The reference-laden humor of the game is what makes it stand out, and what makes it worthwhile in itself, and really the main origin of my 9/10 score.
The gameplay is okay. It feels a bit dated for a 2016 title never mind a 2019 rerelease, but it is fun once you figure out how to combine various attach patterns of your own vs the attach patterns of enemies.
There seems to be a bug onThe reference-laden humor of the game is what makes it stand out, and what makes it worthwhile in itself, and really the main origin of my 9/10 score.
The gameplay is okay. It feels a bit dated for a 2016 title never mind a 2019 rerelease, but it is fun once you figure out how to combine various attach patterns of your own vs the attach patterns of enemies.
There seems to be a bug on the Switch version that causes the compass to work backwards (compared to let's plays from the PC version). When you rotate the camera clock-wise, you'd expect the compass needle to move counter-clockwise. Instead it rotates in the same direction, which combines unfavorably with the overworld map issues described below:
Some design weaknesses:
(a) Loading times. Even when played from internal memory, a change of scene takes around 4-5 seconds. As long as the story is flowing, that's barely noticable, but once you have to travel the overworld map it turns the on-map encounters into an annoying chore, since each encounters requires two loading sequences, while the fight usually takes only 10-20 seconds. The map-encounters should have been either cut or optimized for faster loading. (But mostly you can just run away from the encounters, since they are visibible entities on the map.)
(b) Mana/health system. Mana regenerates slowly and health even more so. Potions are on a 30 second cooldown. While this discourages a boring "farm resources, chug potions" playstyle, it encourages idling after each fight to regenerate health and mana, and let the cooldowns expire. At least, recovery and cooldown expiration should be vastly accelerated after leaving combat to avoid this. Again however, the effect is barely noticable for story encounters, and only becomes egregious for the short overworld-map fights.
(c) The ability tree contains a fire ability, that ads a "wall of flame" effect to the evasion move. Sadly it also adds mana consumption and cannot be toggled off, though with better equipment it increasingly becomes less relevant. I have seen similar effects in Saints Row 3/4, where some upgrades could either overly trivialize the combat (invulnerability, infinite ammo, no reloading) or make some tasks hard to impossible (tornado while sprinting in SR4).
(d) Very minor complaint: There is no level-up notification. By the time I even noticed, that the game has given me points to distribute on the ability tree, I already had 16 of them. Possibility caused by portable mode, where the experience bar is barely noticeable.
Though I play the game in portable mode mostly myself, I recommend against it to give the environments a better chance to shine, than what the small builtin screen can provide.… Expand