Py
Julyne
Sorry I had Jolene in the head and had to pass it to someone else.
- Lore / Story : So you're exiled into a purgatory of sorts. And to get out you have to compete in sort of US football matches?? The lore is quite interesting and there is a loooot of it if you really like that.
- Universe: So this is a SuperGiant Game. As expected the art is gorgeous and the music awesome.
- Game mechanics : There is an outside world, but it is of little consequences on the "main" game-play (I'd say the main game-play should be the story/setting, but unfortunately it isn't). So onto the main game-play.
- You field a team of 3 people (each with different abilities) and you can control only one of them at a time. The goal is to either flung yourself with the ball in the enemy pyre or to shoot it in it.
- Doing either of those will score points, the goal being to score enough to quench the opponent pyre. A big difference between the two is that scoring a "touchdown" takes the player out till another score is made.
- You can try to put other characters out by either firing your aura into them or making them come into contact with the aura around you (the ball carrier as no aura)
- You can also do some jumping and pass the ball.
- Character progression : Each character that takes part in a match will gain some XP. That in turns gains you levels that you can use to unlock skills (up to 4 per character).
You also gain trinkets during the course of the game that you can equip on your characters. - Difficulty : The game can be a bit weird and frustrating (hit-boxes feel really messy at times). Some opponents were really though (the IA was way better than me at switching characters) other were a walk in the park. In the grand scheme of thing losing games doesn't really matter (outside of the ending). So...
not that hard I guess? Outside of the fact that your best players tend to leave your team earlier than those you don't use.
I wouldn't want to try it in the highest difficulty though. - Length : Medium length, took me less than 10 hour to complete.
- Conclusion : It's a really weird game. I liked the universe and the art, but the game-play felt rather lackluster. It'd have been better served by something turn based (à la Bloodbowl)
- Lore / Story : You go in the dungeon to fight the big bad evil!
- Game mechanics : You control a bunch of adventurer, in missions, you go from room to room to accomplish your objectives with a party of up to 4 (among 6 available class).
Inside the rooms you can have trap/combats/treasure or a mix of those. Combat is turn based and handled on a square grid.
On your turn, each of your character can move + do a basic attack + optionally use one skill (those are charge based for the whole level). Then the opponent does the same. And bis repetita.
Outside of missions, you can spend money on equipment, acquire new skills/passives and do some more useless stuff (like spend money to heal your characters despite the fact that they're healed to full at the start of each level) - Character progression : Progressions is very basic. You can craft stuff for your characters. They have two slot, and like 14 items to chose from, so no big reflections to have here.
You can acquire skills and levels them independently for each character. Problem is the skill point pool is common. So once you invest a lot in 2 or 3 characters, you have no incentive (and no skill points) to try the others - Difficulty : The game is easy. I think I failed one mission once because I tried to go on a mission where I didn't have the tools to damage the opponents.
- Length : It's rather short (less than 5 hours).
- Conclusion : A decent game, but nothing spectacular. It's worth a few dollars but not much more.
- Lore / Story : Viking like tribes going to war against the bad empire that somehow find it normal to use undead as workforce/fodder. The story isn't really special.
- Game mechanics : At its core it's a very simple turn based strategy game on an hex grid. You play your turn, the opponent does and so on. There are some dialog and an overall map, but there is little game-play here.
The only resource management done inside a map is how you handle mana used by your casters.
Each unit has a bunch of specific traits/capacity, so it's up to you to do your best with that
Each pack of units has a different number units composing them (like trolls go by two, skeleton archers are by pack of twelve) and within a map, units can either be wounded (and fully recover after a rest) or straight up killed (no chance to recover them till the end of the map). Each unit that is killed/wounded in a pack does not contribute to the fighting anymore. - Character progression :
- XP: For your heroes, XP is the main way to progress. Every level unlocks the choice of a perk within its skill tree. And you can't get all of them (levels are capped). For regular units, XP allows a slight stat increase
- Unit upgrade: Your regular units can be upgraded to a new unit type with resource in the overall map (or within a map if you really need it). You can see the whole upgrade tree (it's only 2 or 3 units deeps) beforehand, allowing you to plan your stuff.
Upgrading a unit can really change how it behaves (different weapons/skills). So you have to think a bit beforehand at the start. - Equipment: Each hero / unit can equip between 1 and 3 items that you find during your campaign. There aren't a lot of really good items, so you'll have to pick who gets them.
- Giving traits to units: In the overall map screen you will at some point gain the ability to pay to give some traits to your units to enhance them even more
A weird thing is that some stuff (like traits or merchant to trade the resources you have for those you want) unlock only very late in the game.
- Difficulty : The main difficulties in the game are:
- Fighting against the unknown: One of the biggest difficulty is taking into account the fact that you can uncover a pod of enemy with your last unit to play and trigger a lot of free attacks for the enemy.
While it's not that big of a deal when you have few units, when you have 30+ units, it can be a bit tricky. Invisible units are also a thing that can surprise you if you don't have good detection.
On the same topic, some maps start with a lot of fog of wars (like you don't even see what's surrounding your troops when you deploy them) while for other you already see the layout. A dark map is way harder to plan for making me restart some maps when I put my main force at the wrong place. - Unit balance: Units seem hardly balanced. Because of the hexagonal nature of the game, ranged units are way more powerful than melee ones. Add to that the fact that they don't take a counter attack, opponents units can't retreat against ranged unit and you get yourself a recipe for unbalance. Like my final army had some meat walls, some buffer and a bunch of ranged unit for the DPS.
And because of the way packs work, tanking with big units is way more beneficial than doing it with a lot of small units (they fight at full force a lot longer). - Fear of losing units: Because one unit can be a lot of investment (upgrade + traits + equipment), losing too many units can be quite detrimental to you campaign because you'll have to repay that in full to get the same unit again.
- Blind choices: Sometimes you'll have to chose mission/dialog options almost blindly. Most of them have some fluff that helps you figure out what you ought to get for each choice, but some seems pretty random. And the impact can be big.
The game allows you to have two type of settings for difficulty. One is just the difficulty. The other is that opponent scales with your force (if you're weaker, you get less, if you're stronger you get more).
- Fighting against the unknown: One of the biggest difficulty is taking into account the fact that you can uncover a pod of enemy with your last unit to play and trigger a lot of free attacks for the enemy.
While it's not that big of a deal when you have few units, when you have 30+ units, it can be a bit tricky. Invisible units are also a thing that can surprise you if you don't have good detection.
- Length : It's a fairly long game, the whole campaign took me about 40/45 hours. It's a bit tedious at the end when you have big armies. (but it was easy, so that helped). And there are more campaigns as DLC
- Conclusion : It's a really good strategy game. I quite enjoyed the progression (it really felt like my army was growing stronger) and the combat was challenging enough!
I started with max difficulty and scaling on and got my ass kicked. That demands almost perfect map knowledge and full unit knowledge.
Started again one difficulty lower with no scaling and aside from some restart because of a shitty starting deployment, I handled the whole game without too much save/load. The end game was especially easy.
And to finish one game I’m glad I payed less than 1 € for it:
- Lore / Story : Monster invade your town and you try to defend it I guess?
- UI/UX: A big criticism of the game is that it lacks a lot of information. Like a bunch of stuff does stuff, but you have no way of knowing what exactly. I won't list it in every section below, but it happened a lot.
- Game mechanics : So the main game-play is you advancing in a level and trying to kills monster pack in it. The levels are named "Area X/Area Y/Area..."
First you try to sneakily approach the pack to get a surprise attack. This sometimes gives you nothing (despite succeeding), sometimes the monster do a quick 180 and gets the jump on you.
And then combat. It's pretty weird because the combat system could be interesting. But it has one major pitfall. You're often enticed to do only basic attacks and ignore the rest
You have stamina that get filled by using skills and taking hits. The higher it is, the most penalty you get to your stats. So you just use the normal skill for like half the combat because it doesn't fill it.
Outside of that there is a lot of interaction between skills. Like the effect of some skill increase if the target used a certain type of skill right before. Tons of buff/debuff - Character progression :
- You gain level and that increase some stats I guess?
- You get a lot of crafting materials, but crafting seems to be totally random. Like crafting 3 times the same schematics with the same ingredients gives 3 different stuff???
And crafting seems to be the way to improve your characters (stuff gives passive stats and new skills)
Also the design of what you craft doesn't matter at all (like you can craft 1 sword and 1 hammer, give them both to your archer and he'll keep shooting despite having no bow equipped) - You can spend gold to increase skill level. That seems to increase the effect (how so is not always clear for non offensive skills)
- You can spend building materials to unlock buildings in your town that produce some resources passively
- Difficulty : Didn't seem that hard, just boring
- Length : Gave up after 3 hours, it was boring (and HLTB clocks it at 30 hours so...)
- Conclusion : The visuals are nice (or at least different from the usual), the combat could be nice but is badly implemented and the lack of a good UI makes it a really lackluster game
Vito
Jolene the song? Or did I miss something?
I’ve heard a lot of praise for Pyre, so it’s interesting to see another perspective. It’s not my cup of tea anyways, but still!
Py
Ye the song. I dunno why it often gets stuck in my head :D.
I think part of my deception for Pyre is that I expected a lot (having already played bastion and transistor). But ye real time sport stuff is just not for me I guess.
Sorry I’ve been binging jolene for the past month so to late!
Damn, you foiled my evil scheme!