Recent reviews by wolfvahn

If you played the Demo, then this is basically exactly the same as that.

The trailer makes it seem like there's a new skill tree, there isn't, just a few new skills from the demo.

Even if you like Idler games there's really nothing to gain from this one. There's just... not much to it. Too few upgrades, too few break points, too few everything. And everything kind of just takes a while to get to. Its just boring and unrewarding.

I've tried to enjoy this game several times since it went into early access. Each time I find myself frustrated by the core mechanics of the game.

One of the big things for me is that one of the core mechanics of the game Lucky Paws a reward for beating the game with a character can only be used on characters that you've already beaten the game with. This is just kind of an anti-fun mechanic and forces you to play on lower difficulties with every character as opposed to using the things I unlocked in order to go further with new characters.

The claw for which the game gets its name from is frustrating, but that's an intentional design, and it would be fine if we could upgrade or get more claws throughout a run.

Because of the claw fights in this game tend to be slow and rather bland with there being very few mechanics to be of note for regular mobs. Bosses in theory should break this up, but bosses tend to be "Beat my stat check." in design. Most of the time its easy to get to the boss only to get shut down. This is a frustration because the game tricks you into thinking that you're doing well only to reveal that surprise it was impossible for you to beat the boss.

The regular mobs are too easy. The boss is too hard. This is really not a good flow.

It could just be that this game simply isn't for me.

Brotato but worse.

Even without comparing this game to to other games, there's a lot of problems that makes the game kind of miserable to play, and only some of them are gameplay related.

Visual clutter is something that these types of games need to be aware of, and the basic minions having several different forms just makes seeing elite mobs or their attacks harder to spot. To add the players own attacks frequently get in the way, normally making these attack transparent would help but there are several weapons in the game where doing so makes things worse.

There are several weapons that rely on player skill(?) to be used, such as lasers that always shoot from your character in the same direction, weapons that require the player to run over an icon on the ground or kickable weapons, all of these items in addition to just amplifying the clutter of the game, are just kind of not fun to use.

The Amount Stat which increases the number of some weapons is unique and interesting, but because its only on some weapons and because every weapon has its own break points means that its a dead stat most of the time, until you actually hit the break points and those break points are unreachable with with a single item or level up perk.

The cancel enemy spawn hit box is smaller than both the player hurt box and the enemies hurt box, meaning that enemies can and will spawn on top of you.

Some characters are exponetionally harder than others until you happen to unlock a new weapon that enables them to not suck.

For an Auto-battler the game itself is fun with there being interesting mechanics and things to manage and even when you're playing the same hero each run they will be different, and it's rather difficult to force things.

The heroes are all unique and while they have their own niches, you're not inherently bound to that niche.

Over all the game is fun and enjoyable. Up until a certain point.

The game has a steep learning curve, and one that is rather unforgiving. Part of this is familiarity with the items, but a lot of it is information that's not present in the game but should be. The two biggest example of this in game are shop odds and what enchanting an item would actually do the item before you actually do it, this information isn't random and is on the wiki.

Shop odds are very important information since a lot of the shops offer a selection of items such as weapons, or medium and large, but some items mostly large items, don't appear at lower tiers, meaning that a player seeing large items for sale as a potential won't be able to obtain that because the odds of getting an item that's a tier of a large item is 0%. Displaying shop odds somewhere would be a big help and make reliance on a wiki less important.

Enchantment effects are also on the wiki and are consistent on a per item basis, however what each enchantment will do to a weapon isn't listed, requiring the wiki to check and see what's the best option for you. Some enchantments are going to be straight forward, such as what happens when you give burning to a weapon or burning to a poison weapon. But a lot aren't. For example say there are two items with an active effect and a passive effect, you enchant both of them with shielding, the first item now applies 40 shield whenever it activates, which in the late game is nothing, while the second item now applies 40 shield whenever its passive is triggered.

Lack of information aside I will say that the biggest reason why I don't recommend the game is that once you get towards the end of the run, and you're feeling strong you have a neat board that does a lot of damage, you'll just start encountering boards that one shot you, often before you're board has even activated. There are currently two heroes that consistently get to do this late game and it's just not a fun or rewarding experience.

I've played several versions of this game over the years, The Warcraft 3 one was great and the Starcraft II one was incredibly solid.

This one captures the minute to minute gameplay fairly well, but it fails to capture on the sense of customization. The original game was largely based around what weapons and armor you decided to give your ship. This game is more about what abilities your ship has with the weapons being just secondary. It doesn't help that you only have two weapon slots, and you can't have multiple of the same weapon either.

Its basically just dota but with boats and no items.

At the moment the balance feels off with high ranged damage being king.

This is a game that is a love letter to many of the old school JRPGs of the past, while also being a new and refreshing take on the genre. Because of the auto-healing after combat, random encounters are allowed to be challenging, combined with the interesting combat mechanics the game feels like an interesting puzzle. This extends to bosses as well allowing you to tackle various challenges in different ways.

The story is also refreshing, with an interesting and well developed world that feels like we're only seeing a fraction of a larger place while still giving us enough to be satisfied. The game does leave you wanting for more, but in the way that a good meal leaves you satisfied, and wanting to come back for seconds.

One of the best JRPGs I played in 2023 and an easy inclusion into my top 10.

I don't know how this happened but I bought this game and suddenly its 4 am.

This is a dangerous game.

Pretty.

That's about it.

Generally speaking with early access games, the games slowly become better over time as more updates are added. This is not one of those cases. I have spent a lot of time playing this game and even cleared some of the hardest content in the game on it.

After the latest update, the game does feel more balanced over all both for player power and enemy power. I've gotten a few wins on the hardest possible difficulty in the new update and it does feel solid.

But, there's still a lot of problems some enemy projectiles still feel like they hit you when they shouldn't, the main culprits being Lightning and Fire Elite Crabs that fire bouncing orbs that have a really large hit box compared to other projectiles. Fire enemies in general tend to apply burning to the crab, which means that they flat out ignore the one shot protection that's baseline in the game. This just leads to cases where you just die instantly, and it's especially bad with the fire skulls that spam AoE fields randomly around the arena.

The absolute worst offender of this is the Elite Fire Crab that has a super jump that not only ignores one hit protection but can also simply be unavoidable.

Enemies spawning behind you and getting a free hit in is also a big problem even if you're constantly mobile like the higher difficulties demand, some maps are worst than others.

Lastly, with the latest update the weapons feel even more imbalanced with some being incredibly consistent with how they perform (This being the rocket launcher for me) while others being nearly impossible (in my case the orb gun.)

Overall the game is fun, so long as you don't play it for too long, but it's not really a good "Main Game."

I hate this game. I'm saying that as someone that loves RPGs and has played many of the other Mario RPGS and loved them. And this game tries to be a spiritual successor to the Paper Mario Rpgs, from its mechanics to its art style. And I'm not going to fault it for that. Rather my problems rest in how this game tries to be difficult. First of all, the over world puzzles are really bad, they're incredibly straight forward, but they're just awkward when it comes to timing and positioning or tedious when it comes to moving objects around the world. Additionally this makes interacting with enemies in the over world cumbersome to say the least. Next is the combat. The game increases difficulty by removing strategy from the game. The best way to play the game is to go front to back targeting one enemy at a time until you reach the end. There's no flipping an enemy over to steal their turn, and the majority of things that you can do with a basic attack are just damage, there's no real depth since the enemies always return to their default state once its their turn and then they hit you anyways. Action commands are a huge part of the game, and even here I feel like the game does a bad job with. For example, the wizard of the party his basic attack is always random with what button you need to press, and it's honestly not a good feeling using him because of this, if it was a skill I had to spend points to use, I'd understand and be fine with it, but it's on his basic attack. When it comes to defending against enemies, even the most basic enemy has three attacks, this makes learning enemy attacks frustratingly futile since there's a lot of varity and you'll end up progressing to a new enemy really quickly. And for me on PC it always felt like the action command to block was lagging. The moves are all pretty samey so far as well, with one character getting a move that's basically the exact same as the move they just got back to back. There's also the issue of the move not giving you enough information with what it's going to hit, like is it going to hit 2 enemies, 3 enemies or just one?The straw that broke my back however was just how stingy the game feels. I regret the time I put into this game, it's just not fun.