Recent reviews by Devccoon

I'm really into proper idle games and hoped this would at least have some element of idle play but the store page should not list "idler" at all. You're meant to be dodging rocks, picking up their pieces, building up your haul and moving on to the next stage. Theoretically you can sit on an earlier stage and let the game play itself but the game really isn't built to support setting it aside and letting progress happen while you go about your business.

So it's really just a short incremental game with active gameplay. It's fine for the price, IMO. Plenty of dopamine and upgrades; it's a good, simple game loop that works. I think if anything, prestiging as a mechanic here really falls short, because half of the upgrades barely affect your initial progress or just prevent prestige from resetting anything, effectively invalidating the mechanic later on.

Decent little incremental, doesn't overstay its welcome. Janky but not in a bad way. Hits a lot of sweet spots for dopamine. I didn't really gel with the backstory or its presentation, frankly the secrets and hidden bits can be really hit or miss simply because you build up to so much chaos it's hard to deliberately stop and smell the roses. The jank hits in a bad way when you're trying to engage with those, and a particular one involving collecting a specific set of fruits at once turned into my cue to set the game down. The timer and goofy physics and giant hole being ever-present threats don't help when you want to get a little puzzle-y.

Pretty straightforward and fairly easy metroidvania. Interesting exploration where you are slowly piecing the separate maps together which opens up new points of traversal to move between them. Doesn't do anything mindblowing with its premise but it's a fun, quick, humorous and accessible romp, almost a cozy game in some sense.

Quirky, charming game perfectly captures that early 3D vibe, from the sound and visuals to the janky and endearing models and animations. It feels like the developers thought of every way to use what they had for interesting new experiences and the game really never stops surprising and delighting throughout.

And you thought Megabonk was addictive?

Ball Pit is a fitting name, weirdly enough, because this game's every bit the "5 more minutes" experience you got at the local Playplace back in the day. Though I don't fully 'get' the theming here, it's a lot more put-together than others in the wave survival/bullet heaven genre. Initially straightforward, it starts strong with great music and an evolving stage of play that concludes in a satisfying way. But what really drove me to write this review was the way the game unfolded in its progression.

All these sorts of games have meta-progression, but it usually ends at some stat boosts and quality of life, like rerolls and such. Ball Pit has those too, but takes it to the next level. I don't even want to spoil the surprises coming your way, because exploring the new twists on the mechanics and major changes to the way you play which ripple throuhgout the whole landscape of the game is such a unique joy brought to a genre that's become rapidly quite predictable.

Honestly, my biggest gripe with the game so far is that while every character has a fully unique benefit-drawback combination that completely changes the way you play or build with them (not just stat boosts, but effects that are too special to put on a simple item), one of the characters comes with only a drawback. There's one character whose only thing is that the game now picks all your upgrades for you. No big game-changing features or abilities, or any form of special luck power to make more synergistic options appear (seemingly), he just removes a core feature of the gameplay with no positive tradeoff. It's just an annoyance because it's not like he isn't playable and there aren't many more characters to pick instead, but that's truly a baffling design decision for a game where you're meant to play around with all the characters.

Overall a great survival sandbox with a lot of content and progression. No doubt, it really can sink its teeth into your free time and not let go. I have some issues with it, I think there's a lot of missed potential, things they could fix, but at least for now, on the surface - it's fun. I enjoyed a lot of aspects of this game and got a lot of satisfying playtime out of it.



I love the Pal designs - call it ripoff or whatever you will, but it's distinct enough that I never get them confused with critters from Other Series. They borrow most of the design language and some bits are definitely noticeably hacked together in a design sense, but as far as I'm concerned, it's all come together to make a game that's immensely more fast-paced, beautiful, and mechanically satisfying than those Other Series games ever have managed to achieve.

Where it falls short is its level of polish. I think they have good bones here; nothing's particularly poorly designed or broken. I can hardly ask for much more when it comes to the gameplay loop, traversal and combat. But the weak link is the sense that this world is paper-thin. That's the one thing that Other Series does REALLY well, to the point where they force you through arduous cutscenes and unskippable dialogue just because they NEED that world to feel alive, fleshed-out and believable, to sell you on an epic journey you're about to take. While on the surface this game looks better than those ever did, and the journey you go on genuinely pulls off "epic" so much better, it comes with this sense that everything is just skin-deep. It lets what you do speak for itself, but there's so little context outside of what you're doing in a mechanical sense, that even the narratively-interesting engagements you get into don't end up feeling interesting in the moment. Bosses have names and presumably lore (who's reading those text logs, anyway?) but there's no attempt made to stage any kind of 'scripted' content and that is absolutely to the game's detriment, IMO. The scope and scale of the experience is massive, but it feels more like reaching the end of a long, grinding treadmill rather than achieving recognition as a strong Pal tamer in this world they've made. Not having proper cities or overarching story (or even putting together 'story' content in the form of effectively sidequests so they can be skipped/ignored) is doing the game no favors.

While running around the open world and building up your bases and teams is satisfying, the game's entire payoff is in the journey, not the destination. At the end there's nothing to do, nothing to seek out, aside from finding harder and harder fights and finally getting to make them ragdoll around. It's anticlimactic, in a sense, from the beginning to the end. There's no sense of buildup outside of some intro cutscenes for tower bosses. You don't fight through their towers to reach them, you just teleport into a copy-pasted combat arena to kill each other. You aren't building up toward some end goal, like getting all of the "badges" or competing in a grand tournament. You don't speak to the major "story" battles before or after their fights. There doesn't seem to be a reason you can respawn and teleport. People in the game world don't feel like they're filling out a believable place; they're either shopkeepers, enemies or scared sitting at a campfire.



I don't know if any of this is intended to be fleshed out in the future, but I hope it is. If anything, I feel like the gameplay loop and even the long-term "chase" content toward the end plus all the ways you can enjoy multiplayer and the laundry list of customizations you can make to the gameplay (Pals being able to die in combat really should be a default, although I'd prefer it to be fleshed out more - ie, needing to rush them to treatment after a KO, that sort of thing) make for plenty of content to fill out a really satisfying long-term experience, here.

Really, if what you're after is some light survival, base-building and crafting, and absolutely disrupting the environment as you capture everything that moves, this game is a hell of a drug. I just wish that, looking back on the ~80 or so hours it took me to hit endgame, it had more of a fleshed-out world and characters to engage with along the way.

I don't need a story, and I wouldn't say this game is incomplete without more dialogue and scripted sequences. But I think they really should take a look at some of the better content from Other Series and think of ways to incorporate more memorable and unique setpiece content into gameplay - bring the world to life as something I WANT to dig into text logs and talk to random guards to learn more about. And honestly, really re-think the default world options. Palworld has always intrigued me for its willingness to look like a cute critter catcher game while crossing those taboo "kids' game" lines - it has a golden opportunity for players to live out some truly memorable and interesting emergent experiences, but it feels like the devs didn't bother to flesh out any decent ways for failure to be a real threat/fear for players and the default settings basically make the worst punishment boil down to "go back to base, use other critters for a while".



It feels like there's tons of potential here, especially with this game's massive viral success. Right now, it's a fun game, but not a fulfilling world that makes you want to be a part of it. A good survival game, good monster collecting game, good exploration and base building game, zero reason to stick in your mind once it's over except to think about how much you want to curl up with a Chillet. It could be so much more, but if future updates just push "this but more of it" then it'll always be just "good".

Cute little Terraria-like! It's not particularly expansive but doesn't ask all too much out of you. Early-game can be a tough time, it's hard to get a decent foothold but you do feel your progression pretty nicely as you move along. Honestly feels like the leadup into something much bigger if it wasn't constrained to a 4-sided square planet - a few more features could see this easily expand into a pretty solid, meaty game. But for a freebie? I certainly enjoyed my time with it~

Really fun, tight roguelike of the 'turn-based puzzle battle' variety. You're building out a "deck" of dice (d4, d6 and d8 so far) and using your limited energy and draw pool to try to synergize together relics and dice effects on various boards (each character gets a different board shape) to break the game before it breaks you.

There are a lot of fun mechanics to exploit and you get a lot of those good feeling "game-breaking" effects as you go deeper, but the game somewhat requires you to hit that point as well. It doesn't just crumble as you bulldoze all its well-designed challenges, though if you're doing exceedingly well you absolutely can break its bosses over your knee.

I hope to see the developers expand out the game's scope in the future - not necessarily to just longer runs, but also to different outcomes. Currently, you don't get choices on the map that send you in wildly different directions or put you on shorter or longer paths toward the end. If anything, I think the layout of maps so far is a bit too balanced and almost forces you to take a variety of spaces along the way. I'd really like to see fully alternate paths, midbosses you can engage or avoid, different bosses that take you to harder areas or things like that.

Performance is good and smooth, although for a 2D game I'd say the loading times are a bit surprising, a few seconds longer than it feels like it should be. Some bugs here and there but 95% of my playtime was nicely polished and felt great to play.

How do they keep finding things to add to this game? It's like Binding of Isaac; the game just keeps giving and giving. Only, I'm nowhere near good enough to get past hard mode.

I don't think I have it in me to see everything this game has to offer but I've loved everything I've gotten out of it. Every time I come back to it I get deeper and appreciate it more. A slow burn for me, but quickly getting to that "comfort food" level this type of game strives for.

I've seen the fandom and hype build slowly over the years and this game has earned it. Without pretending to be more than it is, Star of Providence delivers on its potential and then it just keeps delivering.

Bounced off PoE 1 but this game is everything I hoped for so far and it's been great fun. It's every bit the challenge I wanted to see, there's a ton of variety in builds and opportunities to try crazy things, an insane amount of content already present, and this is all in early access! I don't feel like there's as much insanity in builds yet so the enemy and boss mechanics actually mean something, and I really hope it stays that way moving forward.

It's great to see more ARPGs taking controller players seriously and I barely feel like I'm missing anything playing that way, here. Plus, splitscreen coop together on the same screen on PC is not something I'd expect from a game like this. I'd really like to see a reticle that shows where I'm aiming on controller (and make use of how far I'm pushing the right analog so I can aim skills closer to myself) because that would more closely mimic what mouse+keyboard players are already getting, but the autoaim currently is doing about as well as I can hope for.

Monetization (since it will be F2P) is effectively the same as POE 1, which basically means spend some money on stash tabs and you're fine. It's not strictly necessary, but you will start to feel that limitation pressing you toward a little IAP action. And I think that's fine, since they need to keep the servers on. They are porting over all your old POE 1 goodies including stash tabs (you don't have to buy or configure them again if you did in the original), and anyone who buys into this early access gets an equivalent amount of premium currency as what they spent for access.

In some ways, this game is sort of "just" PoE 1++. You see a lot of familiar faces and items and concepts, even entire bosses re-used from the first game. But everything is cranked up to the next level. None of the familiar concepts are left untouched "because that's how PoE does it". And the result is a refreshing experience, a massive move forward for the genre. Even as early as this iteration is, it feels finely polished with little wasted space.