Recent reviews by Amatsu

With the addition of keyboard hotkeys

def a game worth recommending. Like a full blown sandbox survival on a tile map system with roguelite elements. Just a great little timekiller, give it a try.

Being as NICE as humanly possible here. I really dont mean to disrespect the developers because its not my intention, but I'm sure they're well aware of this.



This is basically Hades, without hit-stun on enemies, and alot more bogged down. It's interesting, It's different, It's fun, sure I can give all that to it, but I would be incredibly dishonest to say it is anything but Hades vs Hades at Home.

It's definitely a walmart version of an already existing game. I would really enjoy it if it had a lot of unique powers and styles, but honestly, it's very basic to its core. I would also enjoy it more if it was MORE like Hades and non-armored enemies actually get staggered, and dashing had more I-Frames than it does, because its lacking heavily with the dash mechanic, Bigger arena's, including boss arenas, More UI visual indicators, etc.. First Major boss Big dude with an Axe, Does a whirlwind, and if he decides to start it while you're near a corner, you're basically forced to eat a ton of damage, ontop of a very small arena to begin with.

The main selling point of this is Co-Op. Which is the only really hugely positive thing that can be given to it. Did you wonder what its like to Play Hades but with your Friends? This is that.... kinda, just not as good, but you can still play with friends!

It's decent but I'd say this is more of a $9.99 game than a $24.99 game and I wouldn't see myself being interested in buying it with that price tag personally. Recommending SOLELY because of Co-Op and Co-Op alone. Otherwise I'd just tell you to play Hades, sorry bros.

Also Wealth upgrade tree is abysmal. I would rework that entire tree. +10 gold per level for a huge amount of gems, +1 gold income from cleared rooms for tons of gems and on 3 seperate nodes. With the cost of items, this is even worse than Hades, full honest. Hades at its lowest is start with 100g lol. You also get gold from random things, gold rooms in this game are the biggest skip of my life because they are honestly so unworth it. The starting gold should be like +20-40 per node and the income should be +2-3 minimum per node. 25 hp heal costs 50 gold. New skills cost ~200 gold. Minor upgrades cost ~100 gold. This doesn't pan out properly. It's a complete and utter waste of a skill upgrade tree honestly. It should be competitive with the others.

Honestly all the tree upgrades are ruthlessly expensive in comparison to the difficulty of the game. I've almost beat the end boss and I havent even gotten close to finishing a single skill tree, It requires so many runs to get so many gems, and so many other items, silk for cosmetics, shards for weapons, embers for unlocks, etc. I just dont feel like we're given enough for how much there is content wise. Kinda feels more like a mobile game than a roguelite with how much expectancy is to come for grinding out items. If I actually played with other people, we would have absolutely beat this game 100% within the first couple tries. I barely struggle solo so I cant see it being much harder with more capable bodies. Just food for thought. Would 100% consider the values being moderately increased on all the upgrade currency. People wanna unlock stuff and have fun, but it feels counter productive if you can beat the main portion of the game before getting to that point. Hades forced you to keep coming back to figure out the story, but it was a big selling point for that game, not so much story going on in this one. 4 chars, 4 weapons for each char so all those need to be unlocked then upgraded, probably 4 spells per character aswell, etc. I havent bothered with the other classes yet, just havent cared for anything but the classic sword guy.

No secret, I love dead in X games.
Dead in Bermuda? Incredibly good, but was rather short. Beat the game in under 10 hours unfortunately. Didn't take much trial and error like Dead in Vinland did, and the replay-ability wasn't as good.
Dead in Vinland? Absolute masterpiece. I have the "You play better than the devs" achievement lol. Went over 200 days in endless its a blast. Was tons of reasons to go back and enjoy it again and again. Great theme, Great characters, Great game. Everything was so well done. The mechanics are dated which kind of is a problem with Antares too but I digress.


That being said, Dead in Antares, while still sticking to the formula of the "Dead in X" games, I'm not crazy about so far. The main character and the style isn't my favorite. I do like her personality, but I dont like that she reminds me of a Tracer Cosplay ngl. I also feel like the dialogue and stuff isn't worth mulling over. It's not really captivating, It's kind of like "oh hell we're screwed out on this planet, what do we do? stress about everything in a very modernistic kind of way" lol. Characters are quirky, and not really what I was expecting.

The other games were more relevant to the theme, this doesn't really feel like a theme, feels more like a convention of misunderstood teenagers and a random old guy if I'm being honest. I'm not going "oh this games woke so its garbage" or something so please dont misunderstand me. Dead in Bermuda had very thematic characters that felt like they belonged there. Dead in Vinland the characters also felt like they belonged there. There was a very clear theme of what the game was and what the characters represented, where they were from, how they would likely look, etc. Dead in Antares feels like a futuristic sci-fi game with a bunch of millenials on the ship lol. I was more or less expecting a pretty diverse cast for Humanities last hope.

Also factoring in that it has a futuristic theme based on a spaceship crash landing on some unknown planet and the characters are fighting for survival, Why is it that the characters are so clean? Everyone but the lead character seems like they dolled themselves up. They all look completely pristine lol. I get they come out of a cryogenic chamber but man it just feels wrong. Idk I harped enough about it. Just not very engaged with the story or cast.

The mechanics and gameplay loop is good, great even. Again, Love Dead In series. The UI could stand to be a LOT MORE user friendly though. Sometimes instead of adding more, refining older mechanics would be nice. IE: When you level a character up, theres no humanely possible way your memorizing everyones stats, job roles, etc. So why make it so people have to back out constantly to look at what their stats are? Having a small hover window showing their stats when you go to select a choice would be incredible.

Secondly, why dont we have a system where you click a circle on a ground and select the character you want to place there? The side menu and having to drag people around is incredibly tedious. I cannot stand it.

Combat, like always a bit rough when you're starting out, was always a gripe of mine with the dead in series because you hit for 1-4 but enemy does 5-9. Really easy to get injured even if you play strategically. Especially if you start accumulating negative effects from fatigue, hunger, sickness, etc.

Overall I can absolutely recommend the game, but I just wont enjoy the story, characters or developments as much as I'll enjoy the gameplay loop and the challenge, thats all I can really say.

game reminds me of Last Spell but in a gladiator form.

Really high compliments to be honest, considering The Last Spell is considered one of the best tactical turn based games of modern day. (if you dont know its basically like taking they are billions, and final fantasy tactics, mashing them together into a base-survival game with a weapon-based skill system and roguelite elements)

Really have high hopes for this based off the demo. I'm a little concerned with stuff like map layouts, overall content, future updates and what not. Would hope this is a game thats regularly updated and has somewhat of an endless style mode where you can keep taking on ever-increasing challenges and difficulties to carve into glory. I also hope to see more diversity in skill/setups for the classes, as it stands theres just no reason to use some of them because they pale in comparison to their counterparts, but a new skill or two that alternates their playstyle might be the change they need. Lastly gear and diversity of stat rolls, would be nice to see a lot of synergy based stats (similar to the last spell) so far all the gear has been rolling similar (dmg, armor, health, xp, gold, crit, move, luck)

But its still super early ofcourse, my thoughts are long term. Definitely keeping a close eye on this.

Its good but has some bugs or just weird gameplay problems I guess.

Like Enemy that does ground slam on permadeath mode.

I jump to avoid slam, as I have everytime before, While in air the ground slam hits, and decides to double my height mid-air and kill me in one hit. Wonderful. Crashing on exiting areas also quite annoying. But overall decent game.

Its a shame, this had such potential, I was smitten with it, even though I had other obligations with games, take like reverse 1999 for example. I played this PRIOR to trying reverse 1999 and reverse 1999 gets it. This game doesn't.

The #1 redflag everyone said right off rip was "lack of F2P, expecting everyone to spend money, and alot of it"
This is the most unideal way to make a gacha game. The trick to a gacha game, which is silly when you realize this as a consumer. Is to make sure people get just enough F2P currency to matter and test their luck, to then trap them into spending money for premium currency. I can do a 10x summon on R99 atleast 2 times a week. The rates are even worse than this game to an extent. R99 also convinced me to spend money pretty easily too, took a note out of Genshin and said "Hey heres this super awesome 1-3 month login bonus that costs either $5 or $10 once. Thats how you sell people.

Tribe Nine felt like it just thought it was going to become a gacha game that appealed to the masses based off its hype of its IP and artistic stylization, when they didnt even put the work in.... Seriously bro how hard is it to give people a keybinding option with a PC game. That's just silly.

If you ever plan on making a gacha game, this is the perfect advice to you. More Events, More Booba (the normies love this) and accessible F2P currency. Your rates can even be dogwater just aslong as you give people a fighting chance to get lucky and get characters they potentially want. If people arent getting that little bit of freedom to try their luck, you're gonna lose the broke players, the whales dont have infinite money hacks either, you need to bait them into buying. So when they summon on w/e they want multiple times and DONT get what they want, thats when the card comes out. It is funny though how they really tried to run rates like Dokkan or hoyoverse games at the start with how stingy their business model was. Definitely wasn't the way to win community favor.

Balancing will always be an issue in this game until the dev's realize how much stat weights should be affected and how much each class needs to have its own benefits rather than lumping the same weights for practically all classes and allowing them to benefit equally off stat increases (just about anyway)

The community is really the problem though because they dont know what they actually want and tend to be like any other game community and just parrot whatever favorite streamer of the week says. The amount of unnecessary damage to Rogues and Wizards has been crazy, and Ironically I've been a Fighter Main since like PT2. Just to really give an understanding of how silly it is, the same people who think wizard is a low skill class, are the same people that say Ranger is hard or Warlock is the hardest class to play. The same people who say Rogue is insanely OP, are the same people who never complained about fighters running at 98%+ move speed with sprint w/ max phys damage reduction plate armor.

Moral of the Story is : Dont listen to other people and generally just avoid the community in this game lol.

It's not a bad game, its going through alot of development transitions but hopefully one day IronMace will just stick to the vision and shut out all the noise and go about making the game how it should be. One of the biggest fixes that needs to come is the movement system but tbh I have no idea how long that will be, or if it will ever happen. This game has a similar movement style to Source Engine and honestly, its a bit goofy.

Still though, + review from me because while it has its quirks and issues, it tore me away from Tarkov and I dont have any regrets. I still have fun PVPing and getting mad. I still enjoy playing with friends and I rather enjoy the PVE aspect of the game for what its worth, its always fun to feel yourself improve and learn new tricks, cheese and develop as a better player as time goes on. I only have about 200 hours in the game, though I've been playing it since before launch, there was just some seasons I couldn't stomach (like the recent multi-class awful idea, no thanks... Sandbox mechanics in a competitive PvEvP game is disgusting..) But every wipe/reset always has something new, whether it be a new meta, new mechanics, or just a general balance change that brings you back enough to enjoy it and thats good enough for me personally.

Also they finally removed themselves from the Battle Royale game aspect they were going for and it will be a hot take with all my friends but, honestly? I'm here for it. I hated the Battle Royale style this game had, the circle was bad, I could hardly see a damn thing if I stepped outside of it, the locations of portals was a nightmare most games, just being forced to drop to level two after searching for literally half the match for a single blue portal, they've made static exits that are always there ontop of static 3-man escapes which are also always there. Idc if everyones able to leave the match, nor do I care about being forced into some small blood bath over the last escape. Especially in High Roller where people sweat super hard and bring in the best gear and would camp the circle until the end just to grief. Wasn't very fun lol. I really enjoy having free roam of the maps and being able to do what I want/need to do, especially with the questing system. Also have yet to have an issue finding PVP, if you look for it, you'll find it. It's not as bad as people try to act like it is. People just got complacent and lazy, or just wanted to have ambush priority by camping the circle. It's way better than its ever been now.

A true hidden gem in the masses of bad games.
Just want to note I have more hours than listed, steam bugged or something, probably did around 200+ runs at time of review.

Clunky controls would love to see an update that would register multiple keys in a single input
IE: pressing up arrow + right arrow moves you north-east (instead of taking 2 turns because its north then east also aware its a bindable key but 8 movement keys is a bit much with all the other necessary hotkeys.)

Overall this game is masterful. Difficult as all hell, enjoy your deaths :) Doesn't matter if you just spawned in on turn 1 or think your invincible on turn 12038, death will find you. It's not particularly "unfairly" difficult, it can be a bit bullcrap spawning in ontop of an orc axeman that one shots you, BUT thats the allure of the dungeon. Full of traps and monsters, you can spawn in a dungeon that has virtually nothing but snails and traps, or spawn into a dungeon where theres an all-out war where you get a ton of loot and equipment you never dreamed of seeing before. The dungeon giveth and taketh away.

Also cheers to the dev still updating the game 10 years later. Thats amazing dedication and wish you the best.

Edit : Whew 70% done the games achievements/challenges, been really hustling through. Definitely love this game to bits. The only gripe I now have, removing all others aside from pressing 2 movement keys together is the fact of Fire,Frost,Shock & Poison/Disease being unable to be enchanted onto gear as singular enchants.

I would STRONGLY like to see this in the future of this game as it kind of forces a meta around Ring of Elements, Ring of Immunity, and Ring of Ebbin.
You can drop Ring of Ebbin but its really stupid to in a way because it is by far the best ring in the game, but you cannot really drop Immunity or Elements without being severely punished for it and I dont particularly enjoy that aspect of things.

Hopefully we can expect this in a future update as the Dev still seems to be working on the game :) I would really strongly like to try other setups for melee especially but its hard when you hit lvl 20 and get pushed into wearing specific things. Hell even level 5+ is ridiculously hard without a ring of elements, a single burn can instantly end a run.

I'm a massive fan of Ishtar games, even go as far to say you's are my favorite indie game dev as of late. Dead in saga is something I'll forever cherish. Last spell was a ton of fun (even though I dont own it, I had the pleasure of playing it through alternate)

Lakeburg Legacies I was definitely hugely looking forward to and I feel like alot of the critique was unfair, because it is a thorough management game, its not meant to develop liking characters, or relating to them, its not meant to really be a dating sim, or anything of that nature.

You're basically "god" and you try to put together the best civilization possible, the matchmaking aspect is how to recruit people outside of using money that will nestle perfectly into your little city and become a productive member. This game does have downtime, management games always have downtime. It takes time to acquire resources and such to make things happen, thats okay. It's meant to be cozy and relaxed.

The only TRUE problems with the gameplay, was people were cheating on their partners, divorcing and enslaving children way too often, almost instantaneously off meeting someone, no endless mode, and character balance RNG.

To break the three down
Soon as someone met another person, they would have a near 50-70% chance to develop interest in them, which lead to cheating and breaking households, which can put alot of pressure on gameplay loop due to having to rehouse people, the slave relationship with children being mentored also just incredibly drove morale down which lead to even more problematic situations with cheating, marriage problems, etc. It became pretty stressful fast.

Endless mode - We all want an endless mode, we cant really go into too much detail on this, just 100 years isn't very long for gameplay and we wanna see how much we can keep a civilization thriving and last in the endgame. It's a feat of strength for sure and tends to keep us interested rather than constantly restarting runs.

Character RNG - This is a general problem with any game with RNG, but you would get floods of characters with negative traits, and negative offspring traits, low stats, etc. I have went through over 3000 hearts trying to get a character decently matched up with someone at @15 per next (nearly 200 left swipes) This is just something that will get better overtime I'm sure, and also just heavily RNG to begin with, theres no way to control it for the player, but it does suck.

Now, the thing is, Ishtar is already handling all three of those things. (except slave trait I think) which is great, it shows active balancing, they've made meeting romances less often, better character traits and already had plans for & are working on an endless mode thats accessible in an alpha state.

With all that out in the open, the game is great, I would love to see it expand and grow, more unique buildings, more resources, more endgame management, etc. Which I imagine we will get some of if not all of. Lakeburg legacies is a cozy game with a bit of stressful management but its cute, its in a nice artstyle, it has a lot of funny moments, it allows a person to feel challenged, and has a great management system that is mostly lost in modern gaming, as it was a thing of older games. I continuously look forward to Ishtar's games and I'm already excited for the next chapter to come.

People may write my review off as fanboy-ism but I promise I would be even more harshly critical of the game if I didnt enjoy it because I have high expectations from this dev. So in fairness, I'm not being incredibly biased, I do genuinely think theres potential and that the game is a lot of fun. I would put a lot more time into it, but fortunately games of these types are pick up and go whenever, rather than just rushing through them and never playing them again. So I can relax and play it as I want.

Hey Ishtar games, big fan of your works and really hope to see a successor to Bermuda/Vinland someday.

It's wishful thinking you's read this, but I feel like Ishtar is the only hope to get another solid management game although its a pretty unpopular genre.

Heres to hoping though.

Game review:
Ever play those flash dating sims / "mcdonalds management" game? Add some RPG elements to it, and add some mythology, you have Dead in Vinland. It's an exceptional game, a last bastion of a dying genre. Theres some Pro's and Con's to the game but I think the Pro's outweigh heavily.

Real question is, are you able to manage the lives of multiple people on a remote island with limited resources and potentially harsh weather conditions & an enemy tribe that wants to kill you spending several days grinding it out trying to figure out a strategy to make it happen?

On the bright side, if you do it. You'll be told you're better than the Dev's & also not human.
10/10 would do again.