Recent reviews by Marfig

I'm not happy with the game. Megabonk gives us a 3D world twist to the Vampire Survivors genre. But it also twists your arm by making the game incredibly difficult. Not kidding, this game is very hard and you'll feel it right at the start.

You are expected to hunt down for synergies in the way you combine weapons and tomes (think of these as skills). The problem is this makes you are a prisoner of the RNG (better restart if you don't get what you need after a while) and forces you to play the meta playstyle of limiting yourself to a few valid builds.

The problem of making games like this too difficult to play is that you end up with having a lot of choice, but very few options.

There's also no sense of character progression in the game. While on games of this kind, finishing runs allows you to empower your characters by buying tailored upgrades, on Megabonk the closest thing you have is additional skill slots. But these are limited to 2 additional weapons and 2 additional tomes and are shared among all characters.

The game deviates greatly from traditional bullet hell games by upping up the challenge to a level that frankly makes little sense to me. I am used to more difficult titles like Jotunnslayer, AYZS (while doing challenges) or 20 Minutes Till Dawn. But Megabonk is just not fun. You have to start every run from scratch, keep a cheatsheet for the meta builds... and the RNG be with you, son!

Too late for me now for a refund. But this one is going to the ignore section. Don't make the same mistake I did if this review resonates with your own preferences.

Same as what everyone else said. Just giving my thumbs up for this extraordinary game.

Blessed are the indies, for they alone lead us to the path of pure joy in gaming.

Why did you scroll all the way down here? Go play it.

It's a money grab schema disguised as a cute (sorta) idle game. Legendary items are nearly impossible to get. At a 1 in 500000 chance every 30 minutes, you need 15 million minutes on average to get a legendary from opening chests. That's 28 whole years of game time. Your other option is to craft them. But that means beating a 10^4 tier list to get to legendary. So you need to be playing for 300,000 minutes, or 5,000 hours to craft one single legendary.

There's nothing even remotely fair in those odds. It's a scam. It's designed so you don't get legendaries through normal gameplay, only the illusion that you can get them.

Your last option is the Market. And that is where the game shows its true nature. Nothing cute about it anymore. It's all about you spending money. Get those legendaries instantly by spending north of 20 dollars for each. What's worse, you don't know anything about where it came from. Bot accounts, the developer themselves exploiting the game, hackers if this thing has holes in it, you just don't know.

This is your usual freemium trash. Avoid it, unless you know you won't be tempted to spend money on this trash, or you own a bot army, or you are the developer.

A fun finite idler that will take you one or two days to complete. You do need to pay attention to it and click upgrades quite regularly. So, its not as much an idler as it is a casual game.

But very enjoyable and well made. Its progression arc grips you and is entertaining. And that's all we want from these games. I'm writing this review on my second playthrough after a 6 month interval, so well done!

Not surprising, coming from a free-to-play idle game. It's a pay-to-win cash grab hidden behind an indie game, that starts to reveal itself once you get into 100 hours of time investment and realize you've hit a progression wall. At around this point, the grind climbs to unbearable levels even for an idle game, and you just can't create enough god points to make up for your demands in clones and building speed.

You start thinking about biting the bullet and putting real money to make progress more tolerable. But once you see the prices your heart sinks. You won't see these prices even on triple-A pay-to-win cash grabs. It's beyond comprehension. And it dawns on you why this game's achievements on Steam show such a nose dive right at the beginning.

Don't play this. There are plenty of better offers out there, either completely free after you pay the initial cost on the steam store page (which is still cheaper than some of the most basic pay-to-win stuff in this game), or with a similar business model to this one but with much more reasonable prices.

This is without a doubt the most ambitious Titan Quest DLC. It is by a long mile the largest and the most detailed and visually stunning. But it suffers from overdoing what could have been its strengths, and the strange decision to reshape certain aspects of the gameplay. We end up with a beautiful DLC that is annoyingly long and repetitive. It has a hard time scaling to the player power, introduces unnecessary new elements to the game, and towards the last third of it, feels like a grind towards the end screen.

Eternal Embers (EE) is stunning and very detailed. It offers the most visually detailed maps of the whole game and is a welcoming change from the depressingly barren maps in Ragnarok. Something like it had already been done in the Atlantis DLC. But it is incredible to witness the even greater level of care put into EE maps. And this extends even into dungeons, which are now incredibly rich and full of life.

This is a Legendary difficulty only DLC. Contrary to many of the reviews I have been seeing here, I have to say this is a good thing. EE is a large DLC. If fully explored it can take as much to complete as the whole of the 3 first acts combined. It would significantly increase the time spent getting a player to Legendary. It would bring Titan Quest the same problem that grim Dawn faces with its very long gameplay loop through the 3 difficulties. I'm thankful that the developers thought to take the obvious financial risk of making this a Legendary-only DLC and thus respecting the player's time.

EE is grindy. It is! Behind its rich and detailed facet, there are huge labyrinthian maps with very few navigational hints that when fully explored will take a very long time to complete, giving the whole DLC and very slow sense of progression. And once we get into the Egypt second-half of the game this becomes so prevalent to the point of frustration. Every nook and cranny in the map opens up to larger and equally complex to navigate areas that most often also include multilevel dungeons that take a long time to clear out. I couldn't help but get a palpable feeling of relief when I would clear a larger area in Egypt and all of its enormous dungeons. Not the satisfaction of a job well done, just the relief when I realize some large piece of grind is now behind my back. That is not fun and it flies in the face of the rest of TQ.

EE suffers from a difficult-to-solve problem in Titan Quest, because the game doesn't support automatic level scaling. Despite being a Legendary-only DLC, it won't scale well to endgame players with character levels above 80. Your best bet is perhaps to play it before Ragnarok, not after. Which is as strange as it sounds. Another option may be to play it with the new electrum mechanic, which can add a considerable amount of challenge to the game. But I haven't tested that out. All in all the DLC is not well suited for high-level and well-equipped characters and it becomes a walk in the park (**) for anyone melee, range, or magical oriented. Add to this the fact that it plays like a grind, the whole gameplay experience feels boring and painful to complete.

EE adds new potions to the game and I just don't know why. There's a point to be made about the two resistance potions that can open up new equipment choices. But I would argue consumables are never a way to plan out builds. In addition, the rest of the gameplay is equally affected and these potions just further lighten up a game that is already too easy.

(**) The earlier decision to add Reflect damage to a large group of monster types in the Egypt part of the DLC has been (thankfully!) reverted by the time I wrote this review. So it is safe to play melee characters again.

A fantastic and addictive arena shooter!

DUSK '82 does for DUSK almost what DoomRL did for Doom; It brings the game we trust and love to a whole new level of graphical fidelity and gameplay ferocity. And if you pick the EGA sprite set from the workshop, it blows your mind in full RTX. There's an achievement for posting pics of your brain splattered walls.

On the gameplay side of things, DUSK '82 puzzles show the same love and care for level design we got in DUSK. But that's not all. The scoring mechanism in the game is where your puzzle solving techniques will be tested to the limit. Only two things will survive past the apocalypse, cockroaches and high scores.

But the game is missing a high scores table. It's sort-of-fine if we can't publish them online, but at the very least we should have a table on the main menu, so we could stroke our shotguns and take snapshots for Instagram.

But all-in-all this is the puzzle game to have at the moment, and a great addition to your New Blood Interactive paraphernalia. Buy it, don't be fooled by its triple-A price tag. My diapers are now wet for DUSK'RL, the roguelike sequel to the DUSK '82 prequel.

NGU Idle was a fun game for a good while. I have a little over 500 hours of playing it, all the while having fun seeing my (N)umbers (G)o (U)p. But I do not want to dwell too much on the good things of the game. Others have done it. Instead I want to talk on why I don't recommend it.

What made me stop abruptly playing was the titan Walderp and also Troll challenges. Once you reach them, these are two features of the game (there may be more, I don't know) that turn the game into an action game instead of an idle one. Suddenly I find myself unable to progress in the game unless I learn how to do manual combat, which means playing the game in a very active manner, dying to a Titan if I don't do the right combat moves requiring quick reactions and paying close attention to what is going on in the fast scrolling text window.

This happened after 500 hours of completely different (and fun) gameplay. A curved ball thrown at you by the game developer and I can't really understand why. It doesn't match with the rest of the game and it doesn't look like it adds anything of value to the gameplay. It's variety yes, but variety for the sake of it on a game that already asks you to do so many different things that you don't really feel you are lacking in variety. At no moment I was begging for some action when I met this point in the game that gives it. And on my case it had the only effect of turning a fun game experience into a frustrating one.

I see many players not bothered about this. And that's fine. I just can't personally recommend a game that had this effect on me. And I can't recommend an idle game that turns the word "idle" upside down so late in the game experience and in such a dramatic way that you can't stop feeling you wasted all those hours. I will leave here this cautionary tale if you are looking for an idle game without realizing you will not be able to progress after a certain point unless you play the game not as an idle game but as an action game of sorts.

As I was asking around the Discord channel for tips on how to deal with this, I was warned that Troll Challenges too (another feature in the game) would require my close attention to the screen for a few hours in order to be passed. And you cannot progress in the game without completing these Troll challenges. I could theoretically make them easier to go through, but that would require a large investment of time. I haven't played these challenges, so I can't give an honest review. But apparently the game has these features in that really don't appeal to me at all.