strike?

How did Sora save Kairi?

Where is Sora?

What rock are the Final Fantasy characters hiding under?

And most importantly, why was Phil not allowed to utter a SINGLE words the whole 2 or so hours I was at Olympus?

Ultimately I am happy that I finally got Kingdom Hearts 3, but I have a theory that higher interference kept this game hindered from being truly great.

Consider for a moment, have you notice that Kingdom Hearts 3 was announced in 2013 yet Big Hero 6 didn’t come out until 2014? 

HMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

[lonesomealley]

Risk of Rain 2 Early Access Review and Discussion

Writer’s Note: This review was written after the December update was released. Any opinions and problems with the game are subject to change over time as the game reaches its full release. This review also contains some spoilers? Risk of Rain isn’t really a game that you can spoil, you’re not ultimately losing anything from reading ahead for this type of game.

-=REVIEW=-

Risk of Rain 2 is a game that I’ve played over 200 hours of since I initially bought it on June 5th of 2019. This is important to say outright because it needs to be expressed that Risk of Rain 2 is super into the arcade-y, repetitive, RNG roguelike style that many games before it have fallen into. These games are not for everyone, and if you’re someone who’s expecting runs to be bursting at the seams with new content, you’re going to be left in pure disappointment. At best this game will throw new content at you for the first couple of hours you play, but after that there is a sharp decrease in this content.

However, I have to preface that this review is a positive review, and that Risk of Rain 2 has created a gameplay loop that is very addictive to get into for many (including me). This game can be easily summarized down to the following: You pick a character, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, go to the next level, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, etc. There is technically an “end game” to Risk of Rain however it basically involves becoming so powerful that you’re capable of constantly obliterating all enemies instantaneously. And while this system is fun, this review is going to explain why the end game is currently broken and that the game suffers from a bunch of small yet consistent issues that actively bring down the experience of the game.

First let’s talk about all the things that the game does right. All of the characters, while some flawed, are exceptionally different from each other and are fun to play in their own ways. All of the characters are also well balanced in that there is no character that is obviously the best character in the game, and no character is so bad that it is beyond difficult if not impossible to reach the end game with. The vast majority of items are well balanced in the scheme of the game, with only a couple items being overwhelmingly awful to acquire (primarily the lunar items) and one item being a direct detriment to pickup. We’ll come back to these later in the discussion part. The game’s art style is great, and the stages are beautiful albeit some poorly designed. The enemy types are somewhat varied yet become boring to look at with time, and the AI of the game is pretty mediocre but otherwise serviceable for a hoard shooter. And finally the multiplayer is an alright system of peer to peer, however many players have complained about the lack of host migration, meaning that if the host leaves the lobby, the entire lobby will close.

You wouldn’t know that I basically covered all of what you can really talk about from a basic review standpoint of Risk of Rain 2, if I wasn’t so generous as to tell you. So instead of providing a long form critique/review like the one I just did for Borderlands 3, I’m instead going to give you a brief review with the review score ahead of time, before I go into just deconstructing the game. So, here it goes:

Risk of Rain 2 feels exactly what a sequel should strive to do in the face of a game franchise. It takes the original concept of the first game and puts all of it into three dimensions. The way that this is pulled off is almost so flawlessly done that it is legitimately difficult to attempt to go back to the original game’s mechanics. This new focus on 3D gameplay has come with the freedom of movement that was noticeably absent in the first game (shooting while moving, sprinting, faster movement, and versatile movement skills). In some ways certain elements of the game have become dramatically less important or dumbed down, such as drones being next to useless, homing rockets being seen as passive damage rather than a massive game changer, and the introduction of death pits that correspond well enough with certain items or abilities to completely change the tide of a fight.

In many more ways, however, the game has become a much more flexible and skill based game that allows the player to play in a much more expressive manner. Gameplay is a smooth, fast paced, hoard based experience that will push you to cleverly use the resources that you’ve been given to turn the tides of a fight. Initially this game is going to seem very difficult for people who begin playing on the, “Rainstorm,” A.K.A normal difficulty, because what this game doesn’t tell you is that there are a ton of nuances that will completely change how you play the game as you learn them. During your first playthroughs you’re going to find that Stone Titans are a very annoying enemy, and that the laser is a powerful attack that will melt your health very quickly. Then later on you’ll find that Stone Titans are pretty much push overs in small numbers or individually, because you can stand at the feet of the Titan which stops it from ever trying to laser you. There are many little quirks like this in the game that will ultimately change how you handle the hoard based combat, and eventually you’ll come to the resolution that Lesser Wisps, supposedly the weakest enemy in the game, are actually the strongest.

By the time you reach that point though, you may become frustrated with the RNG systems of the game. RNG dictates a couple things in Risk of Rain 2, but most importantly it dictates what items you get and in what order you get them (randomly). On some of your runs you may find a legendary, or two, or three on the first level that essentially renders the difficulty of that run nullified. On other runs you’re going to get a bunch of trash items 3-4 levels in and eventually find yourself fighting a game of attrition until your inevitable demise. Of course, you can theoretically skill your way through the game, and the further into the game you get, the more possibilities you have to find items that will turn the tides of your run around.

The character you choose is also a massive influence on how you learn to play the game. If you’re anything like me or my friends, you’re going to immediately gravitate towards the Huntress, as she’s easy to unlock and has considerably more survivability than the other survivors that you unlock early on. The biggest problem that the Huntress posses to the player’s attitude towards the game is that she provides players with the tools to never properly learn how to position or prioritize enemies. What happens when you begin playing the Huntress is that you find it very difficult to play other characters such as the Commando, Mult, or Artificer. This may result from what pieces of information that Risk of Rain provides about the other characters simply not being clear enough as to how versatile they really are. This was somewhat addressed with the introduction of, “Mastery,” challenges that unlock cool skins for each of the characters (minus engineer :c). However, I don’t believe that players will be driven to try out these new characters or even play the, “Monsoon,” difficulty of the game before they’ve put anywhere from 20-40 hours into Rainstorm/Drizzle.

Given this, Risk of Rain isn’t ultimately a game about becoming the best at its systems. It feels much like a “for fun” kind of game where you just sit down for a couple of hours and have a blast killing enemies. This isn’t how I approached the game, however if you ultimately decide that the game is too difficult, the Drizzle difficulty is going to be just the thing for you. You will be, more or less, consistently overpowered on this difficulty if you have even the most basic understanding of how to play the game. You can totally just play a Drizzle run for 2 hours straight and ultimately understand the purpose of Risk of Rain: Get overpowered and screen wipe enemies consistently. And even though I personally don’t play the game like this, I wouldn’t blame you if this is how you prefer to play it.

This game isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you like arcady, roguelike, third person action this game will probably be right up your alley. I give this game a review score of 7/10. It is well worth the $20 asking price, and is definitely made much more fun with friends (who can manage to get good at the game). When this game receives more content and is completed I imagine that this review score will go up, but for now this game may be lacking in content for many people.

-=DISCUSSION=-

That’s where the review portion of this post ends. If you really only wanted an overview of what the game is and what it does well, then that’s what I have to offer you. The rest of this post is going to be going into a long discussion about why certain systems of Risk of Rain 2 are bland and overall degrade elements of the game. So let’s dive into those core issues, why don’t we?

Items

Firstly let’s hit on the core mechanic of this game: randomized item drops. The method in which Risk of Rain 2 hands out items isn’t heavily biased into giving a player a certain set of items or outright trying to discriminate against items (except of course that item tiers become more rare as they go up). However the problem with this system is the aforementioned frustration that comes along with a game that's far too dependent on RNG. In some runs you will be given just the right combo that will turn your run into a god run, whereas others are doomed from the start. I don’t consider the option of “skilling” your way through the first 7 stages to really be an option, since without damage and effect procing (chance on hit) items, the later levels become an absolute chore to play through. Of course, this is detrimental to the game in the way that it may just be outright impossible to obliterate or reach god run every run.

Now this is going to be a hard change to swallow, but I think this game could benefit from having biases in its RNG distribution of items which, according to Ghor (developer of Risk of Rain 2), has been confirmed to be entirely random.

This system doesn’t have to be a drastic overhaul that makes every item has its own custom probability for drop, but it should focus on making each playthrough feel a little more balanced. My proposal for this is to make a system that attempts to balance out how many damage, healing, and utility items the player gathers throughout their playthrough. Basically, if you have too many damage and utility items, the game should start pushing towards giving you some healing items and etc. But there’s some new problems introduced with the change.

Firstly, how do 3D printers affect this? Well, I think there’s two options for this. One, have 3D printed items have a special tag on them that stops them from affecting the RNG calculations of items drops. Or two, just doing nothing about it. That latter fix doesn’t seem all too appetising, but I think it could lead to some interesting developments and meta games around 3D printing items.

The other major gripe I have with the item system is that items are hitting this level of power creep that has made certain elements of the game almost meaningless. And when I say meaningless, I do literally mean meaningless. For the most part, Risk of Rain’s item balancing is fantastic with most items feeling like they belong in that tier, while others are either way too overpowered or provide next to no benefit. And this is the type of subject that I think is difficult for ROR2 to get right because the ultimate goal of this game is to become overpowered, so it would make sense for overpowered stuff to just exist, right? Well no. While it is important for the game to have kinda meh items and kinda alright items, the extent to which the game has pushed its power creep is really stupid.

Most predictably I will bring up Shaped Glass. This item has been in hot heat from most of the game’s community for making the gameplay really dull and having little to no actual risk in using it, despite being a lunar item which is supposed to be a risk and reward item. For those uninformed, Shaped Glass cuts your health capacity in half while doubling your damage multiplicatively. All is well so far, until you factor in how healing and one shot protection works in the game. When your health is over 90%, you cannot die to a single hit of damage excluding over time effects like burning or sticky bombs. The basic gist is that by cutting the maximum health you have with Shaped Glass, healing items will retain their default stats and hence actually be improved each time a Shaped Glass is acquired. Given that this item works multiplicatively, (2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x damage and health debuff) a run will quickly spiral into a god run with no penalty to the player long term.

But at least that takes some effort to achieve, where as Old Guillotine has outright destroyed the balance of elite monsters. Stack a couple of these bad boys, and elite enemies are now a complete joke. Originally introduced in the Scorched Acres update as a direct counter to malachite enemies (as far as I can tell that’s the only reason this item was added), this item allows the player to kill elites at a percentage of their health instead of just getting their health to zero. So if you collect 1 guillotine, the elite monster will die at 20% of its health instead of 0%. This item is generally an okay item, balance wise, if it wasn’t already piss easy to instantly screenwipe enemies during a god run. But oh god, the flat percentage rates compared with how high these percentage rates are per stack are ungodly. According to the Risk of Rain Wiki, collecting just 10 of these bad boys will allow you to kill elites at a whopping 90% health. Meaning, if you manage to find an Old Guillotine printer in your mid game, elite enemies are no longer a problem. But let’s be real, no one needs that many guillotines when only 3 of these nets you roughly 50% (This piece of information has become outdated, now it's about 40% for 3 stacks and 70% for 10 stacks). This is the stack count that I usually strive for because it's the best blend of economy and effectiveness. As you can imagine, even with 3 of these, elite enemies essentially become pushovers. Seriously, having 50% of elite enemies’ health gone is just that good, I don’t know how else to explain this pretty simple concept, but yes it’s true.

And I haven’t seen many people in the ROR community saying this item is a bad game item (please email me) so I will now explain why this hurts the game. Nothing in this game, especially in the later stages or god run, will be difficult if you are on the right track. Elite enemies could’ve and should’ve been the one turning point that kept any resemblance of the game's difficulty outside of the bosses (unless you’re already insta killing them). I can really only qualify this claim by making the point that “elite enemies” are called elite for a reason, right? The following screenshot is Google’s definition for the word “elite.”

However, when I think of the elite enemies in ROR2, I think, “Oh hey more money.” Not, “Uh oh this is bad,” or, “I really need to focus this thing.” To be fair, malachites do manage to pull this off even in the late game due to their (rather bullshit) debuff applied on getting hit by their normal attacks or dispersed spikes (we’ll touch on this later). But this mentality is, most likely, not what the developers intended players to think about their marketed “difficult” enemies. This isn’t to say that elite enemies aren’t dangerous, but even that only comes from the fact that flaming and overloading elites can outright kill you from landing one attack on you in late game. But this isn’t a danger that I’m actively worried about when the elites die in mere seconds at this point anyways.

There are also several items that just outright break bosses. Willow the Wisp turns the Grovetender boss into a free teleporter item. The Halcyon Seed is an item so strong, accompanied by a boss so easy to defeat, that it’s worth getting every time. Previously this item was a pretty meh item because the Aurelionite simply didn’t do much damage or assist you in any meaningful fashion. At some point, though, his laser beam attack was added to his friendly AI via an update, and it just melts bosses. Unstable Tesla Coil makes horde boss fights beyond easy (this item generally makes the game a cake walk). And of course, Chronobauble will transform you into an invincible chad ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

I’m sure there are some items that I’ve missed in this list, I could go into some depth about how 57 Leaf Clover is the best item available, or that some items are useless in comparison and were outright terrible for some time because of the developers’ oversights (H3AD-ST-v2 breaking Artificer’s float and Aegis being worse than the Topaz Brooch.) But you should get the point. Overall the item balancing isn’t awful, the game is still overall playable without an overwhelming amount of this power creep, and to be fair instantly melting the bosses in this game is enjoyable even if I don’t, at all, deserve it.

Stage Imbalance

What is awful then, is the stage imbalance present in the game. Stage imbalance is probably one of the biggest things turning me off from the game right now. Nothing frustrates me more than getting Scorched Acres or Siren’s Call on a shitty run, and basically having to accept my death because I’m unable to grab the Preon Accumulator or kill the AWU with my pitiful damage and healing.

For some unknown, dumb shit reason, Hopoo has stated that this is the way they want to continue developing the game. So this is an issue that isn’t getting fixed, and might get worse over the next three updates. I really hope it doesn’t, because the idea of having the game be more luck based than it currently is might just make me pull my hair out. These tiny, rather inconsequential things in the moment, will eventually build up into a sort of “power creep” among the levels. I’m unsure if this is the right term for this imbalance between the levels, but right now it certainly feels like exactly that. Now, to be fair, there are only 2 levels per stage, however I will now argue that this only furthers the point that this design style is harmful to the gameplay.

Right now, it feels like the most optimal stage path is Distant Roost, Abandoned Aqueduct, Rallypoint Delta, and then Abysmal Depths. While some of these maps have their own issues, the others have issues that pull the maps to be less favorable than the ones described.

Titanic Plains, firstly, is way too big and spacious in comparison to Distant Roost. When you spawn into Distant Roost, you can very quickly identify where the teleporter has spawned due to the compact nature of the map and where the teleporter can spawn. This compactivity also gives you the benefits of an RNG chance at a large supply of items spawning in the center of the map. Titanic Plains is giant, and lacks anything interesting to look at or venture into. It’s an okay map, but has a huge issue with pacing and seems to come from a completely different design philosophy than Distant Roost. Far too many times on Titanic Plains I will get confused on where the teleporter is because it’s out in the open plains area on a bright blue backdrop. And of course, the particles that the teleporter gives off are not prominent enough to stand out from this backdrop.

Other times it’s tucked way too far into a back corner, or obscured by a structure.

The items on this map are also very hit or miss, sometimes I favor Titanic Plains over Distant Roost for how many items this map can really provide, other times I leave the map with the bare minimum for my tastes. This is, however, a problem with the general generation of chests and not strictly an issue with Titanic Plains, but I feel the issue is exacerbated on Titanic due to its size.

I also largely favor Abandoned Aqueduct over Wetland Aspect because of its readability and predictable chest placements. Wetland Aspect has way too many branching pathways with tons of stuff in the way. This is the one map I’ll often ask myself, “Did I miss checking somewhere?” or, “Did I miss it when I was looking through an area?” The teleporter, more often than not, seems to always be tucked away into some obscure corner that I have to go way out of my way to go for. Although I will say this map’s chest distribution is far better than TItanic Plains.

A map that is terrible in almost every aspect however is Scorched Acres. I truly despise this map, and seeing it come up on 50% of my playthroughs makes me want to turn the game off and leave it for good. This map is god awful, where Rallypoint Delta has a circular pathing structure so you can walk all the way around the map and get almost all of the chests (for players who are into that), Scorched Acres is a slow slog up some water geysers and into a park and down some giant structures, ugh. The best place to spawn on this map is at the highest point it generates, because having to look up to find the teleporter’s red specs on an orange background is comparable to making color blind people take color blind tests just so you can laugh at them. And having to get to a specific point on the map in order to jump up a water geyser, for a game about time management, is outright awful design. This map also lacks basic functionality that others ones have like the special TC-280 Prototype (who cares honestly) and the timed chest which contains a free Preon Accumulator (I care). And when I say lacks, I mean it doesn’t have anything else to compensate. Generally how you’d play this map, is you’d locate the teleporter or establish a general area for where the teleporter is, and linearly work your way towards it. If you see an area with a bunch of chests, you sit there and grind up enough money to collect those chests before heading on your way.

Now that final bit might have you scratching your head, “Don’t all of the maps play that way?” Well yes and no, you can play it that way if you want, but most maps are going to have the connectivity to allow you to skip on those chests until after you’ve found some other chests or defeated the teleporter event. You basically cannot do that on this map unless you want to waste minutes of your time or you have so many jumps and so much speed that you can jump from the center of the map to the upper areas with ease. Some characters also have an easier time on this map than others like the Huntress, but that’s generally just amplified because of the shitty map design and not a specific issue for Scorched Acres.

Finally, we come to Abysmal Depths versus Siren’s Call, and. . . Abysmal Depths wins, no big surprise. Siren’s call isn’t really a bad map per se, it’s compact, somewhat easy to navigate, and isn’t a hassle to get the things you need. However there’s one massive imbalance with this map, and that’s the Alloy Worship Unit. The AWU is Siren’s Call’s way of getting a guaranteed red item, and this boss fight is pretty damn tough even after its nerf. This boss scales faster than other enemies, so if you don’t get to him quickly in your early game you’ll be suffering in this boss fight, hell you’ll be suffering anyways. But beyond the boss being a pain to defeat, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with placing a red item behind a boss. Except when you take into account the fact that it is menially easy to get the golden chest on Abysmal Depths. The golden chest on Abysmal Depths always spawns in the same location, and costs a whopping 16 times the cost of a normal chest for the stage. There’s no hooks, no catches, it just requires a decent time investment to get the item because you’ll be grinding out normal enemies. That time investment is the only real contending downside for going for the golden chest on Abysmal Depths, but that also applies to fighting the AWU. If you have a terrible build and you’re gambling for a good red item from the AWU, you could find yourself spending just as long (longer even) fighting this boss. Plus you have the possibility of dying, meaning your run is over. At least now you'd have another chance to get Abysmal Depths.

And sure, as of the December update the AWU has been nerfed pretty drastically. A huge 75% decrease in damage scaling and 20% less scaling in the health department means that this boss is now overall easier to kill. But these changes haven’t ultimately made the boss any more enjoyable to kill when the run just isn’t getting started. Sure, now you can kill it faster, and you now have a more adaptable playstyle where either stage can be more viable than the other depending on your loadout but I still feel myself gravitating towards Abysmal Depths more often than not. This update also added “map variants,” but for the sake of just calling them what they are, they’re basically just additional maps. I’m honestly okay with having more than 2 maps per stage, I think that can lead to a pretty satisfying experience. My only real gripe with these maps is that you can tell these were made by another company and not Hopoo. These maps, especially the Distant Roost variant, incorporate a lot of vertical space into their game play and map flow that at times can be confusing to work around for new players. However I would not be opposed to having essentially 4 different maps for the game to choose from, granted that they’re all balanced well enough.

If Hopoo doesn’t wish to balance the stages with each other, the much simpler system I’d recommend is to have the game force the player to eventually play that stage they missed out on later. So instead of being able to get Scorched Acres 2 times in one run, if the game makes me play on that map for my 3rd stage, then I should know for a fact that I’ll get Rallypoint Delta for my 7th. And of course for Rallypoint Delta I would also recommend putting a second timer on the Preon Accumulator chest just so that it’s an option for players who don’t get it on their first loop. This would scath a good amount of my frustration towards the system because at least then I’d know my run would balance out towards the end.

The stage progression system in this game is currently very awkward. As of writing, you have to run through 7 stages before you can enter a “celestial” portal and obliterate yourself at an obelisk. It seems the way that Hopoo wants to take the game is to have 4 entirely unique stages, and then from there you’d either go to the boss or you may be forced through another loop of the game until stage 7 where the celestial portal will be replaced with the portal to the final boss area. I wish this system was more transparent with where it’s going, and if it is going to do a double looping system I’d honestly appreciate just having 7 unique stages rather than this current system. Again, this problem would be fixed if the game forced you to play the alternative stages on concurrent loops.

Feedback

Feedback was something that was somewhat addressed in this recent December update. The screen now gets dark around the edges when you’re hit and at low health your screen will start graying out. These are absolutely great steps towards integrating more feedback into the game, but it’s still missing the mark with a lot of elements.

Namely, elites have been one of the leading factors in me dedicating a part of this discussion to the feedback of the game, and this is due to the shift towards developing more powerful, end game elites. A lot of the time in Risk of Rain 2, especially end game, you’ll find yourself in situations where you just die seemingly instantly. This isn’t a problem specific to the end game but more a general problem with the lack of feedback that the game gives you when you’re being hurt or have, say, a sticky grenade stuck to you. This recent update has since added some incredible feedback additions to the game, but this system is still lacking. In an ideal universe, I should be able to tell how I’ve been hit and what’s happening to me without having to specifically focus on that. To an extent this game does that well, red lasers appear from Lesser Wisps and shoot very quickly, Golem laser blasts are pretty distinguishable, and so on. But other elements, namely elemental elements, are an area of the game that lack any specific feedback currently.

It would be cool if there were different effects that showed on screen when I was hit by different elements. Such as flames around the edges of the screen when I’m on fire, vines or whatever for the malachite, and some ice for freezing. In the case of the sticky grenades (whatever you wanna call them) it would be cool if they had a Halo-esque sound effect where it would beep for a bit before exploding to give you a very clear indication that, “You’re about to die.” Currently the game lacks this. At best the fire ticking away at your health always means that the screen is darkened, but this is an annoying effect to have on your screen for more than a mere moment. I’d say feedback is the primary reason why malachites are such a massive problem in this game, because more often than not I’ll get the malachite debuff without realizing it and then die shortly after because I wasn’t regenerating health.

More auditory feedback would also be greatly appreciated. Something as simple as a crashing sound (like the Loader’s gauntlet punch) to indicate something like, “You’ve just been melee attacked!” would go a long way to improving the crowd fighting aspect of the game. I would also like to see some more ambient sounds for enemies to emit simply from existing on the map like the high pitched hum of the Lesser Wisps or the burrowing of the Magma Worm. Again, for the most part, the audio is done well, but some enemies are just lacking in any auditory presence. Bosses like the Grovetender and Titan don’t have just a passive sound effect, you’re really only alerted to their presence when you’re close enough to see them or to initiate their attacks. Being able to hear the distant chattering of rocks or the clanking of chains in the distance to signify bosses being around the corner would add a lot to the ambience of this game. It already seems that Hopoo wants to do something great with the game’s audio because of the already existing ambience, enemy sounds, and even the music that all feed into Risk of Rain’s atmosphere. Right now it’s just lacking.

Lunar Bazaar / Lunar Coins

This system, you can tell, is disliked by most people who play this game. Streamers are always talking about how they’re out of lunar coins and a fair amount of the playerbase have just cheated themselves to a couple million so they’ll never run out. In a lot of different ways, I don’t like this system. It encourages players to grind the game instead of playing it for fun. It requires stocking up on coins in down time runs so that players can experience god runs. The system is easily made meaningless by just a simple value change and people who do this are having more fun with the game than those who don’t. And there’s a couple more issues but let’s just begin listing out these problems and going in depth from there.

First, let’s talk about how many lunar coins you can expect to earn from a single round of playing just going from stage 1 to stage 7 and obliterating. On average, I was earning about 6-7 lunar coins on each run, 1 or 2 from random drops and 5 from obliterating which always rewards the same amount. This isn’t factoring in the new secret boss that has the capacity to drop 10 lunar coins, plus the 5 you’d earn from obliterating. So in the best ideal scenario you could earn a profit of 16 lunar coins (Beads of Fealty cost 1, 10 from the secret boss, 5 from obliterating, and assuming you get 2 from world drops). But you probably won’t be able to fight the secret boss consistently from run to run without losing lunar coins in the process, so for the sake of argument I’ll be leaving this new boss out of the equation. All of this math speak demonstrates the upcoming point: You aren’t paid enough lunar coins on a per run basis. Let’s assume that you start off a run with 5 lunar coins from a previous obliteration, and that you’re going to earn 2 more as random drops throughout your progression. The cheapest that you can acquire a lunar item, far less likely one that you actually want, is 1 lunar coin spent towards a lunar pod. The next possibility is that a free blue portal appears and then you find an item you want and can spend 2 lunar coins on it. The scenario after that is that you purchase a blue portal for 1 lunar coin, go in and find the item you want and buy it for 2 to make a total of 3 spent. From here the total amount of lunar coins spent can increase exponentially because, given the rng nature of the game, it’s totally possible to never find the lunar that you want. And that’s a big problem, because ROR2’s rng systems are essentially locking away the player’s potential for success at almost every turn.

And the reason for that is the absolutely abysmal balancing of the lunar items. See, the regular items can get away with a decent amount of imbalance because one, these items don’t negatively affect the player in most instances (Personal Shield Generator cough cough) and two, you’re given the opportunity to 3D print these items away for potentially better items. At best, you can spend more lunar coins at a cleansing pool to have the potential to remove a lunar item that you dislike, but again that’s just more rng on top of the rng and costs lunar coins to use. It’s incredibly easy to lose all 7 of your lunar coins because the game just refuses to give you the item you want, which is most likely going to be Shaped Glass or Gesture of the Drowned. So I suppose I’ll begin with why you’ll most likely want these items over other ones.

Shaped Glass, as mentioned before, doesn’t really have a downside to using it as it’s pretty easy to abuse the game’s mechanics with it. Firstly, if you’re killing more things faster, those things most likely won't even have an opportunity to damage you. This is an okay example of a risk versus reward mechanic, but I’m going to have to lean on this item being more rewarding than risky. That’s because, as also stated before, healing doesn’t scale with this item, hence the lower amount of health you have the faster you can recover back to full. And recovering back to full is important because you restore one shot protection which allows risky players to continually survive even in the most drastic situations by abuse of the mechanic. This item is the foundation for building a god run.

Gesture of the Drowned, on the other hand, has a downside that’s very easy to bypass by simply picking up the right items and equipment. If you pick up something like Preon Accumulator, sure it shoots off 50% more often but now you have to be constantly thinking of what you’re going to be shooting it at and at what time it’s going to happen. Where as if you pick up a Deployable Missile launcher, you don’t have to worry about aiming at all because those rockets are homing and rarely go after the target you’re trying to aim at anyways. Gesture + Deployable Missiles also synergizes incredibly well with Soulbound Catalyst which decreases your equipment cooldown by 4 seconds every time you kill and enemy. So in this scenario, as long as you’re able to continually chain kills with your abilities and the missiles, you will be spewing out missiles constantly with no stopping. So there’s not really a downside to picking this item unless you really want to use something like the Preon Accumulator which, most of the time, isn’t a necessary item for the late game. There are a plentiful amount of other equipment that synergize decently well with Gesture as well such as the Gnarled Woodsprite, Royal Capacitor (due to its short cooldown time), the Back Up, Blast Shower, etc. So odds are that you’ll already be carrying an equipment that synergizes well with Gesture.

Examples of lunar items that are bad would be Brittle Crown, Corpse Bloom, and Effigy of Grief. These items are ones that no rational player would ever consider picking up in their runs (maybe Effigy if you got it from a lunar pod). Corpse Bloom is an item that you’d really only take if you were desperate enough to just get through the rest of the run, but even then it may be detrimental to your healing capabilities. The only situation I can see Corpse Bloom being useful would be in situations where the player has no active healing items and has had to rely on passive healing for the entire duration of the run. Otherwise, in the long run, the item will only restrict the player’s ability to be successful because they’re going to be hard limited to that 10% healing per second. This means that for the player to reach the one shot protection threshold from less than 10% health, they’ll be waiting a whopping 9 seconds and cannot take damage during that time otherwise the player is dead in late game. These kinds of items are embarrassing to see in the lunar item pool and are essentially scams.

Another item that’s entirely a scam is the Brittle Crown. On paper this item seems like a blast. You’ll have about a third of a chance to acquire additional gold simply from dealing damage to an enemy that scales over time, and the only downside is that the player will lose gold equal to the amount of percentile damage taken. What percentile damage means is that if you lose 90% of your health, you lose 90% of your gold. It’s another example of a risk versus reward item, but during the entirety of the run you’re bound to take a lot of damage simply because of the hoard combat. There are a lot of factors to take in when fighting a hoard and not taking damage on just one stage is incredibly difficult. So that means that you’ll be losing gold quite often, and losing this gold (especially while farming) can be devastating to the flow of your run. Especially in the late game where you can lose millions of gold all because you simply got hit once. There is no chance of losing gold either, it’s 100%. So if that isn’t enough to dissuade you from this item, then the fact that this item costs lunar coins to acquire absolutely should.

I’ll skip talking about the Effigy of Grief so I can get back to the point that lunar coins are a limited resource. So how do you stock up on these? Well, since lunar coins are kept between runs, that means the best way to experience the game is to grind out a couple obliterate runs until the player has stocked up over 10 to 20 lunar coins. This will give the player a decent amount of wiggle room for spending and dealing with the RNG of the lunar bazaar. Here’s the issue with this: The player will most likely grind them out over a long period on Monsoon or speedrun Drizzle to maximize how many coins can be acquired in a short amount of time. Grinding, as a game mechanic, is very polarizing for many different players. It has its place in games because why else do we have the massive game titan World of Warcraft, or Borderlands, or Destiny, or just about any mmorpg to hit the market? But introducing grinding to your small, indie roguelike is questionable.

The grinding system of lunar coins in Risk of Rain just feels like Hopoo wanted to have a more premium currency for adding depth to the game, but had no clever ideas as to what they wanted to achieve with it. Right now, the system is bland, uninspired, and cumbersome to play with for many legit players. The first thing to get out of the way is that I have the actual data collected in Hopoo’s discord server to back up what I’m saying here. This poll was posted by a moderator from the aforementioned discord server to collect feedback for the developers to work with.

Most players here are saying that they’d like to be paid out more lunar coins because they’re shredding through them too quickly. Personally, I tried to avoid spending lunar coins except in situations where I really wanted to win a run or was trying to shoot for a god run. Before my save file corrupted I had about 180 lunar coins which is absolutely more than enough to keep up consistent runs for a while, but that’s assuming I’d want to be working at a deficit. This is because, for the lunar bazaar, the chance of the item you’re specifically looking for spawning is around 30% according to this video and it's even less for the lunar pods (This piece of information has become outdated with time as more lunar items have been added to the game, dropping the percentage even lower). Using this logic and the knowledge that I’ll be spending at least 2 lunar coins on a bazaar item it’s pretty easy to deduce that i can easily play my runs at a lunar coin loss if I am actively trying to get that one item. All of this, again, creates a down time period where players either won’t be spending any lunar coins or are actively trying to build them up. I do not believe, however, that simply increasing the amount of lunar coins paid out will entirely fix this problem.

I would recommend entirely revamping the lunar system to be way different or just outright deleting the lunar system altogether and allowing lunar items to spawn as world drops. There are a couple ideas that come to mind: Randomized challenges on each run that reward lunar items, making lunar items world drops, or creating more world events like the Void Fields, mountain shrines, or maybe even being able to fight the lunar bazaar shop keeper so that he’ll drop a lunar item. These randomized challenges don’t need to be anything specific, but I do believe they should incorporate a good amount of the environment and gameplay to make each run unique in its own ventures. Something like tasking players to kill Runald and Kjaro (ideally only as the engineer or in multiplayer games), activating a newt alter on a specific stage, reaching a stage within a specific time, etc. These challenges would reward specific lunar items and be cycled out for new challenges upon completion so that the player isn’t limited to their capabilities in late game. A system like this probably doesn’t solve the rng factor of obtaining the lunar items and is contrary to the goal of lunar items (to be risk and reward items) while probably creating a list of its own issues, but at least now players won’t feel limited by simply how many lunar coins are on them.

Hoppo could completely remove the RNG aspect of obtaining lunar items while still keeping lunar coins a viable option in the game by allowing the player to purchase a specific amount of certain lunar items at the very beginning of the game or even in the character select menu. A system like this would completely kill off the rng aspect of the game, while encouraging players to levy their odds of just how far they want to go with their run. A player can purchase 4 Shaped Glasses right at the beginning of the game, but the player is going to have to be able to carry those throughout the entirety of the game if they want to achieve a god run and should they die, they lose whatever they invested into the run. Although I’d have to wager that there would be a limit to how many lunar items a player can buy each run so that the player doesn’t just stock up on lunar coins and Shaped Glasses for easy runs. Of course the issue of down time still isn’t resolved, but given an increase in the amount of lunar coins paid out would ensure the player could somewhat consistently engage with this system on a run by run basis.

Having lunar items drop as extremely rare world drops would also be an interesting spin on the mechanic but is probably far less desirable than the other options. While it would make gathering lunar items more consistent, I imagine the rng chance of obtaining lunar coins would be comparable if not less than red items. Although I imagine having the occasional lunar drop would allow players to quickly restructure their runs assuming they got a worthwhile item. Aside from this minor bonus, this suggestion wouldn’t be capable of replacing the current lunar system that’s in place.

While the lunar system is simple and intuitive, it’s overall harmful to the game and draws many players towards just cheating in millions of lunar coins so that they never have to micromanage this currency. Please understand that the above suggestions are merely suggestions and not tried and true methods for replacing this system. However given that Hopoo doesn’t even seem interested in nerfing Shaped Glass, I suspect that the lunar system won’t be changing any time before release.

World Events

The new optional events included in this December update are absolutely fantastic. The Void Fields are a fun way to break up the monotony of the game, and having a new optional boss to kill is always a joy. Even though I may trash on bosses like the Aurelionite, having these bonus areas to play through does make the game feel more substantial, and I think Hopoo should incorporate more of these deliberate world events and even some procedurally generated ones.

I personally enjoy the small secrets and additions like Kjaro and Runald’s cave, shrine of N'kuhana, etc. But I find these additions too small in scope to really be worth the effort to achieve every run. The Void Fields on the other hand is a substantial enough challenge and provides a large enough scope that I want to see more of in upcoming content updates. It would be cool to have the world be an almost mmorpg-esque world, with multiple side objectives to do along the way to a main objective. The unfortunate thing here is that not all of these side things are worth doing. N’kuhana’s shrine in fact offers nothing to the player outside of the initial unlock of the item, N’kuhana’s opinion. And the cave of Runald and Kjaro isn’t worth visiting for the measly two green items, on top of the caves only being accessible in multiplayer, or as the Engineer, or managing to glitch your way through the door with character abilities like the Huntress’ blink. I believe the Void Fields did it right in this regard by having a decent reward for players to contend for in the form of 8 white/green items and a red item. Perhaps having items that were more easily accessible or simply rewarding more items and incentives to partake in these optional areas (3D printers, boss items, particular shops, etc.) would drive more players to use them in their common routing. Blend these generated areas with the suggested stage progression of playing each stage once throughout a run, and a player would be able to make a reasonable path of execution that they could somewhat reliably depend on as long as rng was on their side.

To keep the more randomized spin on a player’s run, the use of randomly generated events could be used to allow the player to participate in potentially unique events to acquire a little bit more power for a little bit of their time. A system that immediately comes to mind is a hit list: You load into a new map and the game will tell you to kill a specific enemy on the map for a reward. In of itself, having something like this wouldn’t do much to bolster the game for people who can already kill bosses consistently, so instead there would need to be some type of modifier system. Simple modifiers could be used like 2x damage, health, enemy leeches health on hit, etc. But simple modifiers cause a game to lack depth, so I propose different challenges and modifiers: Time limits, hydra bosses (duplicate on death), health gated bosses (to somewhat halt OP players), and maybe even specialized boss elements that are separate from the usual elite elements. That isn’t to say that these randomly generated events even have to be bosses, it could be something to defend, a flag to capture, a delivery drop to conquer, etc. I believe this would be the best way to keep a game like this fresh while maintaining a lot of what the game wants to do.

Randomized events could also be a risk versus reward endeavor through the use of limiting what abilities and items the player has access to. Let’s say in the latter parts of the game, the player can stumble upon an event that will restrict them down to 20 randomized items (while they possibly have over 100 to be chosen from). Although I’d wager that players in this position would just opt to not even do the event as it could possibly end their run, what better way to reward these players for being risky than giving them more of the lunar items they want or even lunar coins? If players are able to be more productive in their runs by taking these additional challenges, I believe it’ll drive those players to accept these events in their late games. Plus these events give the game that feeling of a larger scope without altering all that much about the levels or the gameplay. And really, you only need to put like 2-3 on each stage to make the events system feel substantial enough.

Overall, I think if Hopoo were capable of designing a system like this, and designing it well, it could draw players back into playing the game for hours upon hours on top of what they’ve already invested. For me personally, the game has gotten pretty bland to play with time because each run just feels like it runs through the same loop: Hope for good beginning items, hope for good stages, farm for a red item on stage 4, and then if I’m doing alright I’ll try to get my way to the celestial portal, if I’m doing really good I’ll try to go for a god run. As much as the game tries to hide this gameplay format by having a wide range of RNG systems at play, the overall experience after a couple hundred hours can become apparent and stale as time progresses forwards. That isn’t to say that I think the current game is bad, but I think it could be so much more than what it is currently.

Challenges?

Another thing that would go a long way to making the game feel more expansive and player-progression focused would be the implementation of some good ol’ challenges. Hopoo seemingly doesn’t know how to develop a challenge that doesn’t have something locked behind it, or outright refuses to make challenges without a reward. Like seriously, some of the hardest challenges in the game reward alternative abilities for characters. Some of those being direct upgrades from the character’s normal ability. You really mean to tell me that I have to beat stage 20 without picking up any lunar items just to get a frag grenade for Commando? Alright, I guess. Hopoo has even realized that not all players want stuff to be locked behind challenges, and has added a decent amount of immediately accessible content to the game to appeal to those who aren’t into the challenges system. However they have also stated that they’re proud that players aren't immediately able to unlock the new abilities from the Skills 2.0 update and I just have to wonder, why?

Limiting the players to the degree that Risk of Rain 2 does seems overall harmful to a player’s experience with the game. You don’t unlock the best red item in the game, 57 leaf clover, until you’ve managed to clear 20 stages in a single run, which will probably be a player’s first time getting a god run. When you start up a new save file, you’re severely limited on the items that you can get your hands on because stuff like tougher times, armor piercing rounds, berserker's pauldron, preon accumulator, etc. are just locked away from access completely. That is disappointing because many of these items are staples in developing a good build, and it’s now more difficult for players to understand what items do what and which items are worth the time and effort when they have to unlock the item first and then have a random chance of acquiring it in a future run with a random amount of stacks to be accumulated. It’s even more disappointing that players have to fight a hill of challenges that get progressively more and more steep with its requirements and begin requiring players to either master elements of the game or the characters present.

I understand having hard challenges in your roguelike, but having items and content locked behind those challenges can turn a lot of players away from your game. The only saving grace here is that these challenges don’t have difficulty requirements outside of a couple select challenges, but most of these only offer cosmetic rewards that come from the monsoon obliteration challenges. It seems inexcusable to me that there wouldn’t just be challenges that players could attempt for fun. Instead we have challenges that players are being forcefully drawn to if they want new toys and gadgets to play around with in their future runs. Some of the challenges are understandable to skip, like if you don’t like the Engineer, you probably don’t have to worry about doing his challenges. However I wouldn’t skip any of the item and equipment challenges because items and equipment are the core of the game experience. Being limited in the items available means you’re only experiencing a limited amount of the game, and that’s a big no no.

The change that I’d propose here is just to nerf a lot of the more difficult challenges that have gameplay impacting items locked behind them, and then put those challenges in their own categories that players can try out on their own time for their own enjoyment. With these changes the unlock system would appear less like a grind and more like something for completionists and avid players to use in order to test their skills at the game. Something else that I’d recommend is a little stamp or indicator that tells people what difficulty the challenges were completed on, just as a little extra something for players to work towards. This part of the discussion is relatively simple because, come on, it’s challenges. But hopefully Hopoo changes the way that they handle the inclusion of challenges in the future.

Collectibles

Oh boy the collectibles. The collectibles aren’t terrible and before my save corrupted I was very close to have 100%’d the unlocks and collectibles, but 200 hours in and I still hadn’t unlocked everything. And the reason for that is because the unlocks take way too long to unlock and are way too frustrating to actively chase after. The environment logs became a chore to try and collect, when after spending about 100 hours after the Scorched Acres update I was still completely unable to obtain its environment log. It took me 90+ Grovetender kills to finally get his monster log, and to this date I’ve only had the little disciple item drop for me twice (one was in a multiplayer match). I ultimately gave up on trying to even go for the Aurelionite’s monster log when it once took me 4 hours to get a single gold portal to show up in a god run.

This section of the discussion is going to be short because I have a very simple message here: Increase the god damn drop rates of some of this stuff, seriously. It’s not satisfying to spend 200 hours and still see that there’s some little lore tidbits that I’m missing from my log book. It’s not satisfying to have to stop my flow of gameplay every time I get Scorched Acres just to have a tiny tiny tiny chance that the environment log radio might have somewhere on the map and then having to go hunt for it. And then when I don’t find it after being way more thorough than one should be on any given stage, I then have to question if I simply missed it or it actually didn’t spawn. It’s not satisfying to finally get that environment log or that one item from that one boss that has a random chance to spawn in the 50% chance stage that also has his own fucking chances on whether or not he’s going to drop the monster log and/or the boss item. Stuff like this is absolutely ridiculous and tedious and is making me work way too hard and having me dedicate too many resources just to get some god damn lore text. Little disciple isn’t even that good of an item, so why is it so rare? Just increase the spawns of stuff like the gold portals, monster logs (for bosses), and environment logs. Come on Hopoo, I just want to read your game’s lore.

-=CLOSING=-

So that’s my super long and in depth explanation and critique of many of the systems that Risk of Rain 2 has. I still love this game, and can’t wait for more content updates on it (primarily a fix to the corrupting save files). Please understand that these are just my opinions and whether or not you disagree with me doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right, it just means I want a different game than you do.

To summarize my review from the beginning of this post: Risk of Rain 2 does it’s predecessor justice and so much more. The jump from 2D to 3D just feels so right that one has to question if this was Hopoo’s original intent before realizing they didn’t have the resources for it. The gameplay loop and gameflow are excellent and you really do feel like you’re overcoming insurmountable odds at certain points to become invincible by the end. It has issues and probably always will be given Hopoo’s unmoved demeanor in even the most balance breaking items in their game. I just hope that they will reconsider some of their design philosophy for the sake of making a much more entertaining video game. As stated before, I overall give this game a 7/10 and depending on the person you may play a few or a few hundred hours in Risk of Rain 2. It’s a fun game to just sit down and play, and you’re given a decent amount of freedom in how you go about playing. And at the end of the day, just having a fun game to play is all that should matter, right?

-Count_

[terryblount]

Astral Chain – Review

It’s a great time to be a niche Japanese studio. From Arc System Works dominating the fighting game scene to Nier Automata being a serious Game of the Year contender (and winner according to some reputable sites), it seems like more unique experiences are finally getting their time in the sun.

Astral Chain is a game that, is simply oozing with its appeal. With a combat style equal parts stylish and steep in its learning curve, Platinum Games has definitely shown they’re very much in peak form with this stylish character action game.

Design

As a game for the Nintendo Switch, Astral Chain follows the trend of aesthetic over visual fidelity. The game looks great, with an art style full of bold colors that read great on both handheld and TV mode. Admittedly, at first I wasn’t too fond of the bulky armor worn by the game’s protagonists. However, once you get to customize your character and lose it, you see that the character models are actually quite decent.

The world itself is also visually gorgeous, with plenty of neon lights and holographic signs for that techno-future feel. It’s got that great “not too distant future” vibe going for it, and it works it well.

If anything, the game’s at its weakest design-wise in the Astral Plane, a series of stages where everything just kind of looks bog-standard “extradimensional plane”. But even then, it’s not weaker by much, and still looks infinitely more imposing than many other game locales I’ve had to slog through.

In essence, it’s the little things that make Astral Chain’s look so appealing. It’s very anime, in that even side characters have memorable traits instead of looking like background characters. The world looks like the high point of futurist anime art, and it’s an absolute delight to be in.

Gameplay

Gameplay in Astral Chain is very much about two halves. I’ll try to break it down here to the best of my ability.

When it comes to combat, Astral Chain is absolutely phenomenal. The Legion-based combat will take some getting used to, but successful mastery of the game’s timing-based Sync combos make you almost wish you had some kind of style announcer lavishing you in praise.

The important thing to remember about the combat with Astral Chain is that it’s not just you you’re controlling. Over-reliance on either the Legion or the player character will often have your moves feel clunky. However, investing in the sync moves for your Legions will allow them to flow into each other much better.

The Legions themselves are amazing, too. Each of them plays differently, and you’re required to not only know all five of them but actively swap between them as certain ones are required for certain enemies.

I highly recommend picking a favourite to spoil though, as higher-level upgrade materials can be sparse and a high-level Legion is more valuable than several weaker ones.

While the combat sections of the game are by a mile the game’s strongest feature, the game is far from simply being a bunch of cool action scenes. Levels contain investigation portions, side quests and even platforming.

I bring this up because compared to the fighting, many of these segments seem not quite as fleshed out. There are a few segments where you have to ride Beast Legion across some platforms and the Legion controls like Agro from Shadow of the Colossus, if they were going through a divorce and had a lot on their mind and also really wished it were more like the platforming in Ultima 8. Suffice to say, much of the legion based platforming is not fun.

Several of the game’s boss fights can also seem daunting at first, but I’ve chalked that up to the game having a slightly more bizarre set of expectations for the player. In essence, once you’ve understood the importance of both you and your Legion, you’ll see just how many of the game’s problems are built around having one particular legion that can solve it with ease.

Content

I feel like by borrowing side quests from more open-world games, Astral Chain has done a lovely job of respecting the player’s time. I’ve done missions with a straight run for the boss as well as also missions where I’ve stopped and chatted up every NPC to complete the side quests. Combining this with the ability to skip to the parts of the game that you want on replay, it really does allow you to just play the good parts of Astral Chain. It’s a nice touch, because more games should let you play the part of the game that’s actually fun.

Unlike Devil May Cry, playing Astral Chain also lets you access the harder difficulty immediately after clearing it on the Platinum Standard. If you so desired, the missions you beat can instantly be replayed on the harder difficulties.

Similarly, you can also tone down the difficulty. The game gives you an out at the end of every Mission to change your difficulty, which is a nice touch.

On the topic of collectibles, Astral Chain has quite a few. Despite being a serious police story about serious police, the game has you seeking out stray cats and toilets, with one being hidden on every level. There are also alternate Color schemes for you and your Legion, which can be awarded for various feats.

I shouldn’t like this as much as I do, but I kind of love the idea of the cats and toilets. They’re not overtly goofy, but they’re just out there enough to be worth a good chuckle. They’re also incredibly difficult to find, and as of right now no site has any guides posted on how to get all the cosmetics despite it being two weeks post-launch at the time of writing.

While the game may not start after ending like, say, a Monster Hunter game, it is very nice to know that the game has plenty to offer after it’s “finished”. It’s also great to have a playground to test your new Legions in, though the game does also give you a training room for this.

Personal Enjoyment

One of the fastest ways to not enjoy Astral Chain is to go in expecting Nier: Automata. While the two games seem similar at first, Astral Chain is quick to establish itself as an action game first, compared to Nier’s message-focused approach.

That being said, as someone who was on board with Astral Chain on the premise of Stand Cops, the game did not disappoint. The action sequences are great, the sheer video gamey-ness of the plot is well set up and the cues it takes from anime are just present enough to be seen without seeming too forced.

The heights of the highs when playing Astral Chain far outweighed its drab lows, and I can’t think of many complaints I had at the start of the game that didn’t feel resolved in some way or other towards the end.

If I had to make some nitpicks, I’d wish that the secret Stand Police weren’t paid in trash. For whatever reason, rather than give you money, many side quests pay you in items that can be recycled for cash, but it’s not a great look for your protagonist constantly hauling around bags of broken equipment and torn caps.

Conclusion

Astral Chain is essentially a playable anime. However, unlike the games that try to do this with questionable gameplay quality, Astral Chain goes the mile to make sure the anime portions are as good as possible.

Its world is lovingly designed to make sure there’s never a point with nothing to do, be it fighting space demons, picking up litter or helping a guy find the local burger joint.

While I doubt it will ever push the numbers of a mainstream triple-A release, I’m glad to report that the game is very much good, and fans thirsting for a quirky character action game with RPG elements should have a good time with this one.

It’s a game that can really Stand Proud of its achievements, and I hope the development team has some Great Days ahead of them for it. Because this game is Fighting Gold.

Review copy purchased by the reviewer

Astral Chain – Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[questlogpodcast]

Moonlighter

What is it?

What if Link’s sacred quest was to own and operate a successful business in Kakariko Village instead of chasing princess Zelda through the dungeons of Hyrule? That’s Moonlighter. You play as Will, a young man who is taking over the family store. Your shelves will be stocked with goodies you pilfer from the dungeons, and you can invest your profits in new gear, upgrades for your shop, and attracting new businesses into the town itself.

Did you play Recettear? No. Okay, nevermind. I’ll just stick to the Legend of Zelda comparison then.

Look

Hey everyone, Moonlighter has a retro pixel art style tha-hey where are you going? Come back!

Okay. Moonlighter’s doing the hi-bit visual style that has been in vogue for a few years now. The first visual comparisons that come to mind are Owlboy and Hyper Light Drifter. Are you sick of it yet? I’m not, actually. I love that visual style, and it is firing on all cylinders here. 

The game exudes charm, and the game’s visual style is a big part of that. The vibrant colors almost leap off the screen, particularly in town. Smoke rises from the furnace in your room, the shop’s banner gently flaps in the breeze, and all you see is the top of Will’s head when he runs through tall grass. These little touches like the tinkle of the bell when a customer enters the shop breathe life into the world.

Sound

This is where the game really surprised me. I’ll admit I was pretty excited for Moonlighter to come out. The visual charm of the game piqued my interest the moment I saw it. Recetear was a hidden gem, and I’ve been wondering when another dungeon crawling shop keeping game would come along.

I hadn’t really given the soundtrack a second thought, but the first time I got to walk around the town at night I was hooked. Ryoka at night is such a peaceful experience, I want to just drink it all in. The streetlamps standing out in the darkness, the fireflies...the night feels safe in a way that reminded me of being out in my small town as a child.* The music moves from playful to adventurous to contemplative as the setting demands it. The best soundtracks feel are an integral part of their game worlds, and Moonlighter’s score is no exception.

Feel

Moonlighter has a distinct gameplay loop of “go to the dungeon - sell your loot in the store - buy some upgrades - rinse and repeat.” This treadmill has been satisfying in a “I really need to go to bed but JUST ONE MORE RUN” way. The game has 5 different procedurally generated dungeons to progress through, with each having its own big baddie on the bottom floor. 

The combat feels tight and snappy. This was my biggest concern heading into the game, and I’m pleased to report that it feels spot-on. I haven’t encountered anything that feels overwhelming yet, but everything is challenging enough that I get punished if I (invariably) get sloppy and lose focus. The game gives you a pendant that lets you teleport out of the dungeon pretty much anytime (for a gold cost). Knowing when to leave is important, and the temptation to stay just a little longer is ever-present. Before writing this, I defeated the guardian of the desert shrine where I spent the last 25% of the battle one hit away from death. I should have left, but I stayed for reasons I can’t explain. Usually that siren’s call leads me into the rocks, but this time I was successful. And that is an incredible feeling.

Moonlighter gives you 5 different weapon types to choose from - sword & shield, 2-handed sword, spear, bow & arrow, and....gloves? Fists. Each one feels distinct and gives the combat a welcome bit of customization. Their reach and ranges are different, and each one has a special attack associated with it; the two-handed sword grants a spin attack (oh hi Link), the glove grants a quick dash attack, and so on.

The shopkeeper bits are a little simpler than I expected: you price each thing for the first time based on a whim. Customers will either be super excited for the price (you’re selling too cheap) turn their nose up (too expensive) or be satisfied (the item’s “base price”). There’s a 4th response where the customer will pay a bit above the base price, but be a little pissy about it.** The game told me that if I don’t mix up my offerings somewhat, the market will be flooded and drive prices down.

You can expand your store space and add decorations that allow you to have more customers at a time, or make them tip a little more with a purchase. The retail portion of the game is a nice way to break up the dungeon crawling, and it lends a sense of purpose to the dungeon delves. Your inventory space is quite limited, and most every run will see you deciding which items to keep for the shop, which items to keep for crafting, and which ones to quick-sell for a little cash.*

This brings us to what is the game’s weakest element: inventory management. You have a limited amount of space in your backpack. Most items can stack, but you will find items with “enchantments” that restrict where in your backpack they can be stored, or send another backpack item home, or copy an item, and so on. It can quickly turn into a sprawling mess of carefully organized chaos. I’m kinda okay with this. I like trying to wring every last drop of efficiency out of a system. 

The problem is how clunky and unfriendly the UI is. I found that I often couldn’t simply press a button to pick up an item and press it again to put it down. Pressing and holding the button, moving it where I wanted to place it, letting up on the button and then pressing it again (sort of like drag and drop with a mouse) seems to work. Constantly rearranging items with an analog stick quickly becomes tiring and acts as a deterrent to engaging with that whole system. 

And the game gives you a magic mirror or whatever so you can sell unwanted items while in the dungeon (for far less than market value of course). That’s a really nice touch and it helps reduce the analysis paralysis. Just leaving stuff on the ground feels bad. But that’s what I end up doing because the need to constantly shuffle items around to make room to pick up the thing I want to sell really sucks the fun and momentum out of the experience. It feels like a tax imposed on the experience. “If you want to get the most gold out of this run, you’ll spend half of your time moving stuff around your bag.” Adding a button combination to automatically sell stuff lying on the ground would be a godsend here.

The UI issues go a bit beyond the inventory management too. When you’re browsing the blacksmith’s shop, there’s no way to see what you’re already using. A button press to compare gear would keep me from having to back out of the shop and look at my inventory 6 times whenever I go shopping. Also it’s much cheaper to craft potions than to buy them, but there’s no way to buy more than 1 at a time. I’d rather buy 10 potions once than 1 potion 10 times.

Give this game a try if

- Isometric dungeon crawlers are your jam. - Dredging up a bunch of shit from a dungeon, selling it in your own store, then adding more display cases and flowers and banners to your shop and maybe buying a bigger bed sounds awesome to you.

Avoid this game if

- The idea of managing and selling inventory is a turn-off for you. It feels like maybe a third of the game. It’s pretty basic, but it’s a significant portion of the experience. - You want a deep and engaging story. For all the game’s charm, the story in Moonlighter is barely there. It tends to explain away the randomness of the dungeons with “I dunno, probably magic?” I think the game is probably better for it, but this might disappoint some folks. - You have little tolerance for clunky inventory management.

tl;dr

I’ve put about 10 hours into Moonlighter and it feels like I’m maybe halfway through the content. Some part of my brain keeps analyzing the game and saying “It’s just a loop of getting gear in the dungeon and selling it to get stronger gear so you can repeat the loop in slightly more difficult areas; when are you going to get bored with this?” The answer seems to be “Not anytime soon.” 

The dungeons walk the knife’s edge of offering a satisfying challenge without being frustrating. Every journey down offers a push-your-luck experience where I sometimes convince myself that, even though I am low on health and out of potions, whatever is in the next room will be worth that risk and will not kill me. Sometimes I’m even right!

The town is quaint and charming, and being in the game just feels good. The town of Rynoka feels like home - particularly at night. And the game is not without its faults. The inventory system feels like the band-aid in the burrito here. It’s not nearly enough to make me put the game down, but I could understand it being a major issue for some. The game also does the “You’ve been on this floor for too long, here’s a big invincible monster to chase you now” thing. I don’t understand that decision. Your limited backpack space is a limiting factor enough, I don’t feel the need to try to milk every part of every floor. Every time the green blobby dude came after me, it was because I simply hadn’t found the stairs to the next floor yet.

I’m in love with Moonlighter. It feels like I’ll get about 20 hours out of it, and right now that’s my biggest concern - I can see the end on the horizon. It’s like seeing a storm coming and hoping it misses you. It’s not perfect, but the good bits are enough to make the shortcoming palatable. Hopefully the game’s UI issues can be addressed. If that happens, I feel like I can recommend this game with no caveats. 

Even as it stands now, Moonlighter is one of my favorite games of 2018. If it ends in a dozen hours and ends up as solid 20 hour game, I’ll still be very happy with it.

Release date: May 29, 2018 Developer: Digital Sun Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One 

*I’m overselling it here. Every once in awhile something out of blue stirs some long dormant memory for me. **Like buying a $10 burger. I’ll do it since I’m already here, but it’d better be good.