Бобок 最近的评测

Fun game, great short MP event concept, definitely worth recommendation. Too bad me and my friend are such clumsy snails that we can’t even qualify for map 2.

В противовес «пальцам вверх», которые не заботятся разбавлять воду конкретикой, я тем более трудиться не буду, мне-то это точно не оплачивается. Игра не зашла, хотя обычно мне заходят фэнтезийные P2W и я башляю в них по нескольку месяцев. Потому что в них ранняя и средняя игра выстроена так, чтобы цеплять. А здесь как будто разработчики постоянно сверялись с концепцией, каждый пункт которой начинается со слов «Игрок должен…»

A puzzle game with logic, without timer, with acceptance of different valid solutions when they exist, and with the very important puzzle game trait of letting the player ‘choose your own difficulty’. That means the player is given unlimited hints (with only a short cooldown), and among the choices there are slight hints and hints that literally solve the level for you, and while remembering that the most other players who perfected the game probably used those hints all the time, one can always choose to play with ‘house rules’ of any strictness.

Playing process is what can be expected from watching the trailer, on fields with all kinds of cell shapes (among which square triangles and some unique sets were for me personally significantly harder to deal with than common squares, hexes or other more forgiving unique shapes). Levels are plenty (they unlock on progression) and layouts are randomizable, for rerolls of difficult ones or for endless replayability. As for bugs, the game may stop responding to controls for some players, that happened for me too, but disabling Steam overlay and cloud saves seems to fix that.

The game uses puzzles that are not at all hard to figure out (and there are walkthroughs available of course), but unjustifiedly difficult to execute for people without fast coordination skill, even with knowledge of the solution. And while the game has easy difficulty mode, switching to it changes nothing regarding the puzzles. That definitely turns the thumb down for me. More about this is said by other players in this thread.

Also, i find this a sort of foul play, that you can get this game for free from buying its predecessor, Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, but it’s not clearly stated anywhere by the publisher that the games are still bundled this way. Bundle is a nice thing, why hide it?!

PS: It took me 90+ hours to (thoroughly and attentively, and also quite laggy despite playing on exactly the recommended specs and lowest graphics) complete the storyline for the first time on Easy. To 100% achievements, the game must be beaten 3 times because of the story’s mutually exclusive choices. In my 90+ hours i travelled a few forks both ways to pick an extra achievement or just for fun, but those were short, and i believe not less than 24h i spent on sorting my equipment, selling stuff i was sure i would’t need but keeping stuff i thought i might need. The inventory space is capped low and the sorting process is aided by really painful interface and a lot of glitches that made me restart the game a lot when the trade menu stopped even showing the right items. When managing the equipment the player still has to juggle the many available heroes, who can re-use each others’ equipment in many various combinations, between only two replaceable slots. I actually like micromanagement, but i obviously want a better thought-out interface for it. Which is never the case with cross-platform games, but i play on PC and don’t at all enjoy always having to face other platforms’ limitations but never their benefits. Having completed the Easy playthrough, i learned that all this equipment pain was unnecessary, no specialization damage or armor needed, killing everything with only the most general stuff was Easy indeed. But when i played i couldn’t be sure of that and suspected difficulty balance walls at any point. If i ever replay the game on a higher difficulty for the first time again, for the same reason all micromanaging will have to be done again.

It is a great game that hides its good side in a spiky shell of its bad sides. The devs could have worked more on cracking the shell and making the great game more likely enjoyable to much more players, but they gave up on it too son. Sad.

Has spoilers, in black.

“Mister Eudo is kind and always compliments me when I accomplish literally anything. It reminds me of mobile games.”

Started feeling a bit attached to the series lately, so let me drop my thoughts down to letters and out of my head. The gameplay, while catchy, feels too unchallenging for me personally and some of the aspects tend to turn even easier for no excuse (the mobile market expansion is something very opposite to an excuse, i’m sure quite a share of Steam players would say so). One may feel that highlighting hidden objects, named back in the days hidden for a reason, is an outrageous insult, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is how the tasks unlock one another.* And that part is still fun. I didn’t at first realize the series ARE immediately replayable, even if i still remember the story. Just need to forget the rewards or outcomes for some of the multitude of tasks:)

*The game is so casual and in the same time so cautiously weaved that the need of cautiousness is taken from the player. Seems that no task fulfilled too early can ever, conversely, block completion of another even temporarily. What you can’t buy or replenish, you won’t sell or spend. (Sadly, that means you’ll get most things from the same marketplace area which you will access very early.) (And any extra stuff you don’t think you’ll yet need is sellable, which is indeed a good thing.) Tools still break sometimes (less frequently) but maybe even that is prevented somewhere in the logic if a player is struggling.

My jocoserious advice to the devs would be to, quite in the vein of what ‘all’ mobile games ‘must’ do, implement the daily powerup thingie, even into the existing series no matter what the HotK4 (if ever) is going to be. For that, make the hidden objects well hidden again, make achievement requirements grindy again, but offer players a way to grease their grind by the daily choice of either a find mushroom hint or instant 100 coins into the purse. I’d sure come back for the coin one myself, lol. But, seriously enough, any solution to provide personal difficulty adjustment would be welcome.

For those who already know what the HotK series is, i have no advice. They can decide for themselves whether they want another title, slightly less grindy, a lot easier in 100% achievements.

For those who never tried HotK, i do recommend to try. Being too easy is not as bad for a game as being too frustrating. Is it hard to read a book? But for them it would be a strange choice among the HotK titles to start with this one:) which is even slightly spoilering all the others in the plot. Actually it may trick the experienced HotK players into completing their collection, if not yet, and replaying all previous titles with some new knowledge from this one:)

A fine well made TM game for the genre fans. 50 basic levels and 10 additional levels already included as the ‘Collector's Edition’.

It’s common to say in reviews how one wanted to like a game, well, quite frankly, i have to say i didn't want to like this game (mainly because of how it handles the active pause cheat), still it won me and i liked it (mainly because of satisfying level design and gold time fitting with my actual results).

As for the active pause cheat it's the thing i'm used to use in TM games since the times when Build-a-lot was new. I play in windowed mode and whenever i want to take a few moments to look at my level and think i click away from the game's window and it instantly gets paused. Once i'm ready i click on the next task i want done and the game continues. Good TM games flawlessly continue from this point and even allow this click that unpauses the game to be registered. This game is ‘bad’ in these terms because although it allows to look at the game field while paused, it still calls up its menu instead of just unpausing when being activated again, and even does that with a delay.

The need to nervously hover over resources extracted by workers would be another reason not to like the game but at least they don't disappear if not picked up (like in some other games where this annoyance is present), they add to stockpile automatically after a while and hovering just speeds it up. Thus no real nervosity here, regrettable but bearable.

And there are good sides. First of all choo choo it has steam trains lol. Levels’ gold times seem well tested and provide just enough approximately equal challenge for my liking (being a sucker at both thinky and clicky games but at clicky a bit more, i had to replay most of the levels for the second time, after realizing which resource to focus on where, and rarely more than that while never hitting a wall, and the bonuses thing has played its unnecessary part here). I only played on the hardest mode available and didn't bother to check the others (can't say anything about the level guides for the same reason). Probably that means that for some players the game would be boringly easy, these games are (i hope) never played for the story.

There are bonuses that make beating levels slightly easier. They gradually become available as the story advances, so that the first time some level 5 is played it has less bonuses accessible than when replayed after having finished levels 40+. Although i don't like this approach to forcing a player to spend more time in the game replaying levels after the ‘upgrades’ have made them easier, i saved my effort and replayed most levels for 3 stars only after getting access to most of the boni. (Not the last one with the hourglass, the one before it is better anyway.) Maybe this is still a cleaner move than unlocking the ‘real game’ only after beating the last level in ‘surprise, this was just a sandbox mode’ as Royal Envoy does — at least gives the player some choice.

Yeah among titles from which this one steals ideas from, and from what i know, copying from Royal Envoy seems a bit rude (gardens? wait for the water towers and see), but copying from Roads of Rome is light enough.

Bad sides are too many tasks require two workers, no undoing queued tasks, no queueing tasks that are ‘right behing’ those already queued — best games of this kind either allow that or even have both ‘multitasking’ and ‘no multitasking allowed’ modes. All of that are just rules, while they are slightly regrettable they don't spoil the gameplay and are not bad enough for me to start thinking dirty about the devs. Also it has these things most TM games seem to have but none can explain what a hell for (one hidden object on each level, not actually hidden, and the shooting minigames; you know how a TM player always worries, hey, i'm here to play my favourite genre i want to try hard for, why are the devs forcing me to also try in a genre i would never have chosen myself and what if i never manage to get the 3 star on these alien levels and that will be my fly in the ointment? Well these were unnecessary but not too spoiling for an arcade sucker or HOG hater like me.)

At most levels there's no need to think whether to upgrade a building or not, it's always a good idea to upgrade everything because in the end every resource will be used or traded for another. As for me, the latter fact means a good level design. But maybe making the ‘hard’ mode's gold times actually hard and optimal would have changed all this.

There are minor bugs: like right after opening a trader's menu it closes by itself because something just happened in the game or for no reason at all. Didn't affect anything though, but could if there were stricter time limits. Maybe not a bug but on levels with steam ships the ship noises seemed to come randomly and probably meant nothing instead of informing the player where the ship is. In some cases the game does not call the nearest available worker for the task (and this one's hard to notice to get mad about it). Music is cheery but one of those you stop noticing around 10 seconds into it (which i guess is exactly what it should be).

I can recommend this one to anyone who respects the triumphal Hercules series for being quite well made despite its noticeable soullessness, BUT does not care if the game doesn't at all have a mode that's challenging enough and only gives you the 3 gold stars in case you know yourself that everything on the level was done next to perfection.

Awesome long thinky TD game.

First thing i had learned about this game is that many players complain it’s innecessarily hard and frustrating. Being one of crappy players who hate frustration myself i became concerned quite a bit, but still started the game on normal difficulty, played for many hours and found it great, long and long before any frustration appears. Actually i soon get bored with any game and move to another, well this one gives a lot of fun before any wall is hit, and as i never was so eager to ‘complete’ it anyway i found normal difficulty just fine. Then i tried easy mode too and felt it doesn’t make much difference and definitely doesn’t spoil the challenge in survival (endurance) mode (and i’m not sure if difficulty reduction is even in effect in trial mode).

And if a puzzle mode (trial) level looks like it’s the said wall, wrong, it’s another way to study the game mechanics better and learn some tricks and combos that could accidentally slip from one’s view, and there’s no shame in doing that by following an existing guide. There are fine text walkthroughs btw (i hate wasting my time on youtube).

This TD is a must have.