Recent reviews by LotusBlade

After a hour of playing i haven't yet seen anything special about this game. It has nice animation and visuals, no lags, a lot of options, good voiceover. But gameplay is kind-a weakest point. Some crafting, some auto-battles, some hero leveling. Nothing unique. Like, lets say you play 7 different games: Leaf Blower Revolution, Post Apoc Tycoon, Idle Wizard, Realm Grinder, Idle To Rule Gods, Hearts of Galaxy and FARM rpg - all of them have unique playstyles that have NOTHING to do with other 6 games, yet from same idle genre. And AFK Journey is just copy of some copy of some generic playmarket slop, sprinkled with sexy furry that love to do half-naked upskirts.

So far it is quite doubtful that i will keep playing it, since there are just too many other games to choose from, especially on PC, even withing just idle genre alone. Sure in last 2 years we haven't seen much idle movement in Steam, but it does not mean we will eat such playmarket gacha slop. Besides, there are enough cool games upcoming like Melvor Idle 2. What place AFK Journey wants to take? It can't rival pretty much any game i mentioned in review and that is just half of cool ones, like Magic Research 2.

As for arena / squad games, the really revolutionary were Idle Agents back in the day (cus they were among first who made this genre), followed by Juggernaut Wars (cus it was 3D pre-era of RAID Shadow bla-bla) and of course the fallen king of genre - Art Of Conquest before greedy devs ruined it into nothingness with p2w. So again, i have no clue what this puny game is trying to do, it is just unworthy of our time.

A huge disappointment, considering all bad idle games released in Steam for last 2 years, this one managed to be among worst. It is just a carbon copy of "Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money", but minus funny story, minus charming characters, minus card reward every 4 hours and minus bonus for progressing stages (where you had to click fast to get nice reward). This game is just empty, there is no story, no character development, heroines have no skills - they are just pictures on cards without anything else. Their names make no sense, like Venom has nothing to do with poison theme and pixel has no pixels.

So what this game has then you may ask? Well, banners pop up all the time advertising other games, vip deals pop up and stay on your screen, the more you play, the more of them appear. Then a piggy bank for $ appears also cluttering a bit. Town itself has no interactions - there is nothing you can click, no rare bonuses appear after time like in Cookie Clicker.

Pictures of girls also meh, most of them pegi 12+ and getting more requires opening gacha for $. You can just play Limbus Company and get better girl pictures, which actually participate in gameplay, have voiceovers and stories behind them.

Don't waste your time. If you want some 18+ go watch new season of The Boys. If you dare.

Game is quite complicated and requires a lot of effort and time investment to do chores. While in other gacha games you just care about 5-7 main heroes, here you care about sect with hundreds of members. Gameplay itself mostly consists from idling while resources are accumulated, there is no actual fun mechanics or anything unique. Battles are auto and boring. Overall i don't think it is worth your time on PC, maybe on phone it could work, but even then i would rather play Post Apoc Tycoon on android instead of this. It feels like a job: you need to equip, upgrade, settle every single person, assign work spaces, houses and rank up cultivation. Too much! I am not doing all of that for free lol.

Alright people, we found it, this is a better version of Balatro - with more bonuses, cards, tile interactions and much more levels. My first few runs were devastating, since i played it like an average 'words game', then changed behavior and acted like this is Balatro and started winning. The difficulty is high straight after tutorial, so you might wanna learn to play Balatro on Golden Stake first, cus you absolutely need all knowledge from it to use here.

There are tons of unlocks and variety, while each campaign stage offers different tables and rules, so one can assume there are '40 decks'. Match lenght is short, which is much appreciated. The only negative side is lack of words description (or atleast i haven't found it).

Found it being very slow, boring and restrictive. Only few levels in each campaign and no carryover mechanics you expect in games like this (atleast in Disciples and Heroes of Might n Magic they let you carry over main protagonist with all his gear and skills). Levels are long and activity-less, there are few camps of monsters on each island so you can stomp on them, but they are all similar. Islands don't have much difference. All units and buildings blend. Magic is basic, not interesting. Campaign level completely separated from each other. I would rather replay anno 2205 once more or do few runs in Northgard.

It is very similar to game called "7 Years Of War" - just a little strategy without any goal in mind or direction. Objectives are very far from each other so you are forced to repeat same economy in each level to create sufficient base, then slowly connect island and explore which will take hours. Heck, even single run of Against The Storm will yield more fun after 400+ hours already invested into it.

Game almost reached level of above medium Tower Defense, almost. I checked it during very early access and right now can see it has same enemies, towers and systems. It didn't grew. Yes we got more heroes, stages, shards, game modes but variety of main gameplay is same tiny item/tower/enemies pool. It is sad. I do not regret buying it, but after 10 hours all the fun evaporated and i have to force myself to play another run.

Major problem is that it simply has weak progression system — not only you unlock all heroes too fast, but also max out technologies too fast, so it becomes a lot easier to play for no reason. Of course, there is shard system to increase difficulty, but why do we use tech to reduce difficulty and shards to increase it? It makes no sense.

It lacks different music, lacks story, lacks levels (you gonna play same ones in campaign over and over). Shops are very strong, you can just route trough shops and forges and reach end very fast without actual battles. I don't know, design looks terrible. Game also has nothing unique or new about it, this is extremely average TD.

In my opinion you should first play those games:
- Variables 2 (more towers, more special monsters, rng levels, full control of game board, unique style);
- Dungeon Warfare 3 - big and fun, unique map system;
- Kingdom Rush 5 trough google play pass (only costs $1 per month) - so you get all DLC for free.
- Broken Universe - just a giant of TD genre and probably the top 1 TD ever existed so far.

So yeah, Emberward is not bad game, it is just not good one either. I got more TD fun from Steam World Build even tho beaten it in 6 hours.

Something unique, but has low amount of content, for about 4-6 hours. What is there actually quite polished and playable - you cook to find monster's loves and likes while trying to avoid dislike and hates. Potions allows you to change many things and manipulate difficulty, so eventually you will win no matter what. Do not expect level of Slay The Spire 2 early access variety, this is very small game.

Changing deck is difficult, you can add cards, but they mostlikely won't synergize with current deck, so you end up with a lot of cards and no clue how to turn them into something good. Sure there is ability to delete cards, but that will not help at all, cus you need working build at all times and can't just 'delete legs or hands from human to switch for a horn and tail'. Later as you accumulate potions and special ingredients it is possible to greatly change dish, like making them ignore monster preference or multiplying whole dish chain by %, which kind-a breaks game.

There is not much content and variety, similar items popping up early-game over and over, also they do not scale into higher areas. This is understandable for early access, but compared to other EA games like Against The Storm had, this one feels more like demo. Progression system between runs fully changes balance, you have to grind it to get forward. Like, it does make difference between starting with basic 10 HP or 25+, considering some monster hit for 9+. Or getting 40 gold per kill instead of zero.

Many monsters and dishes have no passives, making it really boring, and good half of passives only viable pre world 5 (like +5 hunger to monster per turn against 3000 life sponge). There is also bad spice scaling system which requires starting from world 1 to gather spices and boost dmg of dishes. But each spice only boost by +1 and only specific dish ingredient, so again, it is hard to make a smart build unless you 'cheat' with universal chain flourish dishes.

I do like uniqueness of this game, story, humor, visuals, gameplay... But balance and little amount of content are concerning, it will take a lot of effort to turn it into something acceptable by nowdays standarts. Devs going to finish EA in about 1 year, so lets see how they add content and scale everything as time goes on. Majority have 6-10 hours of playtime and never returned to game after writing positive review, so bear in mind.

First 50 minutes game did very poor, i don't like it at all. It is dragging, flooded with watery dialogues, useless cutscenes, slow character movement and weird chopyness every time you move 1-screen (it shakes a bit). It forces you to collect ingredient by moving there and physically getting them, then forces to manually bake by using 5x of ingredient for single dish and that is trough minigames, quite boring and dull. This is not how you make game about cooking. There is project called SkyBrew that cuts off ingredient gathering and minigames, focusing on management and recipes and you just purchase ingredients - that's how you do it, fast and fun. And here it feels like hollow shell with streching mechanics to waste player's time. (have you ever seen a cook leaving restaraunt to hunt a boar in nearby jungle to feed you with stake? i didn't)

I don't think it will be possible to fully get what game is about before 2 hours are up and judging by how hostile it is towards player i doubt it is worth playing. There is no that feeling of wanting to explore which you get in, let's say, Oxygen Not Included from get go. And for that price i expected better polish, there is not even vertical synch in options, so picture was tearing real hard till i forced it to activate through AMD panel.

Honestly, i don't understand what is going on in this game, tutorial did not popped for me and had to learn all mechanics as i go and damn there are many of them. Yet everything is easy to understand and you kind-a flow with the river stream using what you have when you can. Won from first try even tho game claimed i am gonna lose, some encounter were truly dangerous, like enemies who can 2-shot your units, yet bosses felt balanced. Then there is unlocks system, some parts of it add variety, some improve bad starting conditions and some add completely new things to the roster. As far as i understand, each 'starting faction' has separate upgrade tree.

Overall i expected Into The Breach and got something very unique that does not feels like anything else. If you are bored with todays generic copy-cat games, try it for sure, but it will take a while to get used to many mechanics, units and playstyles.

For now it is big NO, played 3 hours during free weekend. I had no crashes or freezes, but performance in town and during battles 15 vs 15 drops, also PC heats up too much during those moments too, which only happened to me in Last Epoch cus it has bad optimization. I don't want it to follow fate of first PoE - releasing some stupid patch (Legion league) that caused me to have 1 fps and be unable to play anymore after years of everything being fine.

I don't like Elden Ring bosses here with spongy hp and two-shot attacks, forcing you to dance around small arena. They also have similar patterns: sending some wave at you, bombing AoE and smacking in melee. My minions died way too much early game, making it very annoying experience. Movement speed sucks, wasting 2-3 times more time than it should. Unit collision annoying, i often get stuck inside enemies or between them and walls, as there are too many tiny corridors / spaces and roll is inconsistent way of running through stuff. You die very fast if surrounded.

Inventory is TINY omg, WHY? Why are you forcing me to not collect loot in a game about loot. Why third of my inventory is taken by orbs, charms, runes and scrolls? Why no auto-pickup of all mentioned above? I don't need 20 stash tabs, i want 20 inventory tabs! And size should be 10 times bigger, while items size should be reduced from 4x2 to 2x1, this is just super annoying for no reason.

I found map and overall skill interface being clunky and requiring a lot of experience to even use it. The areas at the same time are super big, it is hard to find objectives and hidden bosses... With slow movement speed and minion long revival cooldown game became a chore. I definitely will not pay money for such weak state of everything.

It also is not doing anything fresh / new in terms of genre, just repeating steps other games already took. Same classes, same monsters, same areas, same Earth-like planet, same gear. It has all the genre problems like you get items from other classes while need summons only.

I think game became way too much Elden Ring 2, instead of PoE 2, gonna keep playing Grim Dawn.