akwan_tarot

You can play the action game a bit, but the game overall is too buggy to be merchandisable. Stage select is totally messy and broken. if you hold the button for a second too long when entering the shop, you auto-purchase the item under the default cursor. And other reported issues. And no patch or bug fix. Not even worth the sales price of $2.

The premise of the game, as one inspired by Actraiser, is not bad, as explained by the critic reviews. For the core game play, the game should receive a score of 70 or 80. However, one problem knocks it down by 10 points: the inability to save your progress while inside a platformer stage, coupled with the high difficulty of said stages. So once you start playing a stage, you have to either clear it, or you have to quit the stage and lose all your progress inside the stage. High-difficulty platformers are common these days, but few have no-save stages of this length, which is a gross inconvenience. And then a bug knocks it all the way down to 40 for me. The game sometimes crashes when trying to load the strategy map. When this happens, you do lose all your progress in the platforming stage you just played, be it a stage with hard platforming sections and a tough boss fight, or tricky trials you struggled hard to beat. This has happened too many times for me to recommend this game until they fix this bug.

This is a functional abstract board game for its price, but ultimately the game is a bit slow-paced and too methodological. Many other (unplugged) board games, including abstract ones, are more exciting to play. This game tends to get methodological: you build up your energy income until either your opponent makes a mistake (exposing a tower which you deactivate cheaply, or not having enough energy to defend against your advance) which you exploit, or you hoard up enough energy to do a direct checkmate. (With a 5-high tower which is 5 spaces from the enemy crystal, you can move, build another tower in the space ahead, then it moves, attacks to take out anything blocking its way, and spawn another pawn to attack the enemy crystal and win.) If you care about understanding the game, don't rely on the tutorial, read the rulebook (which should be common sense for serious board game players). The game does a reasonable job of balancing the starting player advantage; in fact, in the one player mode, you play each side one time for every map (any claims that "the AI has an unfair advantage" is misguided).