Recent reviews by code_geese

Decently fun open world gacha, but with a lot of issues and no real major hook. My playtime was outside of Steam, I played it for about a year and a half.

Exploration: Generally feels rewarding and interesting. Movement feels great, the game generally strikes a good balance between letting you roam freely and giving you direction so you don't just wander around finding nothing.

Combat: Fun but flawed. Strong focus on repeating fairly rigid combos and switching characters out in the same order. Some elements like the parry and break are poorly implemented.

Story: The biggest disappointment. Occasionally it has some solid emotional moments or a couple cool bits of lore, but they're lost in an ocean of technobabble and nonsensical plot developments. Particularly dishonorable mention to the antagonist faction, who just run away taunting you after you foil their plans, over and over again. They remind me more of Team Rocket than the serious villains they're supposed to be.

Most cutscenes are thankfully skippable, but not all. Story can end up being pretty time-consuming even with liberal use of skip and the game frequently locks vital features behind story progress instead of letting you enjoy the game at your own pace.

Gacha: Technically generous compared to its main competitor Genshin, but on the other hand the speed of character releases and powercreep is much faster so it ends up mostly balancing out in the end. Not the worst but definitely not the best. It does effectively give you some weapon banner pulls for free which is nice.

Visuals: Looks great graphically, character designs aren't the greatest but there are plenty I like. The game sometimes has pretty severe performance issues after a new patch which usually gets fixed after a week or so.

QOL/miscellaneous: The equipment system is quite annoying, the stuff you get is RNG but unlike Genshin or the other Hoyo games, you don't see the stats until you roll. The game has frequent patches and each one requires manually telling the game to restart and then waiting a minute or two to load up again; no idea why this isn't automatic like every other game.

Game is very buggy, constantly freezing when you quit so you have to alt+tab and kill it manually. At one point after resting in the first inn my character vanished and I had to quit and reload to fix it. The game say it has controller support, but I ran into some issues in that area. It seems to either launch in a mode that works for controllers or a mode that works for mouse + keyboard. Bizarrely the loading process seems to be different for controller mode, with an additional "press X to continue" prompt after which it continues loading for another 5 seconds before getting to the title screen.

As for the gameplay itself, it seems interesting. There's a staggering amount of options in character builds if you're like me and not a Pathfinder guru, though there is thankfully a respec option. The combat seemed interesting, if a bit janky (miss rates are extremely high due to being based off dice rolls), and I liked the overall premise, but ultimately couldn't get over the issues.

Basically everything an action roguelike should be. Gameplay is fast and fun, characters feel distinct and interesting and mostly balanced. It does have an interesting feature where the upgrades you unlock will outright change your playable character's abilities, so the same character can end up feeling fairly different from one playthrough to the next.

There is one major issue in that the story/hub area are very bad and eat up a ton of time, but overall it's still worthwhile.

Good main story, great characters, great music, poor gameplay. However it doesn't waste much of your time (by gacha standards, anyways) so I won't hold that against it too much.

Stop holding the sexy horse girls hostage, you cowards

Very good expansion.

Pros:
-There's a truckload of content, feels like several times as much as the base game

-The alternate planets have most similar end products to the starting planet, but you often reach them in very different ways and they require learning new mechanics that are generally interesting to build around. With 3/4 of them you can start from nothing and build an entire factory from just what you find laying on the ground which is pretty neat.

-Elevated rails are a very fun, helpful addition

-Tons of QoL improvements and tweaks that significantly improve the base game

-New music is really good

Cons:
-Gleba (the agricultural planet) feels a bit too difficult in a way that often ends up being tedious. There are a hundred different ways for it to break and when it does, it usually requires manual intervention to fix. It's also difficult to build defenses in a way that the enemies won't destroy something and generate alerts for you every couple minutes.

-Quality is interesting, but its integration to the game feels a little bumpy since a different quality version of the same item is treated as a completely different item, so it requires some extra effort to utilize.

-Not really a con, but worth being aware of the fact that it's significantly more difficult than the base game

Visuals and audio are mediocre but the deckbuilding gameplay is incredibly solid, with tons of depth and individual viable builds for each separate character.

Fantastic, smooth grapple hook swinging gameplay that makes you feel like a badass. There are a few poor sections but overall it's fun and scales up nicely, adding a couple of new moves, obstacles and enemy types. Great techno soundtrack and solid pixel art too.

However it is brought down heavily by the story. And the real unfortunate thing is that the story isn't even bad, there's just too much of it and you're forced go through it at the game's slow pace, with no way to speed things up. There's a fair amount of translation and grammar errors as well.

Review from someone with very little roguelike experience. I enjoyed a fair amount of my time with the game and I might give it another shot once it's out of Early Access, but right now the bad outweighs the good for me personally.

The Good:
-The character building that enschews standard fantasy design like magic for mutations like multiple arms or cybernetics like leg pistons to boost your charging ability is really cool and different. There's a lot of room for creatively mixing and matching powers and coming up with wacky builds, and a ton of different items to find. I particularly like the ability to build your own items, even if it is heavily limited by stats.

-The overgrown, post-technological world where water is the primary currency is neat. The main value for Intelligence here isn't casting spells, it's being able to decipher and utilize the artifacts from the incredibly advanced predecessor civilization.


The Bad:
-Inventory management is the worst I've seen since Subnautica. You never seem to have enough space and you can't see how much an item weighs while you're on the trade screen. Not only is finding places to offload all of the high-value loot the game throws at you difficult, but finding actual worthwhile things to buy is also a headache sometimes due to the random shop generation.

-The game wastes your time a lot; you'll frequently get lost while traveling and swarmed by weak enemies and be forced to pick them off one by one, even though the game itself acknowledges that they're not even worth any EXP. Sometimes getting un-lost takes a significant amount of time. Also, a large number of NPCs will have trading as a dialogue option but if you try to trade with them you're just told "This character cannot carry items". Why is trading an option then?

-The game is sadistically difficult. This isn't inherently a big issue since it's expected from the genre and there's a game mode that saves in towns which the game would be nearly unplayable without. However, sometimes it happens in ways that make very little sense. Enemies who are hostile to each other will sometimes team up to attack you first even if you haven't done anything to them. My stupidest death was when a very weak-but-nimble weasel enemy somehow managed to hold my character in place with a bite, then a very strong enemy who was trying to kill the weasel suddenly decided to attack me instead while I was stuck.

-The direction the game gives you is a bit vague, sometimes even with a wiki figuring out where you're supposed to go is challenging. Bugs can cause issues too.

-The writing is a bit of a mess for multiple reasons. It's definitely trying to come off as strange and alien and sometimes succeeds but dips into pretentious incomprehensibility a little too often for my liking. If everything sounding like the following sounds good, this may not be an issue for you: "Braided tassels spill out of the shadows to frame a blank countenance, and the pleats of a sarong thrash to an unfelt wind. Their goatish stirring is refracted on the boundaries of sight's prism; their horned figure appears underlaid to reality, like a grayscale dream."

I have greatly mixed feelings on Tevi, it's clearly a passion project with a ton of work put into it and the core platforming, combat, and exploration are rock solid. Boss fights with their bullet hell attacks are a lot of fun and the map is big enough to get lost in. I always enjoy that feeling of stumbling across a new area in a metroidvania and deciding to explore.

But it has a lot of major issues right now. The story is really overwritten, the balance between bosses and exploration is a mess (I beat several late game bosses without needing to use a single one of my 10 consumables, but couldn't turn up the difficulty because exploration was already harder than I liked) and some of the map design is really bad, with a ton of one-way passages that force backtracking, some of which are traps that you can't see until you touch them. Music is a tossup, there are some excellent tracks like Verdazure Sea, Evernight Garden, Angelomania, and Replica, but a lot are forgettable.

Overall I'd recommend it, but only to people who already played and enjoyed the spiritual prequel Rabi Ribi since I think that's ultimately the better game even if it's not as flashy.