Recent reviews by Azlelium

TLDR: Dont Reccommend. Art & Style = Amazing. Balance & Gameplay let it down massively.

The game is adorable and I cannot stress enough how much I adore the art style, music composition and sound effects. Every aspect on how the game looks works to support and create an unbeatable aesthetic that I can't help but fall in love with, the battle animations are the cherry on top of this artistic cake and I could genuinely watch the battle anims as a desktop wallpaper for hours. D0 (the difficulty the game starts at) feels good, runs can be challenging but with intelligent strategy you can succeed against most combat encounters/bosses

Now for the criticisms. The balance of the different dice to relics to enemy scaling feels wack. Now I have to preface that I have not beaten D1 (The farthest I've been able to achieve with casual play is the boss of floor 2) and will not be attempting any more runs as when roguelikes/lites start to feel like part time jobs I loose interest very quickly.

The reason I find the D1 jump so drastic and unfun is that at a base level Dice and the energy system feel in conflict with one another. Dice have different tiers D4s, D6s and D8s ( I have not seen higher than D8s as of writing this) and you can level up each dice to have a face equaling the highest number of its dice 4,6,8 respectively. The problem comes when these dice interact with the energy system in the game; D4's cost no energy to use, D6s cost one and D8s cost 2 energy to use and you start with a maximum of three energy to use per turn.

To compare this to another rougelike, Slay the spire, the problem isnt the inherent inclusion of an energy cap, instead the problem arises in the cost of the "cards" and how DitD balances them. In StS 0 cost cards have downsides/other costs that players have to work around as not having to use energy is a major boon to the card, while 1 costs are kind of a catch all ranging from default strikes and defends to having minor extra effects, and 2 costs are the blowouts usually having big highs with either high costs or restrictions like being removed from you deck after use. In DitD this balance is out of sync. D4s dont cost zero energy to play and dont have a downside outside of their lower number cap while D8s cost two energy to use and only have a cap increase of 2-4. In a game where first floor bosses can have anywhere from 75-125 hp (On D1) an increase of 2-4 is next to nothing when for the price of 1 D8 you instead could play two D6s or an "infinite" number of d4s.

This fighting between the dice and the energy is compounded by the rng that the dice themselves bring to the table. In StS a strike always deals 6 damage at base where as in DitD a strike can range from 0-8 damage depending on the roll, meaning that sometimes your only damage option on a turn is to use a d8 that rolled a 1 which makes the 2 cost feel even worse. I'm not advocating for the removal of the rolling system but I think a step back from whats currently in the game and maybe restructuring it to tie the cost of a dice to be based of the actual number on the dice would do the game well. This only compounds when you bring in the different dice effects, which to not make this review too long I will shotgun their effects and my review of them out quickly:

* Block Dice - Great and needed in almost every endgame deck
* Damage Dice - Good but damage scales so quickly that I wish these only came in D4s
* Mirror Dice - Broken. Scales so quickly it can break the game. The only other usable dice in high levels
* Heal Dice - Good but shackled to mediocrity cause they only come in glass from what ive seen
* Boost Dice - Good but has bad synergy with being upgraded as the buffed dice needs to be x tiles away.
* Draw Dice - Literally worthless unless its a D4. Spending energy to draw /next turn/ is garbage
* Energize Dice - Garbage. Pay energy to gain one energy next turn? bad.
* Terrain Dice - Good but works best with the flash mechanic to get the buff going sooner
* Prism Dice - Bad. The problem with buffs is that they go too far and eliminate spaces on the board.
* Poison Dice - Good. Can be better the damage dice but can be worse. Enemy specific.
* Splash Dice - Good as D4s/D6s. D8 version of this are bad and should be avoided

Relics in the current version of the game either feel too weak or too situational. They can almost all be summed up as "When X do/gain Y" and none really serve to shake up the floor to floor gameplay outside of the highest rarity relics improving specific builds. It honestly feels like a system that was supposed to be explored more by the dice property system that got cut and made into its own system. If I was brainstorming ways to improve it as is I would reccommend the dev looking into the idea of the system looking at the players deck to prevent instances of getting relics working with one keyword that just isnt in the players deck.

The types of decks are also super limited, the only succesful ones ive seen talk about are copy decks (decks that use a dice that copies another dice x spaces away) and block decks, this diversity of "viable" builds /cripples/ the replayability factor for me as the characters (due to how bad the current relics are) are essentially different skins that just play different animations while I attempt to build the same deck every single run. You can't really build for high attack dice without tanking your survivability (due to the bad balance of dice cost) and in the higher difficultly levels bad survivability = a lost run 99% of the time.

All in all I like the base game idea and with more work I think it can be really fun but as a rougelike it feels too punishing and restrictive while also not giving the player enough tools to circumvent/navigate the difficulty outside of attempting to build one of 2 hyper specific decks.

Warframe is a game that rewards you for the amount of time that you invest into it. If you wish for a surface level horde shooter with fun abilities then it will give you that experience in spades, however, it also has the ability to allow you to delve deeper into its systems and lets you customize and maximize your arsenal until you become a walking army.

The story is serviceable in the beginning but in my opinion ages like wine as you progress through the star chart, slowly pulling you into an experience that I have yet to relive in any other Sci-Fi game I've played. While it does go off the rails at times it does so in a way that feels believable and maintains a sense of internal consistency that keeps you informed while still asking questions.

Each frame feels unique even though the devs have released over 50 differing characters, each with a unique kit that (while falling into a manageable amount of categories such as caster vs weapons-platform) still allows players to express their own uniqueness through their selection of frames and weapons. It is rare that any two players' loadouts will be identical to one another.

It is definitely a game I recommend everyone to play at least once and one I definitely recommend to anyone who loves long grinds, deep (though sometimes confusing) mechanical systems, and extreme horde shooters.

As a fan of the later games in the borderlands series I have often tried to replay the original to round out my experience with the franchise. I want to make clear that I found my time with the game enjoyable, with the main campaign being my personal highlight of the game with the DLCs being good experiences but not really matching my personal cup of tea for what I personally wanted from a Borderlands game.
I found the gameplay of the original enjoyable but I think in future I would recommend a new player to the franchise to start with Borderlands 2 rather than this one. I found myself often annoyed at certain gameplay decisions within the DLCs that really began to put a toll on me the longer I played. Often in the DLCs there will be a string of quests that ask you to collect certain items that drop from enemies within the DLC (Brains for the Zombie DLC, Robot components for another ETC.) and it shows this idea that replayability comes from collectathons but instead of making the items a player is collecting interesting items like the game’s successors it makes the collectables mindless items that feel copy pasted between DLCs.
This inherently wouldn’t be an issue if major achievements from the game didn’t require you to do this for every DLC with the ‘collectathons quest lines’ requiring upwards of 300+ items collected throughout the DLC. This issue compounds with the fact that these are ‘quests’ within the game and not ‘challenges’ which require the player to return to an NPC everytime to progress to the next stage of the quest. So if a player reaches the first quest step’s milestone amount of collectibles any picked up after that point and until the next quest step are functionally useless. This further compounds with the fact that the DLCs don’t have an easy way to travel between areas within the DLC, requiring a player to often run between multiple zones just to turn in a single quest to continue on collecting items that give them no benefits within the game itself.
Another issue I experienced with the gameplay was with the vault hunter I chose to play. While I have played all four of them throughout my many attempts of fully completing this game I often found myself gravitating towards Brick, a melee style vault hunter. In the base game there were very few issues with this choice (The occasional boss was hard to melee in a critical spot, vehicles cannot be meleed without heavy risk of the player being insta killed, ETC). However the DLCs made this choice of character feel exceptionally annoying. Throughout three of the game’s four DLCs there were enemies and/or mechanics that felt specifically designed to hamper Brick’s gameplay in totality.
The first DLC (the zombie one) had enemies that could constantly apply a massive slow to the player’s character movement speed, with most coming from long range projectile attacks. The second DLC (The crimson lance one) had a plethora of enemies that had large shields which prevents damage when attacked from the side they’re facing (which in fairness is balanced by their head and feet being exposed) and large robots that can constantly push a player away from them. Finally in DLC 4 (The Robot one) there are a large swath of enemies with shields that fully prevent damage from attacks littering their character model. While this doesn’t cripple Brick’s playstyle (and some of these mechanics appeared in the base game) it began to feel as if the developers saw how strong Brick was and added these mechanics to hamper his melee playstyle.
I am heavily against the idea of this. Some of the mechanics feeling extremely unfun for me to play against because instead of there being a unique way to play around these changes I felt pigeon held into using guns. For some this won’t be an issue but I enjoy playing melee characters when the option appears and the base game made it feel like the vault hunters had their positives and negatives where as the DLCs made me simply feel worse because I chose a playstyle that wasn’t “optimal” for the countless enemies in the DLC.
Overall I had my fun with the game and I had my problems. I would not say I think the game is bad, I would simply say it is not the recommended starting point for the franchise I hold dearly in my heart.

bought this as a player who started with ds3 and wanted to see what the roots were like, I finished this game and can say I prefer ds3 vastly over it and recommend it over this version of ds1. This game felt incredibly tedious to me with most of my own deaths in the later part of the game feeling cheap, due to most of them revolving around being knocked off from a high place to an instant death, as I became stronger throughout my adventure. This contributed to, for me personally, a sense of boredom when it came to exploring sections of the game just to return to where I had been killed repeatedly.

If you're a borderlands fan I couldnt recommend this game more as a continuation of the franchise. If you're not already deeply addicted to borderlands 2 I recommend looking out for a sale and grabbing the ultimate edition or whichever one has the season pass which elevates the game exceptionally

Personally I do not think TemTem will be the alternative pokemon game I originally thought it was, while there are still substantial changes to the formula between the two games I do not think that they are entirely positive nor engaging as a player. Initially I viewed the game as a more 'open world' variant of the traditional pokemon games but as my time with the game developed and I played more I found myself becoming more annoyed at the changes the developers have added to the formula.

Switching from single battles to double battles is a great starting point, while on the surface it is a major change that would affect how one would approach battles. I found myself more and more annoyed whenever I entered a battle because every battle felt overly punishing to be in due to how the AI seems to handle targeting. There seems to be an over reliance on targeting a single player's temtem until it is either defeated unless one of the AI's temtems has a type effective move on one of the player's temtems but not the other. This feels extremely frustrating to me as a player because of how expensive healing items are and how little money players can earn in exchange, compounding this idea is that over leveling seems to be almost ineffective the later on into the game I went, there would be situations where my 20+ higher level monster would be hit for upwards of 70 damage out of its 240hp (29% of its hp) on a neutral attack by just one of the enemy's creatures.

However, double battles could allow for interesting team composition to flourish, allowing players to combine certain monsters to use their unique effects to shape how battles turn out. This is a definite positive of the system’s change, my only issue with it is how many few combinations I found as a player with the most predominant one in my mind being combing an electric type type temtem with another that is healed by electric type moves in order to use a move called “chain lightning” which hits three monsters in a clockwise rotation for both damage and healing. There also seems to be a lack of “buffing” moves within temtem, with them mainly being self buffs in the cases I found during my time with the game. Personally this feels odd because if there were some temtems that prioritized healing and buffing the partnered temtem with the support temtem having high defense stats and low offense stats this would be very compelling especially early on in the player’s journey.

There is a system within the game where if a Temtem has a certain move the typing of the partnered temtem can give the move additional effects but in my playtime the most unique effect was adding extra turn durations to status effects the move would apply. This does not make full use of the system in my opinion, with the worst cases making it feel like a superficial change in order to differentiate it from other games in its genre.

There are other problems with the open world but they are more subjective, the worlds are large and have some decent exploration for players who enjoy it, but with no immediate on hand fast travel (like fly in the pokemon series) it becomes very annoying when a side quest in the third island of the game asks for a certain temtem’s egg and you have to manually backtrack to the breeders almost entirely on foot. Combined with the fact that trainers in most cases are entirely hidden from view, traversing in temtem began to feel like navigating an active minefield rather than exploring a vast open world. That is not even mentioning how progressing through the story alone is affected by the constant harassment of invisible enemies, constantly appearing at choke points or at random intervals in order to ‘keep the player engaged’.

Pokemon would often show how many trainers there were in a route in most situations, with the ones that are hidden being certain “classes” trainers (ninja, miners, etc), allowing the player to take stock of the next run and prepare accordingly. The hidden enemies feels more unfair and punishing as a mechanic because of how it withholds information from the player, preventing them from knowing how many fights there will be, doesn't allow them to plan accordingly and begins to feel really tiring as the player’s team becomes weaker and weaker from each battle.

Finally there are the AI’s teams of monsters, with this being a really subjective topic I want to put my full opinion out on. It sucks not knowing what type a temtem is or what type a certain trainer will be using. From what I could gather it would more often than not be balanced around the island you are on (Ie fire on fire island, ground on ground island, etc.) but there would be times where a battle would use types of temtems I had never seen before and due to the art design I sometimes couldn't tell what type they were to begin with. Even the gyms would sometimes deviate entirely from the theme of their gym’s puzzle which felt more like a slap to the face as a player than engaging. I believe pokemon has stagnated in most cases, becoming easier as time progressed and not truly utilizing its genre of gameplay to its fullest but I never felt whiplash from the rock-type gym throwing out a water/Ice type pokemon.

I do not think I can recommend temtem to any of my friends or people looking for an alternative to pokemon, personally there are too many issues with the fundamental systems of the game that I think harm it rather than help it.

The game overall is decent, gun-play is the best part of the game so if that's all you care about then its good. HOWEVER, the game overall lacks a much needed depth for the players to really feel like there is a reason to grind each season and as of march 17th, 2020 there isn't anything close to that. The lore is a very mixed bag with interesting stories being dropped randomly and massive lore drops each season which can be very draining to constantly sift through. With some minor fixes this game has the potential to become the best MMOFPS to date but until that happens its a decent 5/10. Friends not included.

EDIT 5/15/2021 - The game is still very much in the same state as when i posted the original review above with slightly better improvements to the ability side of the game with the addition of stasis. However, the seasons are still derivative and while I (personally) am ok with the 7x3 seasonal progression system, I (personally) wish it wasnt based on a gameplay loop of, "do strikes then do the seasonal activity." Rinse repeat, fall asleep. I also am personally disliking the implementation of 'champions' and 'Legend lost sectors' purely because that it is so carted away from main activities during a season BUT if you want the new exotic armor you are spending time in there whether you wanted to or not. My (personal) issues with champions is instead of adding an enemy the player needs to constantly think about and how they change the flow of battle and are more often than not a burst damage check, completely ignoring their gimmick or using it to hold them still just to make deleting them easier. The recent addition of transmog has really turned me away from bungie as a company, if you want to really customize your characters i would (personally) recommend warframe since their character customization system is far superior. I would probably change my original score down to a 4/10 due to the stagnation of gameplay and developer communication, alongside business choices at the detriment of the consumer.

Its difficulty is fun and enjoyable combined with the modding community breathes tons of life into the game so as to always keep you coming back for more.