Recent reviews by FurFurFur

I'm a bit conflicted. to give a thumbs up, but here's my reasoning:

It's more of a toy than a game. There isn't really much you can do to take control. You can mostly create a species and watch it go, and burn it down. The appeal of the game to me would be the emergent stories. But there is no proper log that tracks what happens, just a pure event log telling you when people died, etc. without context. That way it reads less like stories and more like noise.

This is a theme. There are quite a few systems in this game that are deep and complex and not quite thought through. Like - you can spend a lot of time to create a species, defining its genes, traits, culture... There is like... A dozen different ways to produce offspring, etc. But you cannot export it. So you can only use it once, in that one map. And if it mutates or goes extinct, you can't bring it back.

Right now, most of the game seems to evolve around grinding achievements. Which are difficult and some of them even rng based. So if you're into that sort of thing, go for it.

I'd also be interested in modding additional gear, spells, religious traits, adding sprites, etc. but it would probably involve decompiling, and I just can't be asked to fiddle with it. Not while the outcome would be somewhat unrewarding.

I had a bit of fun with this, and I'm curious where development will go from here.

This is exactly what it sets out to be - a "broken build sandbox". And very good at that. There is an huge amount of build possibilities and the esoteric/mythical barbarian world is a wonderful, immersive background.

Best synergy builder around. The mechanic of cycling war factions is tremendous, Allowing you to gain avariety of stuff. (And through the power of portals, I just declared war on everyone at once) Runs can be short (but don't have to be) and iteration quick. Factions are not balanced, but that way its more fun anyway. Looking forward to what's to come!

This game is almost good. I played the demo a lot, too. Your builds depend entirely on which items RNG bestows on you. Very occasionally there will be something with synergy, but mostly it's rubbish. And in the rare cases you find a synergy, it might not work on the coming boss. And if it does, it will almost certainly not work on the next.

This game desperately needs rerolls, the ability to sell items for money, or something else to control/reduce RNG.

I'll update the review if something changes, this is early access, after all.

It can be very fun, but some design decisions are questionable. My main complaint is that a lot of visual and audio noise can make reading boss actions difficult. Which is bad in a souls like. Would overall recommend, but it's better in coop than in solo.

Crashed twice upon loading the tutorial, then the tutorial was no longer accessible. GUI and controls are convoluted, there is a lot of barely readable text. Uninstalling caused a blue screen.

Heard many good things about this game but it runs at roughly 1 frame per second. Tried the betas and various other shenanigans I found online, nothing worked. Can't recommend a game that does not work on a technical level.

It's an interesting concept and I'll come back to it from time to time - but the game is not good enough to recommend.

At the end of the day you just build up numbers and click things. And hope that the game gives you things with smaller numbers. There are very few synergies between items. The RNG is strong, but not like Darkest Dungeon, where you can build around reducing its impact. In fact, you can't really HAVE a build in Ring of Pain because all the actually impactful items are single or triple use only and then disappear. Imagine Slay the Spire but it's only potions and the standard attack card.

Again, I love the art style and the idea of a min max game like this, it's just badly executed.

The gameplay tries to be a mix between Titanfall and Doom but it's failing at both.

Using movement features like wall running jerks your camera around like crazy so you can't aim. The features that are supposed to highlight enemies for you don't work - they barely pick up enemies that have already spawned, but there are more spawning behind you who you can't notice until they shoot you anyway - there are no audio cues, etc. Luckily you can become temporarily invincible by triggering painfully repetitive kill moves.

Terrain collision... Does not work. Sometimes invisible walls block your shots, sometimes wallrunning or the grappling hook glitch you out of the map. Whenever someone shoots vaguely near you, the entire screen turns into a noise texture and you're left wondering if that knee-high blob of pixels is your own dog or an enemy's. Unless you edit the config file, the game is locked to 60fps. But that does not even matter because it runs surprisingly bad.

The inventory system is infuriating: You can unequip weapons during missions by picking up items off the ground but there's seemingly no way to equip them again. And you can only manage the stuff you own at certain terminals in the hub area. Why is the GUI so bad? People have made working inventory and shopkeeper GUIs for decades, why do I have to press inconsistent buttons to then not be able to do what I wanted to do in the first place and confirm with the escape key?

The mission design is terrible. I just spent an entire mission going back and forth between two tiny areas, doing the exact same, boring fights over and over again, to lure out some no-name miniboss. Difficulty levels follow the classic approach of just giving enemies more hitpoints. Levels actually look like table top terrain, as in that they're a generic industrial/gothic background with a smattering of skulls and the paintjob consisting of drybrushing on whatever shade of brown or grey you happened to have lying around. The writing fits the average level of 40K prose, it's a waste of a setting.

You can pet the dog, though.

It's a really fun, short, first person shooter in an entertaining, original setting.

You have one gun, there's a handful distinct enemy types (plus bosses) and you can beat the game comfortably within an hour. Not included learning the levels for speedrunning, if you're into that sort of thing.

The only two things I disliked:

- If you do a simple calculation of 9.99€/hour playtime, that's not the greatest value (I got during a sale)
- The loading screens are not long enough