Recent reviews by FlankyDanks

I'm so happy they brought this game back. I know it says I have 1700 hours in this game, but that's not actually true--I played hundreds of hours on PS3 before this game even launched on PC. I've also played Lol, DotA, Smite, HotS... if you can think of a MOBA, I probably at least tried it, and a few of those a sank hundreds of hours into.

Awesomenauts tops all of them. It's just better.

If you want to be able to compete against another team using complex mechanics and teamwork to conquer your enemies in a 1980's Saturday-morning cartoon-inspired universe, this right here is your jam.

If you don't want that, then we can't be friends. Maybe you'd rather have some oat bran to watch or a hoop and stick you could play with. You might prefer watching paint dry.

If you want to play a game that is super duper fun and occasionally also super frustrating, look no further.

Generally, this is a great game, with a terrible publisher.

Don't buy Sony/Playstation games.

5/6/2024 EDIT:

Sony has, at this time, reversed the PSN requirement for this game.

8/7/2024 EDIT:

This game is being developed via spreadsheet. Nerfs are abundant and make no sense, buffs are mostly impotent and irrelevant, bugs don't get fixed and performance degrades with each new patch.

Maybe this team will get its ♥♥♥♥ together one day, but for now I do not recommend this because the team behind it doesn't seem to know how to balance or maintain the game.

This game has a lot of potential, but at the end of the day it doesn't really respect your time.

It takes hours to build up and capture territory in some areas, and you can have hours of progress wiped out in a single turn with no chance to do anything about it, simply because you "discover" a new competing outfit which can wipe out hours of work as soon as your next turn loads.

The AI seems to constantly have every advantage over you, and if the RNG isn't in your favor then you're always falling behind the AI as you fight off multiple outfits, all of which are stronger than you and have better weapons.

This game has no difficulty scaling and no way to change how this game scales income, which is ultimately the problem. Generating income takes soooooo long, the AI can just steam roll you while you wait for money to trickle in.

The end result is that this feels like a treadmill going slightly faster than you can keep up with. Eventually, you know you are going to fall off, so do you stay on it for another 3 hours and wait until it happens, or do you just get off before you waste all that time?

I think this game could be so good, but if you leave it up to RNG whether or not a given map is even going to be feasible then you're not really doing your players any favors.

There's a lot here to like, but I can't recommend this unless you really don't care if you spend 10 hours trying to make progress and then lose it for no reason. If I wanted that I'd go play Dwarf Fortress.

Edit: I played the game to completion, but didn't enjoy the last 15 or so hours. Once you get enough guns, the AI isn't so difficult, but it also doesn't really seem like ti serves as anything more than a source of irritation. You can't really do much constructive with it.

Ultimately, the treadmill feeling only gets worse. Your income scaling never really gets to a point where the game feels fun, it just feels like you run from expense to expense while constantly being almost broke if you didn't intervene to fix the problems that arise with the automated routes.

There are some really great concepts at play here, and a pretty nice overall visual style, but I can't help but finish the game and feel... disappointment?

Near 40-hours in and the storyline is complete--maybe I could have done this faster and maybe not, but so much progress here is arbitrarily gated behind "gather this resource to unlock this biome, now gather this new resource to unlock the next biome, and so on" that it feels as if there isn't really much gameplay here, it's just an extended series of fetch quests of your own logistical makeup and some survival mechanics thrown in to drag it out even more.

I'm not sure what I was expecting exactly, but I thought it would be a little less shallow. I might change this review to positive if they make any updates to add more content but this game just feels like a bit of a slog at this stage.

Blood for the Blood God!

It's the snake game we all know, but updated for 2021, and now it's a roguelike/roguelite semi-auto-battler.

Plus, it's $3. You spend more than this on a cup of coffee. Just buy it already.

The most recent patch moves this game massively in the wrong direction.

If you do not already play this game and haven't yet hit max-level, I would suggest you not bother picking it up now, or at least not until the most recent changes have been fixed/reverted.

This game had a lot of potential, and maybe could still be salvaged, but I'm taking a break from this game for a while, and I can't recommend it in its current state.

Final edit:

I initially reviewed this game as mostly positive, but concluded I couldn't recommend it to your average player; it would be better suited to cyberpunk fans who want some mindless run & gun action.

After 15 hours of gameplay, I can only conclude that this game seems unfinished.

First, there's the crashing. I had crashing about every 30-60 minutes, which many other users are also reporting, as well as strange in-game glitches and bugs that would come and go (like quest markers showing up in the wrong positions, for example).

Second, while this game is very pretty and has a nice aesthetic, it's all basically skin-deep. Yes, everything is PRETTY, but there are about 10 different types of enemies which are used over and over ad nauseum. There's maybe 30 total guns for you to pick from, though at the start of the game you can use around 5, and there's no real point to using several of them. The armor isn't much better.

Upgrades to your character consist of just flat numerical increases to your stats, and there's no dialogue to speak of, just you accepting or denying quests, or asking for information about specific subjects. You don't make any decisions about anything, you just... take quests... or you don't. As far as I can tell, one play through of this game will go the same as every other playthrough, so there's no reason to play this game more than once.

There's also a lot of stuff that just seems badly thought out. The isometric style doesn't work very well as a run & gun style game, because half the time you are being shot at by enemies you can't even see on your screen, with no way to know how to shoot them back or where to take cover to avoid being shot. The longer you play, the more it seems like an obvious problem, but it doesn't get any better as the game goes on.

The Ascent could have probably been a much better game, and it's not awful... but it's disappointing. It feels like corners were cut, and superficial elements were prioritized over depth.

Finally, my biggest problem with this game: after the last time this game crashed, my saves got wiped, and the 15 hours I spent in this honestly mediocre game got wiped. The wiped save files then got upload to the Steam Cloud storage, so... after spending 15 hours forcing myself to play through a game I wasn't even enjoying, I had my save randomly wiped.

I could have overlooked a lot of the relatively minor problems with this game, but 15 hours completely gone, because your game isn't stable enough to stop crashing? C'mon devs, did you even finish this thing? That's embarrassing.

I'd warn people to avoid this game, as they won't be missing out on anything by passing it up, and you MIGHT just lose 15+ hours if you do decide to try and play it. Wait for a stable build, or better yet, wait for it to go on sale.

Tainted Grail Conquest is essentially the mutant offspring of Diablo II and Slay the Spire.

The game LOOKS and FEELS just like Diablo II in many ways, generally from the aesthetic, mood, and themes (though to nit-pick a little, the darker elements in Tainted Grail are related to the Wyrdness and not Satan/Diablo, so it's not a perfect 1-to-1), but mechanically the game is closer to Slay the Spire, in that it's a deck-building game where you add cards and shift gameplay mechanics over the course of the game.

But Tainted Grail is more than just another StS clone; in Tainted Grail you choose which encounters you want to engage in--and you can see the "rewards" (NPCs to interact with) before making your selections. If you want to skip[ an encounter, apart from the boss encounters, you can do that, but you'll be weaker for it, so there's an element of balancing your resources here. How many candles do you spend to keep accumulating money and experience?

I could spend some time elaborating the various ways that this game innovates in comparison to Slay the Spire, but in short, there are 9 classes you can play as, and each class can level up 20 times, earning various passive bonuses along the way which can range from improving your class efficiency to shifting the mechanics of the class, so the game, mechanically, has a ton of replayability. The stories probably won't last you much beyond about 40 hours, but given how interesting the card mechanics can be sometimes, I think the replayability outlasts the story.

Check this game out if you like deck-builders and want something a little more gritty, with surprisingly good voice acting.


Pass on this game if you don't like deck-builders.

So here's the thing.

I have 607 hours in this game at this point. Obviously it's not awful. If you want to play single-player, and you have no other applications running on your computer--no browsers open, nothing to manage dual-monitors, nothing for streaming, whatever, you'll probably have a great time.

The reason I cannot recommend this game is that since release, Firaxis seems hell-bent on making the multiplayer functions in this game utter garbage, and the stability of the game gets worse, and worse, and worse. You'd think if they want to sell all this DLC, they'd ALSO work on stuff like... stability, but no. No, that's not a priority.

Over the past year, I've watched this game go from never crashing, to crashing almost every time I run it. I can't actually get multi-player matches to run at all without problems, and 6 months ago it worked fine.

The bottom line here is that the developers care more about trying to milk this franchise for money than they do about keeping a perfectly fine game functional.

So if you want to play Pirates or some other stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game mode, great, have fun with your crashing, buggy-as-♥♥♥♥ game. If you JUST wanted to play Civilization... honestly, probably consider Civ 5, at this rate.

I truly wish I COULD recommend this game. 6 Months ago, I would have without hesitation, but the devs have lost sight of their actual priorities, from what I can tell.