Recent reviews by Timeraider

Have yet to fully complete the game (Sadly lost to the boss with only 5% hp left) but played enough to get a good view on the game.

Edit: Completed the game after about 16 hours. Ending has some additional lore and for people who want to go into higher and higher difficulty (also new movesets for bosses), that kind of endgame does exist.
Rest of the review stays the same.

Summary:
Good game, nice combat, lore/story while interesting does feel like it requires Lost in Random (the normal game). Calculating in the fact that this indie company got away from EA with their IP.
7.5/10, not bad at all. Enjoyed it very much so far.

Gamplay: Gameplay is smooth top-down action-rpg. As expected from these type of games, it's decently fast-paced and well-timed dodges do become important near the end-levels.
You can dodge, attack, charge attack, use a spell (which by default gathers "mana" by attacking enemies) and throw your dice at enemies (which rolls a number).
I must say that after a while I kinda totally forgot you can throw your dice .. its not as fast-paced as the other combat options so unless you're building around your dice, just attack + spell combos might end up being your entire repertoire :P

Builds: The way you can build your character isn't monumental. Enough to keep it different enough but mechanics-wise its not like a new game.
You have the choice of 4 weapons, each weapon with limited choices in builds (plain old crit, lightning at a final combohit or maybe you want to focus on charge attacks? etc.)
Then you sort of get randomised an spell you get to equip. Over your journey you will encounter another 1-2 spells which you can exchange your current spell with.
During games you get to put passive buffs on a field of squares. If you line up multiple buffs containing the same colour, this boosts the stat belonging to that colour by 50% (red is weapon dmg, green is crit chance etc. etc.)
This gives enough build diversity, though fundamentally you will still play out combat in almost the exact same way.

Graphics: Runs very well and the art style is the same reason why I absolutely loved Lost in Random. I'm a big Alice Madness Returns fan and anything that has this dark fairy tale type of style always gets my interest. Just look at the trailer and screenshots and you will see exactly what I mean.
It has the basic graphics options and that's about it.

Story/Lore: This is the one part I have to be a bit cryptic about. The thing is this.. the story as with any of the games in this genre isnt told explicitly and detailed and mostly through lore found during playthroughs.
The issue with this is that I felt like it missed a lot of information and story that only people who played the first Lost in Random game had. So many references towards old past which is not explained enough, sometimes almost leaning on story from the previous game.
Is it enough to say the story is bad? No.. however I do think it is way more clear for people coming from Lost in Random compared to anyone who started with this game and might end up skipping the story due to simply at times not having a straw to grasp from.

Overall, for its price and knowing the developers its a very good entry and I wish them luck in their further developing careers.

Havent been able to play due to technical issues and their support is not answering any of the tickets.

So until they start actual troubleshooting, there we go.

Sony is still the publisher and still going on with the shady stuff.
Im leaving it on negative.

Niche third-person action-based story game with an unique combat twist. Mostly caught my eye due to the style its made in.

Gameplay:
Most of the time you traverse the world, follow the main story, do some sidequests and admire the weird views.
The remaining 20% is combat.. Combat is third-person action-based with a small twist.

During combat you collect mana by destroying crystals that grow on enemies and environments, by collecting mana you generate cards .. those cards can do anything from summon weapons, to turrets, to bombs and more. The cards however cost dicepoints.. so basically.. you collect mana, gain cards and then you roll the dice .. depending on how much you rolled, you can spend on using cards.

You would think you can basically summon 1 weapon and be done with collecting mana for the fight, but weapons have durability. As such rolling the dice and using cards is an important part of combat.

Graphics.
Graphical quality is... fine. Its very well optimised, but nothing to write home about.
The unique style however is the main selling point of this part. It has a very unique style that reminds me quite a bit of Tim Burton and I absolutely love it.

Story
Story is interesting, characters are fun and while not explicitely shown, there are some darker undertones.

Pro's:
Tim Burton style graphics
Decent story
Unique combat, though not meant for everyone

Con's:
There are about 35 cards. Which is enough to sort make your own personalised deck, but I would have prefered to see double that
Niche gameplay. Some will like it, some will hate it.
The price. It is about 15 hours long and feels like its made with love, but a lot of people will hesitate putting 30 euros down for an 15 hour gamble. Luckily however it is discounted quite often and mostly between 80 and 90% off
The final 2 chapters are rushed. Out of the 6 chapters, the final 2 feel extremely cramped together. Now.. the publisher is EA so my money would be on them being the cause, but ive got no proof so not gonna blame anyone but the devs.

Overall, when discounted and if the game looks fun to someone its worth a shot.

Its good 😛
Anyway, their games basically did to crpg's what Hearthstone did to card games .. not gonna say non of the other options were bad, but lets be honest .. Baldurs Gate 3 brought in and enticed a massive playerbase who normally would never play an crpg to give it an try. Opened up the niche genre for a while, now lets hope the "AAAA" devs dont close it to quick with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ attempts at making money from the crpg hype.

Its still a specific genre so if youre not a fan of turnbased strategical rpg's, its not gonna suddenly be your favorite game.
Graphics are fine, optimisation is done well and animations are nice.
Gameplay-wise its an third-person party rpg with an party of up to 4 characters (excluding pets and summons) who can be either storycharacters or online co-op characters.
It has a real-time normal world, though the moment you enter battle it becomes turnbased .. this is a fluid interaction and you basically stay in the same world. At that point it becomes an strategical RPG, controlling your characters and spending points to move, attack, cast spells or interact with stuff.
Every interaction whether its an attack, an spell or something else is made with a diceroll meaning it all is chance based. Luckily it always shows the %s of you succeeding. Stats, buffs and items can increase those chances depending on what youre trying to do.
Stats, skills etc. are determined during the creation of your characters and how they level up afterwards. Creating an character is very statisfying as both the visual creation as the class choices are quite extensive.

Pro's:
Game works and is complete (kinda sad this is a pro nowadays). All the content is just right there.
You can do ANYTHING. Is it smart to do some things? Probably not.. but you can 😄
Want to attack a god at lvl 1? Im sure you can. Kill innocent civilians? Certainly. Shoot down a chandelier to kill someone? Fine .. throw a partymember at an enemy? Might be even more usefull than the partymember itself.
Stuff synergizes. Freeze the ground? Enemies have a chance to slip. Then use fire to melt the ice and electrocute it with lightning? Works. Then have plants grow there before setting the field on fire with a fireball? Yup. Push enemies off the map to instantly kill anything? Why not.
Its very nice to be able to make a character and fully make it your own
No grinding involved so the all the playtime is actually playing

Con's:
Its an strategical crpg so if youre not into these kind of D&D kinda things.. thats it
While I did thoroughly enjoy all 3 chapters, they squeezed a LOT of story and character/power progression in chapter 3 to the point whereby I would say that compared to chapter 1 and 2 .. to much. A lot of stuff happens in a very short timespan.
Only 20% of people fully completed the game so far .. im sure the number will rise and thats still a very high number for such a huge game, but a LOT of people are also stuck in chapter 3.. taking decent breaks in between to avoid getting burned out to hard.

Overall I would recommend this to anyone who finds the gameplay look even slightly interesting and in my eyes, my 60 euros was an great investment for what I got back in fun gaming.
10/10, wish devs werent such douchebags and instantly attacking Larian with "ow, but if we had that kind of budget". F off Ubisoft, you wouldnt be able to make it even if you had all the money in the world... anyway..

Game is fine, but apparently according to the developers i'm xenophobic for saying that other games have proven how 90% of cheaters are from China and that to the very least a block on VPNs (or going as far as combine that with regionlocks) would ease their issue?

Guess some people really like pretending stuff doesnt exist in hopes of it going away.

Yes yes, everyone knows the servers are having issues on launchday. Welcome to online gaming.

Gameplay is very solid though.

Will update the review later on.

Hereby my words to get an task done for the Steam awards.

Simply good....

(This is apparently what Steam wants to encourage, but fine.... )

Its finally back here!

(Do realise that while I did own this game before it got removed from Steam the first time.... as I had issues with specifically the Steam-version on my previous PC ..about 100 hours of my playtime is sadly in the origin version :D)

Semi-disturbing but absolutely crafted with love hack and slash game with fluid controls and great storyline.
I can advise some .ini file changes as seen in some Steam Guides as otherwise the older enginesettings might show their bad side.

Cant people wait with reviews untill they can actually play it correctly?