Devccoon 最近的评测

Good game, easy to sink your teeth into and scratches that soulslike itch distilled into a unique perspective and playstyle. Many genre trappings are here, albeit with less pomp and circumstance and some things maybe not presented as obvious as they should be (there are multiple endings and you're probably going to lock yourself out of one without realizing it until you're sweeping the last bits of the game for 100% completion).

That sounds like a bad thing but it's pretty on-brand for the genre normally, anyway. The game design here does a good job of getting presentation out of your way and letting you get into the meat of it, which makes even your first run through pretty fast-paced. There's a lot to play around with build-wise, and it's easy to want to jump back in to play again with new challenges or just experience it again with different weapons whereas other games in the genre would have me exhausted by the end.

Some of the design choices here are fantastic, too: none of your build decisions are permanent. Every "bonfire" gives you the full ability to reassign points and respec to your hearts' content. There's a lot to play around with to dial in whatever playstyle you want, and you never fully feel stuck on a boss when there are so many tools to play with and ways you can completely change up your build to try a different approach. Loadout slots for that are much appreciated. And I've also wanted to see this kind of item system in a game for a long time - every item you get is a permanent fixture of your inventory. Effectively, everything works under "estus flask" rules. Pick up a mushroom, and that's now +1 maximum mushrooms you refill to when you rest. Love to see it, and it works very well here.

Overall the game does what it sets out to do pretty well, I think. It's not mindblowingly massive and there are some jagged edges here and there (particularly some extended fits of stuttering on occasion when the game seemed to be loading an area or maybe compiling some shaders while exploring?) which might rub a bit the wrong way, but I enjoyed the ride and can see myself returning off and on for another shot at it.

I love the game, guys.

But can we PLEASE get another song? How does this entire game only have one? All this content but there's just one BGM going throughout the entire thing.

I can't knock the game too bad because the demo already soaked up so much time, and there's much more to play with in the full game, but I really was hoping for more on the music front.

Great card/dice-building game. At its core, the game is about balance. Corruption (damage) and purification (healing) apply in opposing ways to yourself and enemies, so the same card effects you can use to defeat enemies can heal yourself. Everything being based in dice means there is a lot of RNG but it makes for an interesting design where everything, even "bad" rolls, tend to have their own uses. You want to intentionally take corruption (damage) as much as you can without hitting 0 so you gain the bonus actions tied to your health bar. Doing so puts you at threat of any little unexpected damage source (forgot about the enemy's thorns?) losing you a heart, but those extra actions can swing a fight in your direction massively. That risk-reward balance feels great.

Astrea has so many mechanics it makes my head spin, but each character has their own armload of unique ones that overlap in various ways so it's only *marginally* overwhelming trying to keep up with it all in a given run. It's certainly enough to have you theorycrafting multiple builds on every character instead of easily finding the one 'win button' option, but does also mean that planning a build from the start is usually not viable. You have to adapt to what comes your way.

It's quite addictive when you start getting into it. The amount of choice you get in how to both build your dice pool and how to use the actions available to you on a given turn can flip the game upside-down. Every win or loss tends to feel earned. You can even make game-breaking synergies, but you have to earn those, too.

I'm really into proper idle games and hoped this would at least have some element of idle play but the store page should not list "idler" at all. You're meant to be dodging rocks, picking up their pieces, building up your haul and moving on to the next stage. Theoretically you can sit on an earlier stage and let the game play itself but the game really isn't built to support setting it aside and letting progress happen while you go about your business.

So it's really just a short incremental game with active gameplay. It's fine for the price, IMO. Plenty of dopamine and upgrades; it's a good, simple game loop that works. I think if anything, prestiging as a mechanic here really falls short, because half of the upgrades barely affect your initial progress or just prevent prestige from resetting anything, effectively invalidating the mechanic later on.

Decent little incremental, doesn't overstay its welcome. Janky but not in a bad way. Hits a lot of sweet spots for dopamine. I didn't really gel with the backstory or its presentation, frankly the secrets and hidden bits can be really hit or miss simply because you build up to so much chaos it's hard to deliberately stop and smell the roses. The jank hits in a bad way when you're trying to engage with those, and a particular one involving collecting a specific set of fruits at once turned into my cue to set the game down. The timer and goofy physics and giant hole being ever-present threats don't help when you want to get a little puzzle-y.

Pretty straightforward and fairly easy metroidvania. Interesting exploration where you are slowly piecing the separate maps together which opens up new points of traversal to move between them. Doesn't do anything mindblowing with its premise but it's a fun, quick, humorous and accessible romp, almost a cozy game in some sense.

Quirky, charming game perfectly captures that early 3D vibe, from the sound and visuals to the janky and endearing models and animations. It feels like the developers thought of every way to use what they had for interesting new experiences and the game really never stops surprising and delighting throughout.

And you thought Megabonk was addictive?

Ball Pit is a fitting name, weirdly enough, because this game's every bit the "5 more minutes" experience you got at the local Playplace back in the day. Though I don't fully 'get' the theming here, it's a lot more put-together than others in the wave survival/bullet heaven genre. Initially straightforward, it starts strong with great music and an evolving stage of play that concludes in a satisfying way. But what really drove me to write this review was the way the game unfolded in its progression.

All these sorts of games have meta-progression, but it usually ends at some stat boosts and quality of life, like rerolls and such. Ball Pit has those too, but takes it to the next level. I don't even want to spoil the surprises coming your way, because exploring the new twists on the mechanics and major changes to the way you play which ripple throuhgout the whole landscape of the game is such a unique joy brought to a genre that's become rapidly quite predictable.

Honestly, my biggest gripe with the game so far is that while every character has a fully unique benefit-drawback combination that completely changes the way you play or build with them (not just stat boosts, but effects that are too special to put on a simple item), one of the characters comes with only a drawback. There's one character whose only thing is that the game now picks all your upgrades for you. No big game-changing features or abilities, or any form of special luck power to make more synergistic options appear (seemingly), he just removes a core feature of the gameplay with no positive tradeoff. It's just an annoyance because it's not like he isn't playable and there aren't many more characters to pick instead, but that's truly a baffling design decision for a game where you're meant to play around with all the characters.

Overall a great survival sandbox with a lot of content and progression. No doubt, it really can sink its teeth into your free time and not let go. I have some issues with it, I think there's a lot of missed potential, things they could fix, but at least for now, on the surface - it's fun. I enjoyed a lot of aspects of this game and got a lot of satisfying playtime out of it.



I love the Pal designs - call it ripoff or whatever you will, but it's distinct enough that I never get them confused with critters from Other Series. They borrow most of the design language and some bits are definitely noticeably hacked together in a design sense, but as far as I'm concerned, it's all come together to make a game that's immensely more fast-paced, beautiful, and mechanically satisfying than those Other Series games ever have managed to achieve.

Where it falls short is its level of polish. I think they have good bones here; nothing's particularly poorly designed or broken. I can hardly ask for much more when it comes to the gameplay loop, traversal and combat. But the weak link is the sense that this world is paper-thin. That's the one thing that Other Series does REALLY well, to the point where they force you through arduous cutscenes and unskippable dialogue just because they NEED that world to feel alive, fleshed-out and believable, to sell you on an epic journey you're about to take. While on the surface this game looks better than those ever did, and the journey you go on genuinely pulls off "epic" so much better, it comes with this sense that everything is just skin-deep. It lets what you do speak for itself, but there's so little context outside of what you're doing in a mechanical sense, that even the narratively-interesting engagements you get into don't end up feeling interesting in the moment. Bosses have names and presumably lore (who's reading those text logs, anyway?) but there's no attempt made to stage any kind of 'scripted' content and that is absolutely to the game's detriment, IMO. The scope and scale of the experience is massive, but it feels more like reaching the end of a long, grinding treadmill rather than achieving recognition as a strong Pal tamer in this world they've made. Not having proper cities or overarching story (or even putting together 'story' content in the form of effectively sidequests so they can be skipped/ignored) is doing the game no favors.

While running around the open world and building up your bases and teams is satisfying, the game's entire payoff is in the journey, not the destination. At the end there's nothing to do, nothing to seek out, aside from finding harder and harder fights and finally getting to make them ragdoll around. It's anticlimactic, in a sense, from the beginning to the end. There's no sense of buildup outside of some intro cutscenes for tower bosses. You don't fight through their towers to reach them, you just teleport into a copy-pasted combat arena to kill each other. You aren't building up toward some end goal, like getting all of the "badges" or competing in a grand tournament. You don't speak to the major "story" battles before or after their fights. There doesn't seem to be a reason you can respawn and teleport. People in the game world don't feel like they're filling out a believable place; they're either shopkeepers, enemies or scared sitting at a campfire.



I don't know if any of this is intended to be fleshed out in the future, but I hope it is. If anything, I feel like the gameplay loop and even the long-term "chase" content toward the end plus all the ways you can enjoy multiplayer and the laundry list of customizations you can make to the gameplay (Pals being able to die in combat really should be a default, although I'd prefer it to be fleshed out more - ie, needing to rush them to treatment after a KO, that sort of thing) make for plenty of content to fill out a really satisfying long-term experience, here.

Really, if what you're after is some light survival, base-building and crafting, and absolutely disrupting the environment as you capture everything that moves, this game is a hell of a drug. I just wish that, looking back on the ~80 or so hours it took me to hit endgame, it had more of a fleshed-out world and characters to engage with along the way.

I don't need a story, and I wouldn't say this game is incomplete without more dialogue and scripted sequences. But I think they really should take a look at some of the better content from Other Series and think of ways to incorporate more memorable and unique setpiece content into gameplay - bring the world to life as something I WANT to dig into text logs and talk to random guards to learn more about. And honestly, really re-think the default world options. Palworld has always intrigued me for its willingness to look like a cute critter catcher game while crossing those taboo "kids' game" lines - it has a golden opportunity for players to live out some truly memorable and interesting emergent experiences, but it feels like the devs didn't bother to flesh out any decent ways for failure to be a real threat/fear for players and the default settings basically make the worst punishment boil down to "go back to base, use other critters for a while".



It feels like there's tons of potential here, especially with this game's massive viral success. Right now, it's a fun game, but not a fulfilling world that makes you want to be a part of it. A good survival game, good monster collecting game, good exploration and base building game, zero reason to stick in your mind once it's over except to think about how much you want to curl up with a Chillet. It could be so much more, but if future updates just push "this but more of it" then it'll always be just "good".

Cute little Terraria-like! It's not particularly expansive but doesn't ask all too much out of you. Early-game can be a tough time, it's hard to get a decent foothold but you do feel your progression pretty nicely as you move along. Honestly feels like the leadup into something much bigger if it wasn't constrained to a 4-sided square planet - a few more features could see this easily expand into a pretty solid, meaty game. But for a freebie? I certainly enjoyed my time with it~