Py
Steam deck killing
Was away from home for a long while, so most of this killing was done on steam deck. It was surprisingly way better than what I had expected to play on.
- Summary : I really didn't expect that game to be this good. But god damn, that combat system has everything that I like. And the art is gorgeous. Definitely my discovery of the year.
- Lore / Story : Aliens are invading your time space continuum. Up to you to kick them. And bis repetita in the next continuum (it's a roguelike after all)
- Game mechanics : Two main aspects here: overall progression and combat.
- Overall: You visit 3 planets (+ the boss ship). Each planet is a map with ~ 20 spaces connected to one another. You will have time to visit 9 before the boss. So up to you to make the best path to get the bonus/opponents you wants. There are also some bonus dungeons semi hidden in each map.
- Combat: That's where the meat of the game is.
- First, HP wise, both you and your opponents have 3 stats . Shield (have to be depleted first). Health (can only be depleted after shield is empty). And armor (health damage are reduced by armor)
- Secondly, actions are on a time bar. At the start of each round, you know exactly what your adversary are going to do and when in the round. You then program the actions of each character in accordance to that.
But where it gets good is that you/your adversary crits if either of you hits before its targets hits. And attacks have predetermined crit effects.
Some will just do more damage, other will break more armor, other will stagger opponents giving you the opportunity to make them miss their turn entirely. And some debuff can be applied with a crit.
Stagger are very important, but not entirely OP as each opponent has a stagger counter, which decrease each time they get staggered and prevent further stagger once it reaches 0. It also increases for future attacks if you let an attack go through unimpeded.
So it's up to you to find the proper combination of stagger/damage done/taken to beat every adversary! - Another aspect is that the combat actually takes place on a sort of grid (front row/back row vs front row/back row). And most attacks can only reach the back row if there is nobody in front. Some attacks reach everywhere.
- Character progression : There are 3 main progression factors:
- Level: One of the in-game currency is DNA. You can spend it on all your characters (3 at the start, 5 at the end of a run) to increase their level. They gain HP and unlock abilities.
- Gear: Gears have plenty of variation. Each character has 3 slots (different kind for each character). They can give you debuff on crit, damage increase, more defensive stats, more stagger, quicker actions,...
- Camping: At the start of each planet and every 3 spaces, you get to camp. This will give you the opportunity to give temporary bonus to ally. But mostly to improve relationships between characters. This unlocks stats bonus for the run, combo attacks and in some cases unlocks other characters for future runs
- Difficulty : It is challenging in normal. Team composition is important and I lost some run early on because I didn't think about it. I have for now cleared the normal and hard. Took me a bit to get all the game intricacy, but it seems a bit easier now that I get a lot of it. The game has 6 or 7 difficulty levels, but you get access to the most difficult one only after clearing the previous one. So not there yet
- Length : One run is about 8/10 hours. But you can grind quite a lot if you want to unlock everything.
- Summary : It's old school fire emblem with a bit of modernity. So it's good if you like that.
- Lore / Story : Generic medieval fantasy bad guys wants to do evil thing and you will stop him.
- Game mechanics : Turn based tactics à la Fire Emblem really. Everybody in your team moves/hits, same thing for the adversary. There is a complex advantage/disadvantage mechanics with like 8 damage types and 4 armor types. No specials tho.
- Character progression : Character level up is random stat gain and each character has different chances for each stats.
Each character also has 2 class change (at level 10 and 30) and you get different weapon types/armor/movement/perks depending on the class choice.
Gear progression is a bit dull. You basically have access to 4 type of weapon on each character (crit, power, accuracy, jack of all trades) and you spend token to improve each type independently.
Team wise, you start with a few character and you end up with like 25. However you can only field 14. - Difficulty : Played the game in hardest difficulty. It your familiar with this kind of game, it's not that difficult. There were some spikes however as I had to play a few maps 3/4 times. But most were smooth one shots.
Weirdest part are dodge tanks. Take a bit to get a few character there, then they are untouchable for some chapters, then they can't dodge anymore. - Length : Took me 35 hours to 100% the game. But of that, a good 10ish hours were for the last achievement.
- Remarks : Additional characters you get along the way are actually good. So you will end up dropping some of the early characters. And there is no way to grind for XP, so a dropped character for a few scenarii is dropped forever.
UI is a mess in some places. Inventory management (for consumables) is hellish.
And fuck that one achievement. It requires you to get a character get every stats on level up. So it is entirely RNG. I had to restart the game in easy and put inflated growths to get it...
Into the Breach
51.1 hours, 65 of 70 achievements
Special mention for that game, that I had already played a lot. Never had done the advanced edition, so replayed it a bit more (and now onward to 100% :D )