The game controls really, really aren't responsive enough for what you're asking the player to do. And then you started mixing in invisible blocks. This game is trial-and-error enough without literal "you cannot know this ahead of time" invisible block placement. I'd give it a two-and-a-half if I could, but I'll have to settle for two stars. Making hard games is easy, so I don't rate them very highly.
Excellent game. Surprisingly deep and diverse, with new mechanics and challenges introduced often and well. A few things I'd say: 1) there was a disappointing lack of water sections like the first set. The sudden shift to Ecco the Dolphin was fun! They would have made good stress breaks. 2) A progress bar would be good. Maybe a timer, too? 3) A level select would be nice as well. 4) If the game saves your progress between sessions, some indication of that would be nice. I played the game in about a 40-50 minute straight session because I wasn't sure whether or not my progress would carry over and didn't know how long the game was, and by the end of it I was stressed and making hissing noises at my monitor every time I made a jump. It's a little tense.
Melody of the Maze made me quit this game. Seriously, whoever designed that mistook "difficult" for "intensely aggravating." The design of "The Plundered Dungeon" fight in particular is inexcusably bad, quite possibly the worst game design I have ever seen.
Dear developer: For the love of everything you hold dear, if you make a sequel, DO NOT INCLUDE LASERS. I enjoy the game, but the lasers lack a clear visual threshold between "close to firing" and "will literally fire in the next microsecond." I can't tell which laser is going to go off in a sequence unless I'm in slow time and I'm manually counting and comparing, and that is NOT conducive to the gameplay. Bullet hell is skin of your teeth, and that doesn't work so well when you don't know where in the hell your teeth ARE!
There needs to be some sort of routing option, ala "choose between these two paths." Otherwise, there's a very small set of learnable facts before the game becomes all luck. It feels a bit like playing with a newbie GM in a RPG that doesn't quite understand what he should be doing yet. "Yes, the players do die if you don't give them armor or elixir shops. This is not new or clever, man. Stop it."
The pathfinding in this game is absolutely terrible. The fact some levels can be lost purely because one penguin will kill itself running against a hedge is unacceptable.
Okay, now that I've gotten the ragepost out of the way, let me be more polite about it. The cardinal sin of any game like this is to put an unavoidable situation where they cannot dodge attacks. This happens repeatedly against Iblis. For once, the intervals between his paired horizontal lasers mean that he can -- and often will -- herd you to the upper or lower front corners. This is substantially worsened by the existence of the low-life plasma beam, because this can coincide with the other lasers. If, for example, he does a sweep from up to down while the horizontal beam is going, then you have to tank the lasers. Yes, you have a health bar, and yes, you have bombs. The use of them should not be REQUIRED, because that puts you in a tanking fight, and you are fighting something with a hundred times your health. That's absurd. With this sort of fight, you NEED to incorporate actual changing AI. As is, it's terribly sloppy, and that makes it very, very aggravating for the player.
You know, I play shoot-em-ups fairly regularly. I enjoy bullet hell. I play a lot of video games in general. And I don't think I've *ever* run a cross a boss fight that seems as inherently unreasonable and unfun as Iblis. Congratulations! Tip: YOU DO NOT INCOPORATE MULTIPLE LARGE STRAIGHT LINE SCREEN DIVIDERS INTO A SHOOT-EM-UP, especially if there are other bullets going around the screen!
My number one complaint: Please implement some universal way to tell whether or not a mission is completed. Each faction has its own "uncompleted" and "completed" colors, but some of them are very similar and there's no cross-faction consistency that I can tell. It makes it kind of annoying to go between each available mission and check the best ones to do at the moment.
This game has a LOT of problems, honestly. Chief among them: The cards in missions scale much faster than yours do. If you want to win later missions, you need either a LOT of luck in card draw and purchasing, or you need to spend a lot of time farming earlier missions. There could be an alternative in arena missions, BUT, for some reason, those give you no gold. Furthermore, the game itself is extremely sensitive to snowballing due to mechanics, which wouldn't be such a problem if some decks didn't have matches determined almost entirely by initial hands. Do I have a Vampire in my opening hand, and can I get an asylum in either the first hand or first draw? If so, win, otherwise lose. The countering mechanics feel more obnoxious than tactical, and whoever decided to introduce the chance elements of flying and regeneration is an idiot; I don't want matches to be determined by whether or not enemies die when I kill them!
Swarm is amazingly overpowered. Once you have that spell, the difficulty of enemies is linear based entirely on two factors: move speed and poison resist.
The game rubber-bands a bit too hard when reacting to your units. Against the Elder or Sultan, going with a weenie swarm strategy of many small units results in them producing just as many units - but EACH of those units costs three times as much as yours! It artificially punishes any attempt at "quantity over quality." What's worse about this is that each of the decks is filled with weak creatures that you can summon a lot of, which naturally lends itself to doing that! If you want the game to be "quality over quantity," THEN BUILD THE STARTING DECKS APPROPRIATELY.
Good game. A few tips: 1) To get as far as fast as possible, stay low and repeatedly boost off of the windmills. 2) On a related note, the most important upgrades are fuel capacity, the +speed on crane, and wind upgrades, and the +gold star chance. If you're going for the "England in 8 days" one, you probably need to get the steering upgrade on the first day; it requires luck, but it's doable. 3)Glitch: Throw the plane, hit the ground, refresh the tab and reload the game. You'll get the money but the day count doesn't seem to progress. 4) Personal record: 8000m, game beat in 16 days. That's far below what I could have done, though; I kept accidentally letting myself hit the ground with half my fuel tank because of wind and inattention.
This game is absurdly easy if you pick Great Sea, simply because they can invalidate every other strategy. Does your strategy depend on me attacking you? I can cast Mana Leak instead to burn a turn, wait for you to run out of mana, and then kill you on a turn you can't cast a counter. Does your strategy depend on attacking me? Additional defensive bolts, Absorb Damage, and Absorb Life all invalidate that. Build enough mana and enough life to survive a few unblockable hits and you're nearly invincible. Ice Land mages are almost as powerful, especially since two turns with Counter Hit High and Low + freeze effect on bolts means that Freezed Death is unavoidable unless you can clear statuses. Regenerate also means they are the only type able to outlast Great Sea, should Great Sea not blitz them and wipe them off the map with Absorb Damage.
5/5, and one of the few games I think actually deserves that as opposed to a 4.5 or so. The sheer length and scope is impressive, especially combined with the rest. The systems are good, the difficulty reasonable, the usable characters are numerous and different enough, and the story was excellent; a lot of the game was silly, but the dramatic scenes after the start of the point-of-no-return were all very well-done. (Particularly the revelation of the true nature of a certain character; Dreamstone #17 was painful to read.) I hope to see the later episodes fairly soon!
You CAN save! You have to pick Load when you start the game again, though. (I got stuck in a seemingly infinite cycle of "kill boss, go to new day, get message, go back to boss, kill boss...", and loading got me out of it.)
I do like the boss (though the impromptu boss rush was annoying) - the 'leveling boss' aspect is a great idea. (I'm kind of tempted to try to screw around with it and see what level 5 does to its attacks.)
Dash does need to be fixed - give it a toggle, at least, so it can be turned off. It's more of an impediment than anything. Remove the stun and it'd be more useful (though it'd just make you run into enemies or lava instead).
100% reward is interesting! I can see the travel mechanics making for some interesting level design.
What is Codex 56? I've gotten everything, played through the special bonus, it's still empty. Kind of strange.
Over all, great game - 5.
...Okay, how do you master Dragon Taming in time? I don't think there's any way to do it before the character is 17, you can only do it twice before needing to rest, and you only get 2.1 experience in it a week - even starting with 0 stress the moment it opened up, I could only get to 75.
I also didn't get the construction or mucking mastery achievements in that same run, which makes it even more irritating... It's probably because I hit 100.3 with them and didn't do it again to roll it over to 100.
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