who this game is for: . this game aims for a wide audience + if you like shooty stuff and magic + if you like looking at colorful, magic environments and can handle being explicitly in a game map who this game is not for: - people with high standards - people who only play stellar games - if you don't like cutscenes - people who want to struggle at the highest difficulty Gameplay why you would buy the game: + a small, but serviceably interesting roster of spells, albeit hampered by the lack of solid progression systems (below under Progression) + all spells are supposed to have their own role, which works most of the time, but not always; most games never give tools like spells their own role to begin with, so this is strictly positive + branching linear maps with encounter arenas + encounters change when revisiting a map (e.g. to collect new gear, spells, etc. that were previously unaccessible with newly acquired spells) why you would avoid the game: - some bugs can break combat and spells (see below under Technical) - exploration tools are built for combat, so the blink is a short range dodge and the double jump cannot be used to quickly scale ledges - combat spells are limited to shooting stuff, shooting debuff projectiles and some movement tools - towards the end new enemies / bosses become bullet sponges, couldn't bring myself to finish the game for this reason Music & Sound why you would buy the game: + a wide range of music from really peaceful tracks, to more exciting pieces . did not notice anything really outstanding, but also nothing lackluster + occasionally the music fit my mood perfectly + sound effects are good, but not outstanding why you would avoid the game: - sometimes in long cutscenes the synchronization between visuals and sound gets lost, as cutscenes are rendered just-in-time and if your GPU can not keep up with high intensity minute-long cutscenes there might be lags in the visuals, while the audio keeps playing resulting in a faster audio and slower visuals (I only encountered it in one cutscene so far, but it's still worth noting) Visuals why you would buy the game: + game is colorful, but realistic-esque and has smooth animations + the vistas are often interesting and there is a lot of variety in the kinds of environments you go through why you would avoid the game: - it is often clear that you are in a game map, because little environment has been placed outside of the walkable areas Narrative why you would buy the game: Characterization: . the strongest narrative aspect of this game + you meet lots of wildly differing characters, if that's your thing Plot: + endulges in using tropes, but could be serviceable for a good game, if the rest was there, but frankly this game lacks in a lot of aspects why you would avoid the game: Characterization: - Most characters are too exaggerated - often characters do not add anything to the story, they just like to introduce new characters, which then exist I guess Plot: - the story is mostly about winning some war, the specifics of which are explained away with: "it's a war over the control of magic" Lore: - the weakest narrative aspect of this game - the effects of the war are not fealt anywhere in the environment, just touched on in passing in some rare dialogue lines - there are note collectibles, which mostly feel there just to be there - one note even literally told me: "just roll with it", the lore here is that bad, they could have used smoke and mirrors to disguise that they didn't have an explanation, but they didn't Technical why you would avoid the game: Written by software development rookies (there's also no way to report bugs). Examples: - there is a gamebreaking bug when starting to cast a charged spell and then opening the shield spell while charging: the charged spell cannot finish casting until the player opens the shield and then starts casting the spell and then closes the shield while the spell is still charging. This happens because someone wrote button handlers with side-effects (i.e. ~there's a variable that tracks whether some action with a duration is taken at the moment and then all other casts with durations fail, because it's set by different actions) - cutscenes are not synched between audio and video (as mentioned above under Music & Sound) - when the character looks up or down when in an on-rails thing (to avoid spoilers), the character will might say "lean, lean" when a gate comes up, where the character is required to not lean to get through Progression There is a shop system (called forge) with 4 resources. You can dismantle gear, upgrade the gear you have and craft new gear: informational: . upgrading gear is straightforward with higher tier gear being upgradable more often which makes the gear stronger . crafting new gear is also straightforward, you can craft out of a selection of items. You can craft mechanically pretty much anything from the start (3 spells for each of the 3 magic colors, 1 assistment spell (called control spells) for each of the 3 colors, misc buff gear), however the gear you can craft becomes more powerful in stats over the course of the game. why you would buy the game: + Sometimes a spell breaks the established mechanic of its type and works slightly different why you would avoid the game: - dismantling gives so meagre results, that I am stumped as to why you would ever do this if you're not just about short of hitting a cost of crafting or upgrading - the prices of crafting and upgrading are Steep. Especially in the one of the 4 resources of which the drops are virtually invisible. they never prototyped their core progression systems: - there is orbs zipping around which you can collect by shooting at them with the corresponding color of magic. However, they are so fast that the window to hit them is very small. Not a big issue if you have spells that instantly hit their target, but if you're like me and like to play with interesting spells: I had a blue spear that is conjured over 0.7 seconds or so, a giant red close range blast with very little range and a fast green barrage spell with a wind up where projeciles fly in all directions at first. Needless to say that none of these do the job at hitting the target. The blue spear looses a part of the casting time as the player progresses. But the red close range blast spell just lacks the range to effectively hit these zipping orbs. Now why would I then not just skip the orbs? Well, hitting them gives a lot of XP a time of noting this observation. A lot more than other activities in fact. - Any spell with the exception of one spell can be used as soon as you have access to the shop/forge All in all: + it's decent for passing the time and might even be replayable, although I couldn't bring myself to finish it for the overabundance of bullet sponges in the last quarter of the game.
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