The theme is great, but the game punishes you for playing well by incorporating 'invisible paywalls' and huge time-gates that prevent you from progressing on the maps, even if you are correctly tracking all the outputs of the ridiculously multi-channel rewards system and intelligently investing your resources. Do you want a second foundry because every upgrade and building costs tons of steel even with the improved steel productions science? That will cost 3000 steel to unlock 10 steel an hour, and you can't harvest steel while collecting this amount because the warehouse has too limited a capacity! :) You can spend gold to do this, but then you won't have keys to unlock the fifty chests in your queue that only open once an hour or longer! Would you like to utilize your best troops to seize a map? The map set-up screen has quotas that will require you to play the incorrect categories, and then if they get scratched in battle they are gone forever! Luckily
Tried playing for the first time today. I get a "Error contacting server. Please restart your game or try again later" error message when I try to move my recruited dragon in the single non-premium goblin mission. I sense it is time to move on to another game. I had fun trying out the different races I guess, although RNG facing different 'zombie lords' and/or tavern recruiting and/or card draw sequencing has a lot of potential to destroy your victory chances within a given campaign after spending a lot of time on army-building and positioning. The lore was OK but some of the incorporated city names are not my cup of tea. As I do not see other players complaining about bugs and glitches in the comments, I will refrain from rating this title, but Jay Kyburz should know that I, some random dude on the internet, am disappointed in the quality of his work, like a leaky umbrella in the rain.
This game is literally too buggy and glitchy and laggy to play past the nuclear meltdown level at 15, as well as being grindy and "pay-to-win" in the classic NinjaKiwi sense. Even the "more awesomer" tagline of the company is grammatically wrong. Kongregate should not give such content badges.
As a new player, I grinded practice matches and converted all of my gold into rubies so that I could jump straight to the "Ultra Box", but instead of 20 purple units the box actually contained 3 purple units, 3 blue units, and 16 grey units. Buyer beware.
This seemed like a cool game in the spirit of Carnacki up till the point where I learned that the Firefox browser won't let you select items to use or drag, so you can't progress past the locked study door :/
I really hope that no kid plays this before encountering original Zelda and builds up negative connotations to the theme from the "monetized ironic hipster lazy bluegrass" version here on Kongregate
This was fun, I chose a wizard as one of the starter-champions who seemed to have little downside, found all five items in the cursed set, and then brutalized enemies with the cursed polearm and 105 strength. Some features I would like to recommend are 1. Better Pathing to stop moonwalking on walls instead of going through doorways 2. Have a map tab that clearly paints which rooms you have cleared so you don't have to backtrack looking for loot so much 3. An "are you sure?" prompt on the gateways to the next level since sometimes the gateway falls on your head and transports you before you could pick up stuff 4. Some pet/building complex/ritual shrine/cult/love-interest to dump gold into as a money sink for all the gold you have after 150 of each potion, etc. 5. More enemy variety or mini-bosses? ---Ultimately this might be meant as a simple game with a simple story and simple mechanics
This was fun until I ran out of energy at level 12 of the campaign. I donate money to game-makers that I respect, not greedy game-makers who seek to waste a player's time with paywalls and forced periods of waiting. 2 stars for the interesting art style and game mechanics, -3 stars for the limited "energy" pool.
2 stars. This game has some beautiful art and interesting themes and storytelling, but there is a secret paywall to advance past level 7ish of most of the world zones (unless you want to grind the lower-levels for weeks of time with slow, unskippable battles and PVP to find anything worth fighting with). The game apparently has a pokemon-type element system where fire-zone creatures are weak to water-zone creatures, etc. but common and uncommon creatures are bad, and some creatures of each type are completely worthless with slow attack-speed and useless abilities.
I give this game 4 stars, +5 stars for the "Telltale Games"-like narrative choices and -1 star for the disinclusive "Riot Games" ethnic makeup of your fantasy world.
I wish that I could give this game a good rating for executing a challenging concept, but the animations for chests and boss deaths are much too slow, there are lag bugs making jumps difficult, and stamina management is a complete fun-killer! For instance I cannot play level 3 because my party originally beat level 2 with a sliver of stamina remaining, so now I must constantly replay level 2 (and the slow foxbowser ghost flight) just to reach level 3 because the shortcut screen starts me with the first stamina total and my party faints immediately. Milk additionally determines level-pathing to a stupid degree, and no enemy or boss drops more milk, so it feels like the conceit was just built in to ensure closet ensemble-completion via grinding, which is of course very boring and unrewarding. Where is the choice architecture when there is only one correct allowable path? You should have called this game "Milk Run, fail if you miss any milk: The Game". 1 star.
I for one found the simplicity of the first game to add to the surreal and immersive feel of the journey, as though my computer had somehow fallen into a psychedelic costume portal ending in Nirvana. With all the additional metagame content like optional lizard-mechanics and "end of the line" dead ends and starmaps (and less music and a smaller model?) this iteration feels more like playing a standard running game with unneeded auxiliary features, and thus I give this sequel four stars and not five. Four stars is still higher than I rate most games on Kongregate.
I have to wonder if it feels "standard" because you've gotten used to the genre in the past six years. It might also be the "unneeded" features thing, but a lot of people seem to like them. --- Also, um... this has three songs rather than one. How is that "less music"?
This game is so unimaginatively generic that I have to wonder if it was written and developed by a sentient bowl of oatmeal. The Rumblegames team could have used their time more constructively by working minimum wage jobs to save up to buy the rights to adapt and port Diablo II or Gauntlet Legends 64 to the iPad, wherein they could have easily magnified their profits a thousandfold while still retaining the ability to look themselves in the mirror without the shame of unleashing such trash upon humanity or the besieged medium of videogame design. From their creation, I'm guessing that they didn't want to do this because those games contain human characters with dark skin-tone and playable female classes. 1 star.
This work has a fine art direction and scoring, but the "game mechanics" (I use the plural facetiously) do not actually constitute a game. The designer Jonathan Blow gave a lecture once called "Game Design: The Medium is the Message" about this sort of shallow experience, which makes me shed a single pixelated tear for all of the young gamers today bereft of quality content or impactful choice architecture. Surely we can do better. 2 stars for not being blatantly racist?
It would be great to be able to change the student's physical appearances from their base avatar models, since there is a jarring lack of ethnic diversity between human characters in this gameworld which doesn't make the developers look like very nice people :(
Yet ANOTHER racism-inspired fantasy universe blatantly containing only light-skinned Caucasian and Asian humans? I wish Kongregate would add a cartoon Hitler-face label to the scores of games like this so that egalitarian players could more quickly realize that the developers are bigoted trash, undeserving of donations or any form of attention... As a very long-time player of Kong, I can recommend that readers of this comment should go check out the far superior "Defender's Quest", or perhaps some sort of zombie or shape game that doesn't invent a parallel utopian ethnic-supremacy dimension.
As a young child I recall being really angered by the patronizing and anodyne tone of several games and films themed like this one that I was forced to play or watch. As an adult this sentiment is even stronger. I pity all of the children brought to this game instead of a work made with humor, self-awareness, or intelligent storytelling like Ray Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree" or "The October Country", and we may indeed see the holiday totally ruined in the future by those who grow up with too much of this sort of experience. I recommend "The Last Door" on Kongregate for anyone who can read, and "The Drabblecast" podcast for all those who cannot.
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I have to wonder if it feels "standard" because you've gotten used to the genre in the past six years. It might also be the "unneeded" features thing, but a lot of people seem to like them. --- Also, um... this has three songs rather than one. How is that "less music"?