Recent reviews by Cuddlefish

This is the best 4X game ever made; however, this is a heavily qualified positive review.

This is an ecstatic and complex game with a lot of issues. I will begin with a basic overview and conclude with the state of the game as it continues to be updated. Summary at the bottom.

Gameplay:
What you see is what you get for the most part. Awesome Warhammer fantasy models go head to head in RTS (with pause) battles and you complete grand 4x campaigns on a large map. The animations are breathtaking if your PC isn't a potato. The battles are snappy, strategic, and have a lot of depth. Easy to learn, hard to master.

Graphics:
This game looks great for the most part. It is sometimes poorly optimized and demands good hardware to run well. The graphics are immersive and watching your units commit violence against your enemies provides otherworldly levels of satisfaction.

Story:
The hard coded story and cutscenes are mediocre at best. They function like a chopped of singular warcraft cinematic. The accompanying campaign, The Realm of Chaos, is frustrating and poorly designed. Originally, the game only released with this campaign which upset pretty much everyone. The way you acquire the McGuffins can be somewhat fun depending on which faction you pick the first time or two. The way your faction's individual story unfolds is compelling overall but it severely harmed by the execution. After 6 months of this miserable campaign, players were finally given the Immortal Empires campaign. Much more in line with traditional Total War, the story here is driven entirely by you, the events in your empire, and your imagination. It's utterly brilliant and the experience is truly your own. Story wise, Immortal Empires is fantastic.

Sound Design:
I'm not an audio guy. This is the least important part of a game to me. Simply, it's average. There isn't a lot of variety and you will for sure hear some repetition. It doesn't help or hurt the game it gets the job done. The musical score is quite good though overall.

Technical Performance:
Besides being a challenge to run the game well, the game is a jumbled mess of awful spaghetti code. The developers outsourced most of the DLC to overseas companies. This would be fine if the DLC wasn't intertwined with the basic game at every level regardless of if you bought it. There are bugs that have been in the game since launch that haven't been fixed and new ones are added with each DLC they release. Bugs range from minor and niche to highly noticeable. Some factions' specific mechanics have in the past or continue to simply not work, making them unplayable or unintentionally weak and unbalanced. Unlocking them typically costs real money so you have to look up whether they work before purchasing them.

Multiplayer Live Service:
Servers are available for you to host and play campaigns with your friends. It's extremely fun but the developer doesn't provide any other service besides the servers. The game balancing is pitiful. Premium factions are strictly better than free ones most of the time and obliterate their free competition with next to no effort. You and your friends should play cooperatively or enforce a laundry list of special rules to make the game less absurd. The other multiplayer option is custom games (mostly fighting one off battles against others). Again, all that is provided are servers. The balancing has improved slightly over the years and they occasionally tweak powerful individual units but the vanilla meta lacks diversity. Players are again forced to create rules, formats, and matchmaking communities. You have little to no hope of finding a good match just within the game.

Total War Philosophy:
Default AI and singleplayer campaign setup is hard-coded to annoy you instead of creating a balanced experience. I have never played a single second of an unmodded campaign and I never intend to. The new player friendly" factions even on normal difficulty will be apocalyptic for a player who is brand new to the franchise without intense save scumming (which sterilizes your experience). Depending on which faction you choose, certain AI factions will behave differently. Rather than create AI that behaves like a player and tries to win, instead it is cheesed to create artificial number checks at various stages in the game. For example, if you pick a "good" aligned faction. The "evil faction" who is 4 or 5 empires away from you will not expand beyond a certain hard-coded point. They will reach a certain size and amass as many armies as they can, often bankrupting themselves. Quantity over quality, these will be the dumbest armies you have ever seen, but there is going to be 5 of them. It's turn 60, and you will most likely steamroll them because legendary lords are utterly cracked when leveled up. There's is level 18 because they have been sitting there for 30 turns waiting for you. Utterly stupid. I use an AI mod to make the AI behave like it's trying to actually win the game. It removes some of the hard coded early game events that are somewhat challenging but makes it so I don't come across as many trash-tier armies in the late game. If they had a balance philosophy, it would be to make you mad so you buy more DLC.

Workshop content:
Bless any of you who create workshop content. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. You are doing someone's literal 6 figure job for them. You are a saint and deserve so many blessings. Do you have strong opinions like me and many other nerds who might play this type of game? That's fine a balder nerd coded up a solution to your problem and it works great! Without the workshop content, the game is literally unplayable in my opinion. It's free though so I don't think it's a very tough solution. Tragic it has to be one though.

The state of the game:
It's pretty pathetic for a 4 year old game, but the game is extremely fun. The developers don't have a lot of trust from the community. They have not delivered on many of the promises they made on social media. There is hope that the game is mostly free of bugs before it goes into life support mode at some point. If not, workshop modders will probably have it fixed in a year or two.

Pricing scheme:
This long-winded discussion doesn't belong in a game review. Simply put, it's predatory, and you need to put in a lot of hours to get your money's worth.

Summary:
This game is your dreamy goth gf. She is beautiful and everything you ever wanted but she absolutely has major emotional problems. You have fun together as long as she takes her medication which she sometimes forgets. You can be together but she isn't going to make it easy. You end up paying for most of the things you do together. You go to couples counseling but she insists that you do it on zoom with her friend from another country. Their accent is so thick that you can barely understand them.

Should you play this demo? I will break it down very simply. Answer the following questions:

1. Do you like Backpack Battles?

2. Do you like auto battling games?

3. Do you like deckbuilding games?

4. Do you have 5 minutes to set up a free account?

If the answer to 2 or more of these including question 4 is a yes, give it a shot. Feel free to check my hours in Monster Train 1 and 2, Slay the Spire, and Backpack Battles if you don't trust me. I also enjoy Teamfight Tactics and Magic: The Gathering. It's literally a free demo. If you have time, what's the harm? If you're worried about your time, don't play any video games. Go do what you need to do. These negative reviews are deranged. There is a slight delay when taking actions at most but I didn't experience any lag. It's a free demo where you can play 3 rounds including 1 tutorial. Fun game! Decide for yourself... that's the point of a demo....

This is really a neat little game. It's simple yet elegant so I would say overall: what you see is what you get. I don't think there's a lot of game outside of the previews you have most likely watched.

Do you want to do dozens if not hundreds of 12-17 minute runs of throwing balls and dodging some stuff? This game may be for you. Do you like building a cute base with some resource quirks too? Then this game is definitely for you.

If you like this sort of thing, I'm willing to bet you will get somewhere between 15 and 50 hours out of this. If not, there's probably a more appropriate thrifty indie game for you.

Just go try the free 1.5-2 hour demo if you're interested in this game. If you're still on the fence, I'll divide this review up into a simple questionnaire and an in depth review:

Do you like Digimon? Do you like creature collecting games? Do you like PS2 era JRPG's?

Your answers are 3 no's: Why are you even reading this review?
Your answer to exactly 1 of the questions above is yes: Wait for a sale.
Your answer to 2 or more questions is yes: If you liked the demo, buy the game.

In depth review:

Gameplay: 7.5/10

It's turn based and you tell your guys to do the thing and they do it. Typically, I think this style of gameplay is outdated and boring as all get out. Make your numbers big enough to beat the enemies' numbers or grind until you can. Basically, about as interesting as doing the dishes. Thankfully, they built on that foundation a little bit. Simply put, imagination, variety, and the auto battle function make the gameplay siginfigcantly more interesting and fast paced. The devs said "hey we know this gameplay loop is outdated and terrible so we put a fresh coat of paint and some lipstick on it." Not that Nyx cheap lipstick, this is the thousand dollar lipstick Taylor Swift uses to look 10 years younger and make young women feel insecure. This is the paint you buy to keep that wall orange for 200 years. I will get into more detail in the visual design section but holy guacamole these Digimon are incredible to look at. When they do the thing you ask them to, it feels absolutely amazing. The strategic depth and type advantage system is just complex enough to keep things fresh. Rock paper scissors with style. Also, they said grinding is for chumps. You can crank up the difficulty if you love pressing 3 buttons for an hour to grind. You could also do that at your day job, the devs respect the hell out of your time. Digivolving is fair and compelling. You can change your little buddy into 20 different digimon to raise their max level if you want, otherwise just throw them in the overly verbose daycare and raise whatever stat they need. Collecting digimon is incredibly fun in this game, but it's not really a requirement. Also the way you can customize their moves is liberating and flexible. The digimon add imagination and variety to your little number battle so it's actually interesting. Also, against digimon that aren't bosses, you can just turn on auto battle and your homies will just bulldoze the enemy with super effective attacks to speed things up. There are AAA gaming moments where you go up ladders or shimmy across a narrow ledge. These are an opportunity for you to recover your dopamine receptors by no longer having fun for a moment. To any game devs, the game can just be 30-60 minutes shorter. No one is going to be upset by being unable to press A to do a 12 second vine jump in place of walking for 2 seconds. Riding digimon is flipping awesome, as you would expect. The digimon farm was fine. Basically just a place to do some menuing in exchange for stats or personality. The personality system and the farm felt undercooked. They got the job done but they weren't anything special. I would have also taken out the silly card battling thing in place of a simple auto-battler. The auto battler would offer 5-10 quick tactical decisions to the player and yield results in the form of stats. They could defend your base and let you get more furniture or something. The tiles and weird looking objects for the digi-farm are alright.

Story: 7/10

At first, I thought it was a little silly. Once you actually get to the digital world, it stopped being silly and put on its serious pants which helped a whole hell of a lot. 7 out of 10 characters are interesting, compelling, or charming. The voice-acting is good 70% of the time and is strangely absent sometimes. 7 out of 10 plot moments hit and are deeply compelling. I think games rarely get passed a 5/10 in story so this is high praise coming from me. When I want a good story, I'll read a book. I have the attention span of a goldfish.

Visual Design: 10/10

Holy mother Mary of sweet Jesus Christ. These digimon are an absolute masterpiece. Put them and their animations in a museum of digital art. There's 450 unique digimon with largely unique animations. They look AWESOME. The time, love, and care put into the digimon of this game should earn somebody the Nobel Peace Prize they're so good. They honor the original TV shows and then elevate the digimon to new heights. It's so beautiful that it brings a tear to my eye. My inner child has not been this pleased in years. I cherish the moments where they made me feel like a kid again. The graphics and design of the world are just a colorful stage for these magnificent creatures to do battle. They aren't all that special. Development started in like 2018 and they need to run on plebeian consoles. It didn't hold the game back in my opinion though. In 10 years, I hope to see some ray tracing and individually animated hairs though. The digimon town is about the coolest thing I have ever witnessed. A base similar to the town is what they should have given us instead of the farm.

Sound Design: 9/10

There was enough voice acting for the game to seem polished. Sometimes it was a little inconsistent like with the main character, but whatever I guess. The music was good and added appropriate atmosphere to all the various places. I found the soundtrack relaxing overall. The sound effects on attacks and other moves was fitting and they weren't overly repetitive. I'm not really much of an audio guy so look elsewhere for more on this if you're some weirdo who plays games with your eyes closed or something.

Level Design: 7/10

The digital world is well crafted overall. There's no obligatory empty open world so that's good. Just good old fashioned maps that actually have things in them. Most of the levels were good. Any time you were underground was when creativity flew out the window. Ah yes, another grey wall. Riveting. The game asks you to spend a startling amount of time in the human world which is usually not great. It gets better, but I would have appreciated more digital world zones rather than walking around Shinjuku. You can do that in real life, so why does it need to be in a video game?

Closing thoughts and some background:

As a kid, I played digimon world ds, dawn, and dusk. Apparently, these were not the good ones. They were pretty cool but really grindy. This game is what I wanted those to be. I very rarely beat JRPG's and usually drop them after 10-15 hours because the gameplay is super boring and I have a short attention span. I'm just about finished with this game though and intend to do all the side quests. Side note, I'm a spiteful person and derived joy from buying this game instead of Pokemon Legends Z-A. Take notes, Game Freak.

Final score: 8/10

This is a very good game that falls just short of being a great game. It's a love letter to the digimon franchise and captures the magic of the series. It succeeds in most of its systems and is not innovative.

based and cool

Deck-building experience: Magic the Gathering: Pioneer, Commander, Friday night Magic drafts, and pre-releases in person, Slay the Spire, Monster Train 1, Flesh and Blood pre-releases, Hearthstone (2014), Balatro, and Dominion Board Game.

This is the pinnacle of deck-building. Slay the Spire's heuristic choice-making branches are small and simple compared to the complex and vast web that can unfold in a Monster Train run. The sheer variety and the 'any run is winnable' design is the absolute best for tight deck-building game-play. It lacks the role-playing whimsical atmosphere of Commander games, but apparently that's not why people like Commander which is baffling to me. If you're more traditional in that you want mechanical efficiency and total victory this game can offer a much more concise path towards achieving that. I greatly enjoy the novelty of having "creatures" on my board and they look great and offer a lot of varying game decisions.

By purchasing this game you are supporting passionate developers on the cutting edge of this (somewhat?) niche genre.

Shut up and give them your money. This is a real game for real gamers and we need to encourage developers to make more games like this.

Pros and Cons followed by my thoughts-

Pros:
-Awesome premise and interesting Game master system games the game relatively fresh and exciting
-Shooting enemies feels really impactful
-Whacky Shenanigans and hijinks
-Good gun-play and many interesting choices to choose from for guns
-Pretty good graphics and visual design
-Great sound design
Cons:
-Long missions drag on and become walking simulators
-No vehicles yet despite irrefutable proof they're in the game files
-Rock-paper-scissors enemy types and counters require highly specific guns and stratagems
-Difficulty translates to increasing the size of health bars rather than more complex mechanics
-Missions are extremely repetitive
-Escort missions are a punishment and barely even work
-Prolific game breaking bugs still present months after launch
-Made on the worst game engine ever conceived
-The most out of touch and incoherent weapon balancing patches I have ever seen in my 12 years of multiplayer gaming

Thoughts:
This game is like the most delicious hamburger you ever had, but the bun is made out of drywall. You beg them to let you just eat the filling, but it's all glued onto the drywall, making it impossible. At this point, it's just not worth it. During the hype days when there was hope, it was fun and if you were rolling with your friends you really felt like you were a part of something special. Now the developers have a weird fixation on making players suffer rather than making the game more fun. It's profoundly strange to create so many nerf-centered patches since this is a PvE game. There's very little in the way of competition in this game it's mostly just about having a fun time with your friends and playing how you want. It just feels insulting that these patches don't BUFF the weapons that are underused. Instead they basically nerf everyones' favorite weapons every few weeks for "balance" because I guess the AI enemies were complaining too much. Happily adding my review now in conjunction with other players who love this game more than I do and who have been taken advantage of. This game is also still unplayable in many countries because Sony is an evil corporation run by greedy short-term profit chasing racketeers. Will also happily change my review back to positive should they address some of my complaints. In a PvP game, yes players often don't know what they want and their biases skew their view of the bigger picture. In a PvE game, you can only blame out of touch developers who need to be working more closely with members of the community to deliver a compelling experience that will entice players to continue playing.

They addressed a lot of the issues I listed above. As promised, I'm updating my review to be positive. I would now say this is a great chill game to play with your friends. If you want a compelling competitive PvE experience then you can simply ramp up the difficulty level. They will be adding another one soon.

This is a good game for a good price. Eventually it could become a great game and justify a more hefty price. If you like grinding, monster collection, and cozy vibes you'll probably like this. Plus, it's co-op. Emphasis on grinding though. I would mention something for survival fans but you all already know it's a better blanket statement to just say y'all like chores.

The type of game to actually be worth $60 dollars. Stop reading reviews. Go buy the game.