Recent reviews by Kargor

Oh well... it's one of those games again.

It's reasonably well made -- technically. Looks excellent, sounds nice, plays nice. It could use a map, though.

What ultimately made me go "I can't recommend this" is the story -- it's boring, repetitive, and boring. And if that wasn't enough, it's also boring and repetitive. I still don't really know what it is about though, but I'm glad I finished it. And the game looking good can't make up for that.

The game is quite playable. Is suspect most readers will know what to expect in general: a simple 2D action game, going through a castle filled with enemies, learning skills and collecting gear, levelling up, and a little bit of wannabe story to tie it together. It's quite the looker, though -- the castle and enemies look good in general (except for the hidden "8-bit" area, but that's bonus joke), and the different sections are quite varied too.

As such, let me point out a few things. First, the game is either difficult or grindy: you are able to considerably outlevel bosses, making the fights a breeze. And that's ignoring the fact that some of the time can also be spent collecting materials and/or money for healing items to bring into the fights. So, if a boss gives you headaches, simply bring more healing, or more levels, or both. I didn't even need healing for late game bosses, and just face-tanked them with my levels while smashing them with maxed out skills.

One of the bad things about the game is the lack of direction and/or information. You absolutely will need to look up things on the Internet, since even progress can be very very hidden.

The game also outright lies to you. Like in the beginning, NPCs keep telling you how the source of your powers will corrupt you. But, fear not -- you can have as many shards as you can carry, all upgraded to the max, and nothing happens other than you getting powerful. And it literally took me until the end of the game to realize that the guy doing the alchemy telling me "I can't make shards" was lying too, and he actually does have a tab to make shards...

The voice acting is mostly horrible; for me, this also made 2 of the "familiars" completely unplayable because of the awful sounds they keep making. Luckily, the only good familiar (the Dullahammer heads) is silent.

Sidequests are forgettable and 110% repetitive -- only lady is asking for foods, one is asking for items, and one is asking for monster kills.

The game can get very grindy if you want to upgrade all your shards (skills) to the maximum -- but it's not required. On the positive side, as I've said, you can overlevel -- so any time you spend grinding for whatever you want to grind will help you with progress too.

Controls could use a minor update. There are weapon-combos, but I never used them because they use mana AND they are difficult to pull off especially during a fight; similar to how I often needed multiple tries to activate a specific traversal skill in the game, except that this didn't really cause issues since I didn't need to do that during a boss-fight.

Also, while the prompt to interact with an NPC shows "d-pad up", it will also accept "left stick up". Which lead to me frequently triggering the NPC interaction by just passing by it, if I didn't specifically pay attention to not have the stick ever so slightly "up".

Well, it's an overall nice-ish game, with a lot of annoyances.

For example, you can improve damage vs. specific monster types... but you have no idea what type a specific monster is.

Quests are full of guessing, or googling.

There are way too many "Higgledies", especially considering that they are either pointless, or not described well enough to know what they are used for.

The same applies to the "armies" -- it's a bit more clearer what they are used for (it's a separate game mode that uses them, after all), but there are way too many -- and only the ones that you use gain levels.

Spells? No idea what they do, never used them.
Armor skills? No idea what that is, never used it.

It feels like they wanted to add a lot of systems, but ended up with a big mess of unexplained and ultimately useless stuff. It's possible that I might have finished all te optional stuff with this -- that stuff gets super-hard -- but, well, it's optional.
In a similar vein, level requirements on some of the stuff seem way off -- tainted monsters in particular have massive HP pools and do insane damage, so being way ahead of the is definitely recommended :-)

Oh... and the escort skirmishes. Those are *classic* escort missions, with the NPC charging ahead no matter what.

I'm still giving it a thumb-up; just be warned that you'll have to do a lot of external research, grinding etc. I haven't been able to finish my kingdom, as I'm still missing a couple of citizens.
Also, I don't think I've done any of the DLC stuff -- I have a bunch of quests with insane levels, so...

I played it a bit, and quickly gave up since trains got stuck in turns...

I should probably call it a "rage quit". While putting progress behind hidden passages shouldn't be too bad yet, it just got waaaaay too annoying when they turned to precision jumping with the not-so-precise wind skill.

Also, horrible voice acting

Phew... This one is just tedious/boring, although I did make two runs to get a "true ending".

Let's start with the gameplay. They often just flash targets for a second, or keep moving the camera until it finally comes to a standstill so you can actually target stuff. It's also extremely difficult to see whether you've scored a kill, which generally messes up your accuracy (admittedly, I have no idea whether this affects anything). There also seem to be messages attached to levels, but I have no idea what this is about.
And, generally, all levels feel the same.

And then, there's no English voice acting, and a lot of stuff isn't subtitled eiter, so they keep talking at you and you have no idea what they might me saying.

Sometimes, the game lets you make a choice -- and to have any chance of a "true ending", you must look up these choices to choose the best one. Or rather, the best one that you can actually select, as the guides I found don't take into consideration that some of them are greyed out. Besides that, it might be necessary to get a "Perfect" on all events that involve the girl you're going for in the playthrough.

Buying stuff in the shop only lasts for the current playthrough, so most of it seems rather pointless since you're not getting enough currency to buy all of it anyway.

Ok, this is an interesting thing. It's very grindy and you keep doing tons of fetchquests, with only a few distinct areas, yet it never felt that bad all. The quests are short enough, even if they have you fetch rare meterials, there's a good fast travel system -- unfortunately, they don't always tell you where to find things, so keep Google on shortdial.

The game is easy enough, which is something I like. Only the first boss was a minor problem; following that, I was probably overlevelled far enough to trivialize them. Almost the same applied to hard mode (whch unlocks after completing the game), except that I didn't even get to the final boss in that mode (well, might have if I had used potions, but seeing the amount of damage I took from the first enemy...)

Still, there are two control schemes named "normal" and "simple". Both are... annoying. In "normal" you have to pull off precise timing to trigger some special combo thing; in "simplified" it happens automatically, but characters keep switching and teleporting around like crazy as well which creates a lot of confusion during larger battles. Or it can be annoying when you switch to the ranged char because you want to clear out some enemies blocking a pit that you want to jump over, but then the character switches and teleports over the pit, falling down...
Still, seeing these combo links trigger quite a lot, I left it on "simple" anyway. There are no bottomless pits anyway, you just have to walk a bit and try again.

The characters and story aren't half bad, although there isn't much of that. As I said, there's a lot of fetchquests, which are used to develop the town. While their marketing likes to stress that this is a prequel to some other game, which I haven't played, it can certainly stand on its own. Yes, a mysterious "empire" makes an appearance eventually, but their role is obvious enough so I don't need to know any intricate details about them.

I didn't use most of the town facilities, though -- Í only actually used the blacksmith/weapon/armor shops, the tool shop, and the rune lense shop -- but I did them all anyway. So, it was an alternation between progressing the story, and doing the fetchquests for the town, which generally appaar in large batches as the story progresses. For me, it worked out wwell enough. I even spent some extra time to upgrade my kit to max, even if meant fetching some more materials and money.

The game looks great, I really liked some of the background tracks (my favorite is probably the Runebarrows one)... but, there's 0 voice acting.

There is one annoying detail when going through the world, though -- you have be "careful" to not leave item drops behind. Most of the time you'll just pick them up automatically during the battle, but it can happen that you're too far away for that to happen... there's really no good reason for this design choice, and it prevents you from just running through an area full-speed that you've already seen countless times anyway.

Phew... done. Finally. Note that I've only played one class, the Consular -- so, I don't know whether the other stories are any better. I'm also only looking at the class story part of the game; I don't care about multiplayer and cash-stuff.

The writing is just awful. They keep repeating the same stuff over and over and over again, and that's not even about that stupid Empire war which is the main ever-repeating "story" in almost every place you go. Locations are boring and repetitive.

And heck, they aren't even using that to grow character relations. Like I talk 3 lines of dialogue to some Jedi bureaucrat I've never met before, and next I know they are like long-time masters to me?

Gameplay isn't any better. There's a strong focus on the cash shop; at some point I tried a difficult (optional) mission, somehow beat the first boss, and got an item that I wasn't allowed to use without buying "authorization" first. I hit the level cap during the character story, and at the end I used the same items forever (not even the final set I got was any different) because everything they gave me was at much lower level.

Moving around is tedious; they have huge locations just so you have to walk for minutes to get anywhere. The story takes you to different planets which don't fell every different, give you tons of samey rubbish quests across lots of samey locations. Maps are labyrinths on most worlds, with a crappy/useless map -- because in Star Wars, nobody has invented flying yet, and I guess Google Maps isn't an option either. In some places. I spent more time trying to find a way to the quest location, than actually doing the quest then...

The companions are annoying, especially since the first one I got was a dumb lizard who'd be more suited for the dark side, and uses the stupid "alien voice"-scheme instead of real voice acting. They do that a lot, which makes listening to these aliens a pain.

Even the display isn't particularly good. Depending on the world you're on, things may be difficult to read because they don't constrast well with the landscape. And in one boss fight (actually, the one I mentioned above), I died because I couldn't find the tiny mouse pointer on the screen in time to click on the healing thing...

And how old is this game? Never mind, they still have quests that can bug out...

On the positive side, you can still play it for free. Is it worth it? Not even that.

Even on "casual", this is just waaaay too demanding -- its balanced to not give rewards. Unfortunately, rewards are needed to upgrade things in the shop; while the game is entirely luck based, you can go back and grind previous levels until you get something, but this takes forever.

Levels are way too long as well.
Sometimes, tiles can be overlaid with something -- a bonus, or ice that you need to destroy -- which makes it almost impossible to know what kind of tile this is actually on.

The game even starts with some voice-acted story intro, but that's it. After that, it's the occasional dumb chit-chat text-box that doesn't do anything and even that it super-rare.

All in all, not worth it. Not even the -90% I paid for it.

Well, if you play for a few minutes, get annoyed by just about every character that makes an appearance, and hope you'll get to the end soon... I cannot possibly recommend such a "game". It's not actually a game anyway -- I claims to be a "Point&Click", but it's really just a Visual Novel since everything is clearly marked. There where like 3 or so "puzzles" where you had to turn rings into the correct position, and one time I actually had to go back to the previous room and write down the melody it was playing... but other than that, it was just clicking on marked spots and listening to the ever-repeating non-language accompanying the boring story.