Recent reviews by swightly

While the artsyle looks good the gameplay just feels limited and maps just too wide for no good reason. It really feels like the game designer has not played any good SRPGS in his life when he made the second map, why is there so many mobs with high hp when you characters dont deal that much damage AND their skills also have CD along with limited skills at the start, especially the mage guy.
Counterattacks also being limited is a dumb choice in this game when they want CDs on your damage skills.
You get more mana every turn however youre still limited to one attack+combo skill per turn(including cooldown time for some reason when the skills arent gamebreaking), it feels like the game might be balanced for having a giant party. I was trying to find the auto-battle option at the end because there's isnt much meaningful positioning or what skills to use in this game.

Game has a lot of potential and needs a lot more work. Compared to other similar flickshot style games ive tried the controls feels off and only works OK with mouse, its dreadful on the controller.

Fun billiards-like tactical game with good artsyle. Game doesnt feel too hard in the demo but unlocking new skills seem to take forever to unlock or take a lot of skillpoints along with the randomness of trying to get the gacha ball you want after beating a level. Hopeful in the full game theres more interactive skills at base level like the ricochet or dragon iron lob.

Made velma terrible to play as along with other things like making perks feel pointless

After playing act 3 and 4 I will never buy owlcat games on release because of how both buggy and ridiculously overdesigned some combat encounters are. I would wait another year for patches before trying this out.

I'm agreeing with a lot of opinions from other beta testers that they made the game much more worse with most of the new changes, namely the longer matches and picking items in between sets. The matches should be quick instead of extended stompings. There wasnt a need to remove the training runes since farming coins was pretty quick and actually allowed some build diversity for your preferences.

Aside from the cash shop, its a good second monitor semi-idle game to play while you doing something else. Dont play on the whale pvp servers and play on the peace american servers instead for english speakers, the latency doesnt matter that much even if you from asia. Reached lvl 28 so far and theres no paywalls stopping me from progressing, just timegated stuff in the form of shipbuilding just like any other mobile game which I dont mind,

You can easily get red gems from auction house if you're willing to sell high tier ship parts and blueprints for other people at the cost of your own progress if you want to play this exclusively f2p.

While the lore is interesting, I found doombringer be a terrible class that's really boring even after reaching lvl 35, just too weak and squishy compared to other currently updated classes. A lot of the talents just make no sense or too investment heavy on a melee gish, your important attack abduction which grabs enemies can easily miss even at higher levels with extra dex from escorts and talents(which takes away from the other skills you really need to survive). I found low accuracy to be a big hindrance as well since you cant spare points on raising the accuracy talents early on.
Maybe the demonologist is worth buying this DLC for which im going to test out and see for myself.

edit:
I tried demonologist for bit and it's more durable and has more interesting skills but also useless ones that you never want to points in. The demon seed mechanic is fun and gives you a lot of options in tackling monsters. However there is a lot of randomness to it and most of the creatures are awful for combat if youre looking for something close to summoner. I haven't tried the other two DLCs yet but youre better off getting them first since embers also gives a campaign and you can get the lovecraft inspired dlc seems to have more fleshed out class kits.

After beating death on normal I don't ever feel like playing this game until they both properly balance the game and also make the roguelite mode more fun since it's rather bland. Currently there's a lot of very unfair stuff like donkeys still existing with their insane range fart stun on enemies(on 2 CD) that's way too strong for this game since most of the maps are very small, if you manage to get two of these as enemies at the start it's GG unless its a bigger map. They should make the range smaller or make it apply to friendly targets as well. Some maps are also filled with things like spark fire causing 3 damage each turn, an instant lose if you do not have access to devils that are immune to fire. You can also be a victim of random BS like plague clouds spawning on your side close to your commander which you cannot remove and deals 3 damage each turn on the target. The infected target then spreads it on contact or at the end of the turn to adjacent targets, making it harder to deploy beasts if you cant move the commander out of the way to not get poisoned.

The duel encounters in this game which is 5 v 5 with no commander, is very RNG based in the later areas as all the enemy gets to move on turn one after you compared to all or some of them napping. Depending on the random placement of your units it can be impossible to win. There's also this really bad system when the enemies or you (with no commander) getting free +5hp heals and random damage boost on collecting 12 ink (way too easy to get with the amount of ink on the floor). This just makes the game too snowbally as the HP of most units is around 10, allowing it to just waste the enemy's or your first round of damage.

Ranged enemies are also very strong as they can easily destroy your commander since you need cover terrain to block(randomly spawns or acquired from shop/loot). But these cover terrain cant really block shots vertically, forcing you to take tons of damage on the map where you are spawned on a top platform with enemy archers on the bottom that you cannot easily one shot since they are far away. They could give an ability to the swordsman which have shields the ability to block arrows for the person behind him since they are kinda crappy compared to other units with their extremely situational cleave skill.

On the balance of starter beasts you can start with, between the animals you get early on (rabbit,dog,fox) I feel that the dog is way better compared to everything else since they have higher damage to kill things quicker. The rabbits dont get a damaging skill and have lower damage in exchange for a situational stun, which can be good as a pick up during the course of the game but not at the start where you need to kill things. The foxes are immune to debuffs on hitting clerics but also lose access to prayer, a very big downside since you need to be unpushable to stop the enemies from insta killing with a push. They also get ink steal on their damaging skills which is good if you manage to hit two enemy targets to steal two ink.
The bean monsters and devil monsters are balanced well, but the skeleton enemies are just insane with their debuffs guaranteeing 5 damage since removing it needs another attack from an enemy, a push action on the target or a halo. Most of the time it might not be worth it as all the skeletons will be able to easily reapply the debuff.

During the course of the game, you don't feel like you are getting stronger or really making any meaningful choices on beast picks(just collect elites and also cheap minions to cycle for boredom). The talents all kinda feel anemic, some are really good but the rest are just crap. Actions are also kinda the same, but you are limited to 3 even though you can collect more than that and mix and match for each battle. The act again actions and healing is probably the best there, with others like damage causing or enemy sleeping skills situational as you dont want them to get too close or move your commander near the enemy. I think there needs to be an ability to upgrade the beasts you own into more powerful ones and/or borrow a page from autobattler games, give bonuses for having same type of beast/class.

The base gameplay is solid but the game still need a lot of polishing most importantly the translation and rebalancing stuff. There needs to be a hovering tooltip to show what the town on the map has instead on the small icons which tell nothing. Progression is a big issue I had since I was stuck with so many boring easy quests after the first demon horde and the game would not give me hard quests other than one boss quest which decimated me on the boss level because I couldnt properly level up my character/deck/mercenaries which is mainly locked to quests of your recommended difficulty(which isnt shown by the way).

The random bonuses on level up seem to be very unbalanced as well as you can get really good ones like extra action points, mercenary limits and hand size and also really awful ones like 5% better trading prices or 5% chance to save a dead mercenary. You're only given 3 options randomly which can easily make the game harder for you if you get bad ones early. From reaching level 11, none of these seem to get higher bonuses with level other than stacking them.