FurthestFlung

After 7 years, the only thing that has really changed in this series are the graphics. The game is still clinging to the pretense that it is somehow "old school", as some sort of facade to say that it, unlike, presumably, modern AAA gaming, is not about graphics, but about deep gameplay. This is just flat false - it's exactly that: A game with the prettiest graphics the developers can afford, and the simplest, most dumbed-down gameplay they can muster. "Enjoy" an "epic tale" consisting of just a few pages of plot that have basically nothing to do with your character, who is supposed to be the same character from the first game, in spite of it being impossible to be female in the first game, (for no adequately described reason,) but possible from the second onwards, much less what other differences actually exist between games. As I said in reviews of the previous games - play the demo first. There is essentially nothing in the demo that isn't in the rest of the game, barring the graphics of some of the monsters, because the game doesn't add anything as you go along. All monsters share the same AI - they just walk straight at you until they reach attack range, then stand still and fire. The only difference is in the value for their HP or Attack Bonus, along with occasionally an enemy that (gasp!) attacks from more than one tile away, but is otherwise identical. This is a game that is propped up by the elitism of people who want to claim they are "Old School" gamers in spite of apparently not recognizing what the term means, and want to dismiss all of the overwhelming criticism of the series as somehow coming from "teenagers" who "play Diablo". Even the game's own advertising tries to make itself seem grand by denigrating Diablo. I hate to break this to you kids, but as much as I hate Diablo too, this game still is even more dumbed-down than that. This is a game that has less choices, less enemy AI, less character builds, less of everything than even Diablo, which is really saying something. Go play real old-school games (they sell them all over the place on things like Steam or GoG,) like Ultima, Wizardry, or X-Com, or much better old-school-style games like Avernum or Xenonauts, instead.

This is a game with an intriguing premise that you can shape your own personalized hero by playing through the generations of characters, aided by a dating-sim-mini-game, and selecting out the heroines who will become your final hero's (great-great-great-grand)mother. The story is basically dead-set upon tick every RPG cliche it could off the checklist, and features a generic war-of-the-light-versus-dark story, but makes up for it with colorful characters. Oftentimes characters more scantily clad in their colorful-but-threadbare outfits than may necessarily be comfortable, but at least the dialogue did its job of entertaining me as I played through it. If it was just an average RPG with the same story and gimmicks, I would have been happy to give this game an above-average rating. The problem is that the game falls flat on its face when it comes to the actual "game" part of the game. I have never seen so much need for an auto-battle feature before in my life. The auto-battle exists (barely), but is so mind-numbingly stupid that you generally have to go a third of the game backwards to find opponents you can auto-grind against, but it's still far superior to having to spend the hundreds of hours it takes to beat the game gaining XP the normal way. Grinding is excruciating and necessary. On Hard, bosses will kill your characters in one hit, no matter even if you spent every single character point on NOTHING but getting more hit points. (And I did, for every character, because there's little point in anything else.) When they use their super-moves, (which they can do at will,) they often get the "overkill" bonus for dealing triple the HP of my characters in damage. Survival is a matter of packing max recovery items and spreading out so that only one character dies at a time. Because every combo you can do has to be not just pre-planned before battle, but pre-equipped and oftentimes grinded for, itself, the theoretically tactical grid-based combat basically always comes down to getting into the exact same formations, using the exact same combos you've metered out exactly to take advantage of the exact amount of AP you can spend. There is nothing in the game to make any one given battle any seriously different from another, besides maybe the bosses, but even every boss starts looking the same after a while. (In fact, at the end, they just outright keep reusing the same boss.) Hence, auto-battling just to keep from drooling boredom. (And because the auto-battle is awful, you have to grind more on auto-battle to survive auto-battling.) When "playing" the game usually entails just putting a weight on the button to walk upwards, and then leaving for a while so that auto-battle auto-levels your characters, just so I can do something else while "playing" the game, it's a problem. Worst of all, there's basically no way to get the good ending without using a guide, and if you screw up anything (and the game gives you basically no hints as to how you're screwing yourself over, or even where to look,) you have to start the WHOLE GAME OVER TO TRY AGAIN. That's right, 500 hours down the drain. When you DO finally beat the game, the game says, "Congrats, now onto the TRUE FINAL BOSS, which incidentally, is level 700. What, you're only level 100? Here's a new place to grind forever in, and all your old characters back, back at level 20. No, of course there's no experience sharing. Grind harder, ****." I estimate "beating" this game will take roughly 1,000 hours, and I'm not even exaggerating. That's roughly where I figured I was just completely not having fun anymore, and abandoned the game for good. Oh, but as a bonus, they include "free DLC" that they originally charged people for, which basically includes just plain BUYING exp. Yeah, that's right, their business model was to make a game where you grind forever, and then sell people exp. In summary, the story and style of the game may or may not be to your taste, but the actual mechanics of the game get downright masochistic. When a game is best played by having a book to read to get you through the boring parts, (read: 99.999% of the game,) then it's not exactly something I can in good conscious recommend to any but the most rabid of JRPG dating-sim fans.

While this is a great game in concept, in implementation, it stumbles. The procedural game setup can always be a double-edged sword, since, even if you "never get the same layout twice" by randomizing the stages, if all the stages just consist of the same 6 things over and over, then if you've seen one, you've really seen it all. Symphony has not just too few enemies to stay entertaining, it has the same small number of enemies flying in the same small number of patterns over and over again. In fact, there are so few patterns of enemy flight paths that you frequently find ships overlapping! There is another major problem in the game, in that, apparently fearing that they might make some songs too hard or others too easy, they decided to give the player infinite lives, a ship so huge you can't possibly dodge anything, but make it take tons of hits and regenerate with every enemy killed (including by ramming your ship into it), so there's basically no skill to the game at all, you just play by buying up more expensive weapons for your ship to be able to handle higher levels that give you more cash to upgrade your weapons enough to handle the next highest level. In general, I think how much you like this game depends on how much you've played it. It's fun for the first few hours, but notably, only 0.5% of players ever actually played the game for 12 hours. That, right there, shows exactly the problem in the game. It just doesn't have enough variety to keep people coming back past playing their favorite 20 songs or so.

The Gust games have become a true favorite of mine, and Atelier Rorona is one of my absolute favorites among all RPGs for combining a fun and engaging alchemy system to play with while flooding the world with lovable and humorous characters. The Atelier games are, at their core, probably more aimed at a female crowd than most RPGs, (and Rorona isn't just a female lead, she even wears pink!) and it's obvious that not everyone seems to care for trying something different, but if you have ever enjoyed a game's crafting system for its own sake rather than just to get something out of it, then this game is built specifically to cater to the player who enjoys building more than smashing things. (As well as humorous vignettes about pies that come to life and attack their creator afterwards.) Overall, there are few flaws with this game, (It does become annoying to try to get all the endings, since you have to go back a whole third of the game to try to unqualify yourself for some of the endings to see the endings that have lower priority.) but I can happily call it one of the most engaging games I've ever played, and something that any serious RPG player should try, just to experience something different. In many cases, most of the negative reviews I see for this game are based simply upon its difference, and it's a shame to see it that way. Rorona and Gust in general have a lot to teach the RPG community, and it's a pity that the game isn't approached with a willingness to try something a little different.

A puzzle-RPG mash-up, it basically performs exactly like it says on the tin. Ultimately, the game multitasks too much to let you enjoy any one element to its fullest. Maybe I'm just someone who likes to focus upon one goal to the exclusion of all else too much to get the most of the game, but a major stumbling block for enjoying the game is that, in order to clear the puzzle segments that give you the power to do anything in the RPG segment of the game, you have to minimize the combat, and focus upon finding those color matches. Since you need at least four gems cleared to do anything, there's a heavy emphasis on getting four-gem combos and passing on three-gem combos until you can get a better match. This presents a real problem in the RPG section of the game, as you will often find yourself surprised to learn you're suddenly at half health and poisoned and without the dodge bar full and about to get eaten, only to flick back and mash a bunch of attacks out to wipe the floor with the enemies. Basically, the RPG and Puzzle elements of the game seem like they are at war with one another, rather than a cohesive whole. To get the award for doing a mission well, you have to both get a good time and a good score. Unlike normal puzzle games, this means you aren't trying to get great combos or huge chains going. In fact, the game kind of punishes you for doing well in the puzzle section by largely wasting what you get. Instead, you're just doing puzzles to go back to the RPG section and throw more fireballs. There are also some "hard" fights (especially the optional ones) that generally require some grinding to be able to stand a chance against, and can even sometimes just outright one hit kill your character. I'm an RPG veteran, but even I feel that it's sometimes cheap to just deny players the chance to use the mechanics in front of them to their fullest effect just because you don't have enough DEF+ attributes assigned. Winning these fights requires either grinding, getting lucky chains while button-mashing, or playing with your eye almost entirely upon the RPG section, rather than the puzzle section, avoiding clearing gems until you actually need them. It's a frustrating experience to feel like the game is hamstringing you from enjoying what is really the main mechanic of the game. The sentiment of the game seems to be that if you enjoy busting gems for their own sake, you might as well go back to playing Yoshi's Cookie or Bejewelled. What the game really needs is to have a way to let focusing upon the puzzle part not punish the player for not paying attention to the RPG parts. Puzzle Pirates does a much better job of making the personal puzzle elements not conflict with the overall effort of the crew. Making the game have a minute of puzzle time followed by a "turn" of the RPG, where the other element of the game is paused while you focus on the part you are playing. With that said, this is far from a bad game. It's definitely a "light" RPG that seems more focused upon the puzzle crowd than the hardcore RPG crowd, so it may be worth letting those casual gamers you know have a try at the game. The puzzle game is simple and easy to pick up, and so is the RPG element, that largely consists of just clicking an enemy, and clicking your summon creature to throw attacks out. However, I'm not entirely sure casual gamers will be able to handle the sort of multitasking that annoyed even a more hardcore gamer.

It's $10 for a 2-hour game. The fundamental flaw with this game is that the developers were simply scared to let players have any freedom to explore or experiment. Which is to say that the whole premise is flawed. A Portal wannabe, this game lacks any of Portal's fun, both in the sense that I really, truly missed GLaDoS making the game hilarious as well as giving the game any sort of context for what happens, as well as in the sense that simply pushing and pulling blocks isn't nearly as fun as running through a perpetual portal tunnel. Even if Portal 1 constrained you to one solution just to teach you a new trick with the portal gun, you could still USE the portal gun wherever. The gloves in this game only do one specific thing on the handful of blocks specifically given to you in specific areas for you to accomplish your specified mandatory puzzle time. When all you have are two to five blocks to push or pull, and you know that EVERY one of those blocks will be used, all the puzzle solutions become obvious. Even a few red herring blocks would have been welcome. What the game could have really used, however, would have been freer-floating blocks, and puzzles that actually use the character's relative position in some interesting physics puzzles (like Portal did) so everything wasn't just so scripted. As a result, the developers seem to have quickly found out that they painted themselves into a corner, and couldn't keep coming up with new puzzles using the same block types, so they had to keep inventing new arbitrary block types or conditions. First you have color blocks you have to push with other blocks, then it's a ball. Then it's a ball on a slope with timed actions (annoying). Then you have to do everything all over again in the dark (REALLY annoying). Then some blue balls start wrecking the place for no reason (but you don't know if that's supposed to be good or bad for lack of plot). Then they start being suspiciously part of obviously pre-planned puzzles where they don't wreck things and move in set patterns to activate other blocks. Then magnet blocks. Then lasers and lenses. Then they forget the whole "blue balls wreck everything" concept entirely, and there's just rubble everywhere for no reason, even though everything still works. Then they super-charge your gloves at a Lego temple for some reason, and you can start changing the colors of different blocks (which would almost make you have to stop and think were it not for the fact that there are only 1 to 4 blocks you can change at a time, anyway, so there are still too few permutations to make puzzles challenging). Then the game ends in a completely unexpected, anti-climactic, and utterly confusing way because the game has no plot, and dumps you out to the menu screen because the devs couldn't think of anything more to do with their premise. It's funny to see a game so utterly linear seem so utterly aimless. It just leaves me with the feeling that the developers discovered how limiting their game's premise was too late, so they just kept throwing new things at you every 5 minutes hoping that they could milk another 2 or 3 puzzles out of it before you got bored. Plus the devs seem to spend an inordinate amount of time making you sit through cutscenes or walk in tunnels where the Lego structures jiggle in ways that cause them to clip through one another... What this game could have really stood to try to copy would be games like Trine or Fantastic Contraption, where you DON'T have just one arbitrary solution to the puzzle. Fantastic Contraption, especially, rewards coming up with clever new ways to use the same tiny handful of pieces in new ways to solve new problems, or even to just go back and solve the old puzzles in a new way. When you complete qube, which only took about 2 hours, you never really want to go back, because there's no reason to do so.

Of the casual puzzle games I've played on Steam, this is probably the one I keep coming back to for a 15-minute break most often. It's simple in design, and can sometimes be difficult to really see the full effects **** "push", or player action, several moves ahead, which is exactly what such a game needs to do in order to stay interesting as a strategic challenge. Unfortunately, puzzle mode aside, much of the challenge of the game comes from either having to make quick moves (in arcade) or make matches (called blooms) in incredibly low numbers of moves, and forces you to rely upon the unpredictable dumb luck of having the game just plop tiles down in convenient locations for making more easy matches. Especially since late-campaign or arcade mode almost entirely depend upon being able to make matches with special blocks you can't place yourself, this tends to sap most of the strategy out of the game, as you're largely just waiting for the game to give you the pieces you need to win, and it becomes quite frustrating when the game randomly decides not to give you any. As a puzzle game, it needs to rely more upon strategy and less upon luck to really shine. I'm supposed to feel clever for doing well, not lucky, and when I do badly, I'm supposed to learn what I did wrong so I can improve for next time. This just makes it feel like a slot machine you just keep cranking the handle until you get lucky.

Many puzzle games advertise themselves as some variation of "simple but addictive", but they're really not kidding when they call this game "simple". No blocks drop, no randomization takes place, and the only failure condition is running out of time, which is restored with combos... in Survival Mode. Endless Mode's name does not lie there is literally no lose condition at all besides quitting the game. Bizarrely, even this mode has a scoreboard, in spite of the fact that you can literally play a single round of the game for weeks on end, taking breaks whenever you feel like it. The only thing it measures is how long you are willing to go before just giving in and quitting. It's not a terrible game by any measure, but it just doesn't add anything to an already tired formula of match-whatever games to make itself stand out. It's ultra-low-pressure casualness also led to it not really addicting me, for that matter. You see everything this game has to offer in the first 10 minutes, and it's just the same chains from there on out.

As a Dwarf Fortress player, I really, really want to like this game. It promises to be Dwarf Fortress without the horrible interface. It's... just not, however. It does have a better interface, mostly. You actually just set how much food you want produced at all times, and townies will butcher the cows on their own to fulfill your quotas that's a solid improvement, at least. However, the problem comes with the whole "goal of the game" thing. Dwarf Fortress just lets you do whatever, and is robust enough **** to make doing whatever crazy thing that comes to mind actually rich and enjoyable. Towns, however, lets you build your town's most basic functions in just a few minutes, then tells you to mine down for the rest, where you encounter the dungeons that are the "real" part of the game. To clear these dungeons, you need heroes, which are beyond your control. Basically, you just run an inn for the heroes who do all the game for you while you just wait for them to finish mopping up. Then your townies run in and get eaten by monsters because you can't tell them not to pick up shiny items the monsters drop, much like Dwarf Fortress's notorious mob rushes for the socks of dead goblins years ago. Heroes and townies drop like flies at the lower levels, but there's nothing you can really do about any of that, as combat is nothing but dumb luck against monsters that are just ever-increasing numbers, and nobody listens to your orders when it comes to monsters, anyway. Basically, this game is just Dwarf Fortress without the attention to realism, and five years of development behind, but with a better interface. That, ALONE, would still make it a recommendable game, except that you quite honestly have nothing to DO during all the time you spend "playing" the game, but watch the ant farm run itself. The only times you are forced to act are when caravans come or sieges come and sieges are a massive pain because of interface problems, at that. The only thing you can do in this game is build more of your town, and even that is ironically best done down in the dungeons, repurposing the old rooms rather than building new ones. There's the potential for a brilliant game, if it could just solve some of Dwarf Fortress's old problems, and actually set out to create some new territory of worth to fill, but the pathway from here to there is a loooong one, indeed.

The previous iteration of this game was described as "a turn-based game with none of the depth such a game requires," and since then, all that's really changed was the graphics. In spite of being turn-based, all I can really compare it to is Diablo, but with none of the pacing. Even without being turn-based, it's just a monotonous crawl of walking-by-clicking from place to place followed by 3 seconds of combat consisting entirely of spamming clicks on an enemy, followed by having to camp to restore HP or MP. Worse, it might be a trip back to town followed by an awfully long walk back Diablo had town portals for a reason. The only thing keeping you from realizing how small the world really is is how long it takes you to walk anywhere, and you're actively discouraged from exploring by just how utterly barren and empty the gameworld truly is. Yes, you can go off the beaten path, but all you'll find is a couple more monsters that are exactly the same as the monsters ON the beaten path, and a barrel that MAYBE has items in it, exactly the same as is on the beaten path. A better game would have rewarded your exploration to make it feel worthwhile. Also like Diablo is the fact that every monster is just a different name on the same old monster. Every monster has the same dumb-as-bricks AI of running straight at you, then punching. No elemental weakness to exploit, no tricks, no variety, just the same monster with more HPs and slightly higher damage. It's the hollow drudgery of a procedural Roguelike random dungeon without the expansiveness of one. Or the interesting monsters of a Roguelike. Or the clever tricks of a Roguelike that makes the game feel exciting. Or any excitement at all. It wants to be a Roguelike (actually, it wants to be a "Golden Age" RPG, but doesn't come close,) on some level, but doesn't seem to understand what makes those games fun... and Roguelike games are generally available for free, while you have to pay for the pain of playing this one. Go play free Roguelikes such as NetHack or Elona, instead, or play Dungeons of Dreadmore for a similar price. They're much more expansive games with far more character variety and gameplay to explore.

Anyone who wants to build a Visual Novel could stand to take cues from this game. Its "visual" elements are stylish and flow well for each part of the game you are exploring, building up the mood appropriately, and mood is everything in this story. The "novel" part is actually quite novel, as the game simply hands you a disorganized set of clues, and tells you to figure out the story for yourself. It's quite engaging, as you start out for the first 15 minutes of the game just scratching your head, trying to keep all these names straight, and not really having a clue what's important at all, but having a **** feeling that it will all be worth it when you can jam some of those pieces together. When you do, it's a rather haunting story that all crashes down around you at once. That said, it's also a game I felt was somewhat short, and left far too many mysteries I rather wish that it were longer, and padded out with more dialogue that let you get a better sense of what life was like on the ship before it all came tumbling down. The story certainly doesn't really leave much room for a sequel, with it's multiple endings and destroyed setting. However, there are several reviews of this game calling it "too long" for reasons I don't quite grasp, so I guess that's a matter of perspective. I would think that anyone really trying to enjoy this little mystery would honestly like to have more mystery to have uncovered, and the "too long" people were basically people who wouldn't have been satisfied by this game at any length, however. Ultimately, it seems like the real decider on whether you will like this game or not depends entirely on whether you have a positive or a negative reaction to the words "Visual Novel" as a genre in the first place most people who dislike this game dislike the entire genre, and there's just no way a mystery will satisfy someone who isn't a mystery fan.

This game is fun and light strategic gameplay, but lacks in the "balance" department, and ultimately winds up having too little actual depth in its gameplay to keep it going for too long. Fundamentally, this is a game of real-time Battleship. You seek out enemy units that dart about the map, and try to destroy them before they can destroy you. Unfortunately, by the late game, you get range and area-of-effect boosting powers that ultimately wind up meaning that it's easier to just progressively saturation-bomb the map rather than actually hunt for the enemy. It's a fun game while it lasts, but it ultimately has a definite lifespan where you can definitively say that you've experienced everything this game has to offer. If there were just more mechanics to give the game more depth, it could have been more deeply satisfying for a greater period of time. Story-wise, the game is also fun and wacky, but the lack of more than one character expression in the Visual Novel-style interludes ultimately undercuts the enjoyment. On the whole, I'm just left wishing there was more to enjoy which does say that there was something there to enjoy, but that you're left feeling you only got a taste of something more that's ultimately denied to you.

Let's not mince words: This game is a purebred dungeon grinder at its heart. There is some fun in exploration to be had, but this game revolves almost entirely around a few tense minutes of character building, followed by hours of stomping on random monsters for the EXP. Love it or hate it, this game is all about grinding monsters into a thin gruel of EXP for more levels and character points. As a DS game, this can fortunately be a blessing in the right circumstances. You can design your characters at a time when you can spend all your focus upon them, but then you play the grinding sections while waiting in line at the mall or otherwise just need a simple distraction for a few minutes or a few hours. Still, this is a game where you build your characters around using the same two or three skills over and over again, and then mash those skills out constantly to trudge forward this isn't a game that relies on a lot of higher brain power to get through, and it can feel like advancing through the game is best accomplished by just taping the "confirm" button down while throwing your characters into a loop with the auto-walking feature. Even if you wanted to have different strategies to fight many bosses, you really can't, since your characters are forced into being min/maxed to doing just a couple things very well at the exclusion of everything else. Doing those anything elses requires the Herculean and ultimately rather thankless task of building and grinding up another character (or de-leveling an existing one) to do that new thing you wanted, and it's oftentimes just too painful to even consider. I'm just ultimately not the sort of player who really wants that kind of grind, so I can't be satisfied, but anyone who, for whatever reason, does like hours upon hours of grinding will certainly find everything they could ever ask for in a game like this.

To give a short description, this game feels like Candyland IN SPAAAACE! Fundamentally, this game feels like it was only half-built, and all the parts that should have been actual gameplay that made the game fun were replaced with completely arbitrary dice rolls. Games are short to the point of feeling abrupt and unfulfilling when you complete them, but the reason why is obvious: Once you have any halfway-decent equipment, all challenge to the game is over. Basically, the game is won or lost in the first sector, and you'll be restarting the game 10 times for every 1 time you get past the second sector. It's a game you don't so much play as have happen to you. You can screw up the game, definitely, but you can't win it through any of your own power you just have to keep restarting until the game lets you get lucky and suddenly be handed powerful weapons that let you beat the game easily, and from then on, it's just a matter of not screwing up what you have. I just wish there were more actual GAME in this game to play.

This is far from a bad game, but a game I'd like to like more than I actually did. It promises character customization, but it's really only cosmetic except for the classes you take in-game to give yourself new spells, which is to say that early-game customization is limited to picking your haircut. This game might look like it has dungeon-crawling RPG elements in it, but don't be fooled, this is pretty much pure Visual Novel of the "spreadsheet statistics" variety with a minigame thrown in to check the numbers you've put on your spreadsheet. With that said, the world itself is certainly engaging, and Hanako Games certainly took the time to write in basically every conceivable configuration of paths down a conversation tree that they or fans could think of. A game like this ultimately rests entirely upon its characters and story, and I ultimately found myself enjoying getting to know most (with a few disturbing exceptions) of the quite colorful characters and the world as a whole. The world deserves some special mention, as well at first blush, it's just a Harry Potter ripoff, but the world actually goes deeper than that, and has an old Fairy Tale feel, where the magic isn't whimsical as in Potter (at least, the early books,) but rather the entire concept of the magical creatures has a very dark side to them. Fairies may be beautiful, but they'll also steal your baby away, never to be seen again because of fickle and hardly-explained rules that put you slightly on edge. (As opposed to evil being personified by Death Eaters with a name and face, the "evil" here is more of a nebulous, but ever-present threat.) For someone who likes a darker Grimm Tales version of magic, it's quite intriguing. Ultimately, I'm left wanting more, and that's probably the best argument for any story-based game like this. Unfortunately, I was also left wanting more puzzles in the dungeon minigames, as well. It felt like such a waste to have this huge list of spells I learned in class, and then only have one chance to even use some of the later-game spells.

This is a game worth at least trying out, as it shows you an entirely different way of thinking of the whole notion of the RPG as more of a physics puzzle game based upon a skill tree than any standard dungeon grind. It's impossible to say that this is a wonderful, much less perfect, game, but it also tries to do something so ambitious that I can't help but cheer for it in spite of its many flaws. Those who ding this game for its slowness certainly have a point, and most of it seems to be flaws with Adobe AIR, the game's poorly-chosen engine. However, part of the slowness is also deliberate. It's a deeply psychological game, built around a core of the sense of loneliness and isolation, even from those who should be friends or even family. It was also a deliberate choice that all your "psychic powers" are themed around psychological "defense mechanisms" and coping strategies of the traumatized. "Deliberate" is also probably how best to describe how anyone really getting the most out of this game will play. Unlike so many "tactics" or "strategy" RPGs, this is a game that really asks you to take your time and think through all the consequences several moves in advance, like an overly elaborate game of Chess. In the hardest levels, you win by out-thinking how the predictable AI will move, and skillfully guiding the predators chasing you into blind corners or otherwise trick or trap them. It's a game that will make you genuinely feel clever when you figure out how to succeed. It's also, however, severely buggy especially because of Adobe AIR and some levels can seriously take minutes to even start the mission just because the engine is so inefficient, it can't even load the map. The game has an unforgiving side, as well. Skills bought on the skill tree are permanent, and the game likes to spring surprises on you where suddenly, some skills are disabled, and a build that was powerful before suddenly fails you with no recourse but to reload from much earlier in the game to build an entirely different character.

What's so enjoyable about this game is that, somewhat like the GTA games, it seems to be several games at the same time, and let's you hop from one game to the other at the flick of a button. I'll be first-person dogfighting in a sleek fighter one moment, then, when the last enemy ship is down, dock on my destroyer, and leave the engines idle so I can bring up the maps and play a strategy game pushing my fleets around before going into mercantile management of all my factories, finding what products I have been trouble selling, and considering branching my businesses out into new sectors. Everything you do in this game gives you the sense that you're gaining ground, and opening up the door to a new, and greater accomplishment down the road, and I can play as much a humble backwater merchant or a daring pirate as I want without feeling like I'm missing out on any of the game. This is exactly the sort of open-world gameplay more games should try to emulate.

If you have the slightest interest in this game, definitely play the demo first. I can assure you that there's nothing in this game for you to discover beyond the first 10 or so minutes of play, because it's just a rinse and repeat from there. It calls itself a strategic turn-based game that isn't "dumbed down for the masses" or based upon nothing but repeated clicking... and that's simply a lie. Everything in this game is done through clicking, and combat is a matter of repeatedly clicking on a monster. It's Diablo with none of the depth even that game had, and made to take much, much longer because of how after everything you do, you have to camp for more HP or MP. Or, to put it even more simply, it's a dumbed-down Diablo made even more boring. It claims to be a "return to the Golden Age of RPGs" without any understanding of what made those games any good, and it comes off as slander to those games. The RPG genre is flooded with games much better than this one in any way imaginable, and there are even free games out there, like Elona or NetHack that you could be playing, instead. Don't play this game.