Barnem 最近的评测

I don't think the tutorial for this game is very good, and the iconography for the game is too difficult to parse. While you mouse over a tile it does highlight some interactions, you don't get a good sense for how they interact.

The symbols don't have a legend unless you go a menu deep, and you can't even mouse over a symbol to see what it means. The game is kind of there but there's so much about it that's not done. The symbols are also so tiny that even full screen they are hard to parse. The hatchet icon is surrounded by white pixels, and even on a darker background, most of the icon is silver, it makes it blurry.

So much of the game would be better if you could just mouse over a tile and hold tab, or something so you can see what the symbols mean and do. I get this is inspired by UFO 50 but those games make more active sacrifices of game complexity and information for readability.

I want to like this game more because I enjoy tile laying and synergies, but for now I'm putting down a major NO.

Do not be baited by the nostalgic look, this plays like NONE of the jank-ass games of yesteryear. I appreciate the concept but the onboarding is terrible - if you're going to play this play it on the easy mode as the normal mode appears to have even less respect for your time as a player.

The controls are incredibly clunky and stodgy, you can only move orthogonally. Your attacks are airy and the game cannot decide if they have hitstun or not. You get three hits, but on normal mode you can only heal in towns, and that's only if you spend currency to heal that you have to grind for, and the drop rate is slow low enough that you're going to walk into a screen, slash, then walk off again.

Even worse, this game doesn't obey using the gb rules because you're pushing multiple buttons to pull up additional menus. Why does right shift pull up my health bar? Why can't I pull that menu up when I hit start or select? Baffling choices that don't match the era and don't match the tough as nails attitude either. -Usually- grinding occurs because the next task is not clear, so one performs a task inefficiently to get something done. Maybe the game respects your time later on but I'm not going to stick around and find out.

Another good early game sign is the game has you perform a minigame that you can neither practice, nor does it indicate what button you are supposed to be pushing. I have patience for jank, I don't have patience for this.

The writing seems promising, the setting has something going for it, but the lede is buried under very underwhelming gameplay. You get your first glory point slashing bushes, and then the game cuts you loose and you realize you can only gain another when you've ground out killing 5 of an enemy, but this requires just going in and out of a room over and over rather than organically exploring anything. Perhaps I got another point by repeatedly killing bushes, but the message did not state if you got another, and for the life of me none of the menus showed how many glory points I even had.

I don't like being a hater for no reason just something about touching this game made me angry because it was clearly chosen to work with real limitations and then the devs just chose to overbloat the game and UI while making the moment to moment gameplay unsatisfying.

Please don't be fooled by the Adult Content warning - the most "adult" material in this game are the three main character's revealing outfits. Your grandma would probably see these outfits and laugh than look at you funny.

But on to the game - it's good! Blackjack is a great basis for the game's combat - you are (usually) trying to get to 21, and trying to make sure that your hand is better than the enemy's hand. Whoever wins does damage.

What makes the game cool is how you can manipulate your hand using skills, or banking cards in a side pool. Along with status effects that you can apply to monsters, or have them apply to you, the math that you're doing is always shifting. There are multiple characters you can play as, each with different skill sets that help them manipulate the odds in their favor, whether it's tanking damage, manipulating the hand, or having an extreme variety of skills.

And if that isn't enough, the game's equipment system offers a way to slowly upgrade and customize your play style with different passives. Equipment drops very freely, so don't feel shy and synthesize!

An incredibly smart choice they made was that weapons have a base damage, and then a scaling number. The scaling number gives you Bonus Damage based on the absolute distance between your hand's number and the monster's - meaning that sometimes, it's actually GOOD to have a hand with a low number if you can reasonably assess that the monster will bust. What this all means is that yes, being good at blackjack helps, but I think it helps you be creative at understanding your odds and working with your tools to help.

A recommendation I have is do not play with the timer off, if you can. While the game does (fairly in my mind) compensate the difficulty for giving you unlimited think time, I think it's much more exciting to make faster choices and be a bit messy. But if you ARE struggling with the card counting, this accessibility option is well-balanced and I don't think you'll walk away unhappy.

As far as the story goes, it's extremely basic, but it takes itself seriously which is nice. No cutscene goes on for too long and you still get a good feeling for each character and their little quirks. I got to the credits roll but there is a lot of post-game content, and I'm excited to chew through that. My main complaint is that one of the characters you get has a very odd manner of speech, but I think that whoever did the English translation did not compensate enough and some sentences just don't make sense.

Overall, this game is eleven dollars. I spent about 10 hours on the main quest, save for a few times I had to idle while doing something else. I'm not sure how long the post game is. But I'm already happy.

Short, sweet, and fun!

I'm not sure who this game is for. As it stands right now, Ratatan is neither a very interesting roguelike, nor does it really provide the compelling combat of it's predecessor, Patapon.

The main problem is the combat - the game gives you freedom to move a player character around, and your army does not move with you, they must be commanded to march forwards. What ends up happening is that your leader stands as far into the back as you're willing to manage, and you make your army fight. If it's a boss battle, then there may be some mild dodging involved.

But you must hold still to input a command. Now, that sounds like the rub and the main puzzle of combat, and I'd agree, but the biggest design choice that makes this game flop is that rhythm bar only allows inputs for a specific time, you are LOCKED out of doing anything for an entire "turn" if you aren't holding still, and the enemies have little regard for this. So if you're late by one beat, then your army does nothing for another turn.

The chants are also uninspiring. You are literally mashing one button. There is an "advanced" playstyle, but these chants aren't great but also you can tell they are an afterthought because many of the main set of commands are built to be variations of timing, in what I assume is a way to reduce the load of moving and button inputs. I'll just say this - both methods are lackluster. I do not like how the game feels.

Bosses are even worse, because while the extremely passive enemy encounters give you time, the bosses will do something generally every few turns or so. In Patapon, usually this was a decision you made of how far are you going to push to attack, when do you want to dodge, is it worth breaking fever to do something else - all of this is gone. When the enemy signals, you defensive action, or you attack. Because again, you cannot change what you want to do. The way the commands are set up you have to get it right or you are locked out for an entire turn.

So what a run ends up looking like, inevitably, is that you move your army into place, and then you mash attack, and maybe use skills if you have a passive that makes using them worth it. To the game's credit, all of the army unit types seem to have different purposes, but it all blends together into mush because you truly only want to attack - your meter for special actions builds up miserably slow, and none of the enemies are so devious that you feel like you want a different composition.

You get perks, but none of them change how you approach combat in a meaningful way. I can chalk that up to it being in alpha or a demo, but it's troubling still. Maybe if the units you brought in had their own perk pools, so you had to think harder about composition?

The other problem presented by giving you control over a single unit is that the camera is now your greatest enemy. The game is too zoomed out, and it's all too busy. It's hard to parse enemies from allies when playing the game. I know you can zoom in and out manually - it's bad still. Your character is too floaty and fast and they have no impact on anything other than being the one that cannot die. Again, the best thing to do is move as far left, zoom out, and repeat attacking except when you have a boss and must engage with mechanics.

I kickstarted the game, tried the second alpha, and I've been disappointed since. Knowing steam, there will be people who will come at this review saying, "You just want Patapon 4." No, I really don't. I'm not here to be a hater for hate's sake.

If moving the Ratatan is TRULY critical to the vision of the game, then they should be anchored to the ground, and your army should move around with you. If there was a short radius that you could move from left to right so you COULD dodge attacks or microposition, or slowly march your army forwards. Then the move option becomes better because it is a big burst of speed. Lock the camera in place.

I can only summarize this game as it made me frown the more I played it. It's boring. And it drives me nutty because I'm not sure what fun others are squeezing from this experience.

I'm going to write more once I'm done, but for now I will recommend this as a fun retro style JRPG that's just fiddly enough to make me rotate it in my head when I'm not playing it, but not so much that I don't think I couldn't recommend it to just about anyone.

I have put around twenty hours in this demo alone.
Looking for synergies and shuffling your gems around feels great, the foley for the game makes touching these little gems so satisfying.
My only complaint is that some of the boss mechanics are on a sliding scale from "oops a lot of damage" to "instantaneous death" and once you understand it then yeah, they aren't hard to manage but struggle much more than others to survive it, like Yubar.

But please don't take that small piece of criticism as a "stay away!" This game whips. It's great solo as a brain-off game on lower difficulties and it's fun in coop.

Another bit of feedback for the devs: Please make shopping easier when in coop! It's very taxing to share what's in another shop, even with the middle click to share a concept or memory, as those don't stay visible in the chat for very long.

Thumbs up with a BIG Asterisk

This game is to me less an ode to older JRPGs but instead modernizing certain aspects of the experience while maintaining the roughness and jagged edges the genre used to have. Having played Venaitura, their previous game, this is all the more clear. This is a game for RPG enjoyers who love fiddling with dials on their characters with oodles upon oodles of equipment, and fussing with their party composition.

The modernized bits:
You can run away from pretty much every encounter you want, as long as you are within a level band of the enemies. You can get surprised, but it's very rare. Resource management is less stressed in this game with decent checkpointing with heal spots, and Save Anywhere.
Characters, in general, feel balanced enough that you can justify all configurations throughout the majority of the game. Some characters ARE better than others, but you can truly play to your preference and wanted difficulty.
Grinding is a choice - with good composition, action management, or just learning the fights beforehand and reconfiguring your equipment, I don't see anywhere that's a true "wall."
Difficulty: This game I feel is of medium difficulty if you are not used to JRPGs, in the sense that the game will throw status effects at you, enemies will have exploitable weaknesses, etc, and you are expected to gear for them. If you grab all the treasure chests, this normally will be fine.

What's not modernized:
- The encounters, because they are optional, are sometimes a lot spookier than the boss fights. You can get locked down if you don't prepare for the change in status effect du jour of a new area.
- You will be wandering. Someone will say "it's too the east" and while usually this is a decent enough signpost, if you stop playing and reload, you may not remember what you were doing, and there's no one to talk to. I feel like venaitura was a lot more forgiving with this because there are NPCs worth talking to.
- Dungeons are long, winding mazes. This is a take it or leave it thing, I think it's annoying but because you can run away almost unpunished, I suppose it's fine. Near the end I was getting very frustrated with how elaborate these branching paths were.
- You can bust your characters. Let's just say there are party members that don't play by the normal rules of equipment. But even normal characters can be optimized for absurd damage.

Now here's the asterisk:
The writing in this game -is- bad. While it's fine to have stories where characters do not grow or change, it means usually you have defined personalities bumping into one another and how they react to different scenarios. The problem is that every character reacts the same way, every time, in every scene. One character will act genre savvy, the others will range from mad, to bemused, to tired. That's it. Every once in a while someone will say something witty but the hit ratio is far off and by the end I was very tired of everyone talking. Which sucks because every character, if you think about their one line summary, IS interesting. Why YES, I do want to hear about an adventuring couple that's married and happy. Yeah, I DO want to know what it's like being a sibling to someone you find out is from space. Yeah, I DO think it can be funny to be someone who essentially is a god running around and not caring about mortal affairs. But nothing comes of it.

And I will say this - old school jrpgs may have been light on story at the time, but many of them DID try, very very hard, to evoke something even with their limited character limit. Final Fantasy 4 is not the wordiest game, but it still manages to write evocative characters who think and feel, despite not always having enough time to drill down to everything.

The closest thing I can compare the story to is "what if we take the comedy aspects of Slayers but apply it to jrpgs," in that folks know what's going on (semi-genre savvy), but still play it straight. In this game, the characters are TOO savvy, and not interested enough in the stakes, or are forced to bend to one character so badly that I actually come to really loathe them. Basically, expect to skim dialog after the halfway point.

It seems like their next game has withdrawn away from telling a more direct story, which may be for the better. I enjoyed Venaitura's cryptic to a point story.

But that is just one asterisk. I know that in an RPG, sometimes you really do hope for a good story + gameplay, but this game is just a long chain of goals to get to the next thing so you can find more toys to play with in your party.

There's spoilers ahead but I try to be vague enough.

I think that the base game and the "standard" puzzles are great. The other modes are brain twisters. I liked them! I had to look up a few but like the Store Page says - "ask for help and rest often."

The game has a Gameboy Aesthetic to it, I dig the sprites. The music is repetitive but in a way that I still hear certain Floors' music playing away even after I've put the game down for a few weeks.

However, I don't vibe with the meta mechanics. I don't think that the way you "Explore" the tower is very interesting, and there are certain puzzles that require more than just writing basic things down which to me is an incredible no-no -- either give me what I need to solve the puzzle, even if it's obtuse, or reconsider your puzzle. There's definitely ways the devs could have presented a specific, notorious puzzle that would make sense in-game but still be quite the brain teaser. Also given that you have to manage resources in such a specific way to solve some puzzles means a SINGLE mistake screws you and you're going to spend around a half hour starting over.

The story itself is fine, the cutscenes have charm without becoming too cute, but the way the lore is laid out isn't for me. I'm not the type of person that likes reading item descriptions for The Lore :tm: and what I'm able to find that's presented directly isn't enough for me to peel back the Truth. You just sort of bump into Sick and Twister people and then you do a few things and then move on to the next route for more drip feed of information or context, but the problem feels like when the "main story" is over I don't care about the context because the super mysterious characters are revealed to be very stock characters. The game ends up stumbling over it's own seriousness vs the Anime filter it's presenting itself through. Not that I'd want the story to be a very dry read, the goofy anime bits feel RIGHT at home with something around the Tenchi Muyo in Space kind of vibes or a slightly more serious Slayers. It probably just isn't for me.

From what I read the story's really sapphic and fraught over motherhood while all these women have to grind up and down this extremely phallic tower swinging around a rod with a bunch of dead men littered through it and there's bugs involved and I'm messing with the interface and I just feel like whatever answer was behind the door was something I'd have to keep looking up guides to figure out and based on the main story's ending it probably wouldn't give me much. Again, especially when if you have to "start over" a run the skips don't provide enough access and you have to climb the tower again which can take what feels forever because eventually the time reduction mechanics you can find stop being helpful at later puzzles if you need to be higher up to do something. I played this game for -26- Hours and while I'm not bad at puzzles, the looping is TEDIOUS.

So would I recommend this to you? Not really. But if you're smarter than me or more patient OR more willing to follow guides to get through, then I think you've read enough to say "I'm going to get SO much satisfaction from this ludonarrative experience, here is your clown emoji, reviewer." It's not that expensive, and we should support stuff that leaves us conflicted versus the bland smooth drek we're so often served. Sometimes I can handle the rough spots, but not for this one. The game has an identity and I'm sure it's trying to say SOMETHING but beyond "Wouldn't it be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up if I had to push blocks around for this person" but where it wants to land from that point I didn't feel compelled to find out.

Which is really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up because when I finished my first "run" of the game, I actually cried - it was legitimately upsetting what happened and I felt the way the character did. But the further I got in the more disinterested I became because nothing really beat that extremely powerful ending.

This game is just good, and I've played it from Alpha to Release.

The lane swapping mechanic has you shuffling your heroes around desperately trying to mitigate and minimize damage with your card synergies.

You're building 3 decks of roughly 9-12 cards, and while this sounds stressful at first, you'll quickly understand what you want out of a character and how they will play nicely (or not) with your teammates.

The difficulty scaling in this game is *mostly* appropriate. At the highest levels, it's possible to just be hosed and that's honestly it. But if you don't mind that in a roguelike then you'll definitely find something fun here. And furthermore, you don't *need* to play at the hardest levels to still feel challenged or enjoy experimenting with different comps - there's enough heroes that you could do this for quite some time.

The other thing I think the game tackles well is that unlocking a bigger card pool doesn't feel like you're getting worse and worse - more often you're getting access to better enablers for the silly stuff you want to see in a game like this, big combos, draw engines, things like that.

And if you do tire of the base version, there is a Hearthstone-like Arena run where you can draft cards in buckets in a series of back-to-back fights.

For twenty dollars, this game IS worth it.