Recent reviews by Z͟҉͟G͟҉͟1͟҉͟S͟҉͟

Fun game

I love the game, I just wish there was a soundtrack I could buy. Doesn't seem like developer is particularly active in responding to questions as far as I can tell from looking around.

Let me get out of the way i'm no game maker but I got the program because maybe one day I want to be and I have ideas that I want to put down and sort out. Even barring all technical knowledge of game development, there are some pretty decent tools a brainless person like me can use to get what I want done. There are some quality of life difficulties I can't imagine why needs to be there like, having unnecessary extra steps to editing every single individual templates or not allowing you to manually "save as" to a specified location, or make a new file save. It saves automatically and overwrites that single save every time, every 5 minutes. In fact that is such a poor practice that if a problem happens like say, trying to save some new template edits freezes the program and makes it unresponsive, you can't go back to an older file that actually works and now instead every time you try to load your project and edit a detail, the whole program freezes.

Edit: Despite the flaws, i'm changing my review from thumbs down to thumbs up because customer support responded. I was kind of sceptical if there would be any for a product more than a few years old by now, so glad that it's there.

As the time of writing, I can say the only thing that seems to be fully optimised is how it doesn't take up a ridiculous amount of processing power. Everything else is a hot mess.

Castle building is initially more confusing than it needed to be for what it was trying to do. It feels like it's more than possible to have designed the mechanics in a way that is both simple and get what the devs were going for too. The solution they implemented with highlighting the borders of tiles with colors feels more like a band-aid rather than solving the root design being too non intuitive. I mean the band aid helps yeah, but not having a problem to begin with would've been nicer. Moreover the tutorial is honestly terrible. As much as I hate tutorials that hold your hand and force you to do a certain set of actions, when there are stuff that isn't natural to pick up it would be helpful to go over several scenarios physically. The kind of tutorial you get is like a quickstart page you find in a board game box. It answers nothing in detail or any questions you may have about certain interactions. For example castles can actually fuse together into one kingdom but you'll find no mention of that anywhere nor an explanation of exactly how it works.

The UI is quite lacking. There are no keybinds or fullscreen options in the settings menu. Heck, you can't even look at the encyclopedia the game has while you are playing a map. You have to go to the menu and if you do then you can say goodbye to any progress you had in the middle of that map in particular. Moreover, it's less an encyclopedia than it is a binder of cards you've seen and an elemental weakness chart. There's no information about what the global sefiroth effects are so you're stuck having to play through runs till you find a card that gives you a particular type, put in the work to build it and if you don't like it then tough, there's a garbage card in deck for the whole run.

The balance of the game isn't too bad i'd say. Is it perfect and as fun as it could be? Well no. But i've certainly seen a lot more games with worse balance that make things too difficult or easy. In Orx it's more than doable but somehow it feels even though it's in the middle zone of difficulty, that the pace or some other factor I can't place my finger on is missing that could make it more fun. Well I suppose that's too vague to justify taking points off of, so at least good job with making the difficulty reasonable.

More than anything else though, the bugs in the game are game breaking. Like end your run/save game breaking.
Twice now have I been at the act 2 boss only to have it ruined because of some weird thing that happens when placing a tile or something. Idk what's going on with the coding but it seems to halfway place an object? The castle got built with a missing tile and the card used got returned to my hand bugged after having to slap every key on my keyboard like a spastic monkey to deselect the bugged card. Then if you try to build you can't as the bug replicates itself to every other card. In fact attempting to use a spell even softlocked me from interacting with anything. Some less game breaking bugs included getting scammed out of an artifact I was supposed to have selected. Didn't missclick anything or continue without selecting a reward, I actually selected rewards and low and behold next fight, what the ♥♥♥♥ where is my item? The artifacts list on the top left seem to bug out every now and then not allowing you to view more than like 4 things which are random by the looks of it and that sunny day tooltip claiming to lower costs by 2 is just straight up a lie. In video game culture some bugs are hilarious and can even become features but nothing i've encountered here could be said as such.

I do like the vision the dev had with this game. There are already games that exist which check off both roguelike deckbuilders and tower defense but those ones have been fixed on a small grid you never move around which makes me feel wanting. Orx is definitely a much bigger map that feels closer to like, age of empires level of space. So it feels a little bit like a civ in disguise. Unfortunately as it is, it feels like whatever happens between envisioning a game and getting a product of that has gone awry. Like in the way that you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the start when setting out to sea and now you're stuck with what you have trying to patch it up.

I think this game is best if you aren't too picky about having a well designed and perfectly polished game. Helps if have time you're lookin to kill too. On the rpg side the story initially gave me a boring impression. The plot seemed quite shallow, hero go kill stuff and fight some demon lord. But after giving it a chance and continuing playing it felt redeemable. Not like, this is great but like passable for keeping me intrigued. Each run you can potentially unlock more story and it's the mystery of what it is that I keep playing for still. I've played more than my fair share of deckbuilders and roguelikes but despite many of said genre of games being better in mechanical concepts, a great deal of them also tend to not have any real story that keeps me coming back like Criminal Dissidia. Some roguelike deckbuilders I enjoyed but have played for like 2 days then never touched it again. Does that make Criminal Dissidia better? Well, no. But I mean, I do have time to kill and it does well enough to hold my interest personally. On the plus side the music is lovely and im waaaay into the art style.

All in all it's a decent attempt at a roguelike deckbuilding rpg. While I'm not impressed by it, I am still very much having fun and enjoying it. There's definitely some hiccups here and there with translation though. For one thing it seems like the gender pronouns are reversed with men being referenced with her and the protagonists being called a man despite all 3 being female. Kinda hilarious actually. A few cards are still in Chineese although online image to text translators are an easy enough remedy for me. One card is kinda wrong in it's text effect and so is another status description blah blah, you get it. Minor little things.

What really bugs me though is that it's not at all clear what requirements you need to trigger certain events or where or when to do things. It drives me nuts how i've been through marcusias forest dozens of times doing everything I can think of without getting a true end or hidden boss. In the encylopedia it does specify completing a lv10 event or something but i've never gotten a chance to do whatever event it is I need to and there's no indication of where or how. With the sea of reefs i've fought the hidden boss regularly before but suddenly can't seem to get the hidden boss to spawn anymore despite not doing anything different as far as I can tell. The same with pond of seclusion hidden boss spawning previously and not anymore. Some events require you to do things before fighting the main quest boss and others have to be done after, but they don't tell you. I mean I guess the whole point is kind of to add mystery to it and trying to find out? But it's not like it's just easter eggs, these seem to be part of the actual main storyline where you are trying to get the true ending. They literally have achievements in the encylopedia telling you that. What they don't tell you is what to do when you get stuck or aren't making any progress. I mean there's a friggin bard that drops hints on how to activate hidden bosses but that doesn't actually matter when for example, you can't find the "request of the mutanians" to enable the hidden boss event to begin with. Or what the hell does the requisite of complete quest with a perfect rating even mean, it's not like they give you a grade after each stage based on time or how many monsters you killed or sidequests you completed. Uggghhhh.

Well you'd think the biggest grievance is how they managed to make you do the same quests over and over. You know the ones in rpgs to fetch or kill monsters? I used to think new game+ was a cheap trick to add playtime, but roguelike rpg quests? That's criminal!!---Dissidia. But actually I find it more enjoyable than just playing roguelike deckbuilders without a developing story at all. It's getting stuck on trying to get events to trigger that is really buggin me.

As torture as it sounds to repeat quests, I do think there could be a target audience that would enjoy a roguelike rpg game, if the mechanics were designed better. I do enjoy playing this still, and I certainly love the art style and characters. Just tell me what the hell I have to do to trigger events though!



Update: I made a guide so you don't have to suffer. YOUR WELCOME :)

So. 36 hours no sleep, playing my first run 19 hours straight. I straight up just paid 30 bucks to **** myself and I regret nothing. 10/10 Take me away faceless!

As of the time of writing, this game made a good first impression. Each playable character has it's own actual unique mechanics that completely change how you interact with the game, unlike many games which just claim as such with only minor differences to show for it. There are also many challenges which change up the rules of the run, and upon completion a medal will appear beside the challenge. There are enough items and enemies in the game to keep things fresh for a several runs, however for the most part these quickly become stale after the 7th or so go around as every challenge and character share the same enemies and most of the items.

It is worth getting and playing as it is right now however be warned, I think there are some... questionable decisions going on. For one, there's several game ending bugs that seem to be floating around which seem to not getting fixed. The adaptive challenge mode feels impossible to complete because the backpack becomes locked at random after a battle. There's also a bug where if you had the checkmark for delete save on death (because you're into that I guess) then if you return to the menu and load the save, the backpack will lock up also. I have inquired about it but it doesn't feel like the devs are very responsive. They will respond but I mean not really to a satisfactory degree from my experience anyway. And moreover, there's been notes about updates to the game but these updates aren't actually applied to the main branch? It seems they are updating the test branch of the game which you can opt into but the updates they post often don't make any mention of it only being applied to the test branch.

All in all, it's still a very good game as it is right now, as long as you keep in mind that it's mostly playable. As long as whatever updates eventually do get applied don't completely break the game and then the devs don't do anything to fix it, i'd say it's worth buying. I don't have confidence where it's going but i'd like to be wrong here. So here's hoping!

First!
Internet Culture Satire Game.
Classy Music.
E-girls and feet pics. Oh god the feet pics.

Love the game. The only real criticism I have at the time of this review is around the player's home. The yard can't be expanded enough to make the mansion of my dreams, i'd really like to buy land the size of Cooper's farm, I mean there's so much public land behind the fence line anyways no matter how many years it takes to raise the money for that. Even more aggravating is that to max your workshop's output efficiency requires you to actually put your machines in the yard in spite of having the money to literally fill your property with 4 floors. So being able to place machines indoors, as well as on the roof (along with decor since you can't place those on the roof either) would've been a better experience.

I'd also like to see more weather conditions having an impact on something, as far as I can tell currently sunny or cloudy days don't have an impact and even sandstorms which are rare have a few minor inconveniences attached to them as opposed to something that makes it feel like an actual sandstorm hit. And being able to change the character customisation at some point would be nice. It all looks well and fine on the character customisation screen until you realise that the actual game play has changing lighting due to well, night and day cycles and weather and stuff. Then suddenly you're 10 shades more into looking like a ghost than you thought.

I wished the game was complete already since i'm not big on revisiting things i've been through or picking up where I left off long ago. But that's neither here nor there. The game is playable and enjoyable as is currently.

I played the demo a while ago and thought that this was an interesting game, especially by the time I saw the fisherman's appearance and had a good laugh. However, by the time the game actually was released I found myself incredibly frustrated with the controls and ui in general. Here's my experience's listed and if the rant doesn't interest, feel free to skip to the end.

- For one thing, you aren't allowed to bring up the pause menu during combat or dialogue. Like wtf? But okay, try to move on.
- Attempt to select a skill to use and you need to select a target and you'll quickly find that the skill is covering up the enemy's card making it difficult to see their health stats and other stuff. Alright, fine, go back and look at the stats before selecting a skill.
- The tutorial will teach you that if you hold a key while hovering the mouse over an option, you can get a small glimpse of the text that option has. Granted I only played for like 30 minutes before getting fed up and refunding this game, but there was at least 5+ choices during that time, none of which remotely used this mechanic. You'd think if it was only applicable to certain things they would let you know but no. Whatever, just ignore that whole part then I guess.
- There's no easy way to select a card or option other than clicking over and over. It gets bad sitting through a long playthrough when you need to click to progress the dialogue, double click to confirm your choices, click on every skill and actually double click to confirm the target you want to use said skill on. Of course the first thing I do is try to rush over to the options to address this because you'd think they include an option to change the controls right? Well yes, your options is space bar and enter key. That's it. One is confirm the other is cancel. The enter key? Are you friggin kidding me, Im forced to use the opposite side of my keyboard? (Like for real, just let me use "e" to confirm like literally every other game that exists.)
- Lastly I try to explore the third option listed there, some azerty layout to see if it includes some hidden option to manually set control actions. Immediately the menu closes and now whenever I use the menu it closes the instant I try to go to any page at all. Want to change a setting? Nope. Closed. Want to look at your character's stats/skills/equip or items? Nope. Closed. At this point i'm just done, I may be desperate to kill time but even i'm not willing to put up with this much nonsense.

On the bright side, the game does offer a simple rpg, even if it doesn't explain why your characters will sometimes get extra hits you didn't expect. Seemed like it would've been an easy enough rpg given my experience in the demo at least, so I guess if you don't mind the game just expecting you to know why you get extra hits due to a crit probably or other weird stuff then it's still playable in that sense. The story is probably generic but I guess I won't be finding out. The card art is quite lovely as well, no complaints there.

Short story long, my experience was not an enjoyable one. Perhaps I will be willing to give this game another shot if square enix addresses these issues and changes all the characters and monsters card art to the buff fisherman in the demo.