Recent reviews by Ashrubel

Short but sweet.
A Fine little game. took me about 80 minutes to finish base game, and there appears some kind of trophy-hunt mode, but I think I'm satisfied.

10/10 for what it cost.

Its an Isometric ARPG Diablo clone that plays like a darker Torchlight, with the whole companion/pet system.

There aren't really very many builds that turn out to be viable late-game, and experimentation beyond putting points where you obviously are expected to is generally punished by a bossfight that soft-locks you until you respec and actually behave the way the game expects you to.

I have honestly tried so many times to get into a playthru of this game, and end up doing the same thing I did the last time in the same way, and just burn out in less than 5 hours.

It is truly tedious and unengaging on almost every level.

The dialogue is occasionally funny.
The sequel, and therefore the Directors Cut, do not add that much to the experience, and the feel is essentially the same.

Soft pass unless you get this on steep discount and are truly desperate for something to click on and see stuff happen.

Its an Isometric ARPG Diablo clone that plays like a darker Torchlight, with the whole companion/pet system.

There aren't really very many builds that turn out to be viable late-game, and experimentation beyond putting points where you obviously are expected to is generally punished by a bossfight that soft-locks you until you respec and actually behave the way the game expects you to.

I have honestly tried so many times to get into a playthru of this game, and end up doing the same thing I did the last time in the same way, and just burn out in less than 5 hours.

It is truly tedious and unengaging on almost every level.

The dialogue is occasionally funny.
The sequel, and therefore the Directors Cut, do not add that much to the experience, and the feel is essentially the same.

Soft pass unless you get this on steep discount and are truly desperate for something to click on and see stuff happen.

Its an Isometric ARPG Diablo clone that plays like a darker Torchlight, with the whole companion/pet system.

There aren't really very many builds that turn out to be viable late-game, and experimentation beyond putting points where you obviously are expected to is generally punished by a bossfight that soft-locks you until you respec and actually behave the way the game expects you to.

I have honestly tried so many times to get into a playthru of this game, and end up doing the same thing I did the last time in the same way, and just burn out in less than 5 hours.

It is truly tedious and unengaging on almost every level.

The dialogue is occasionally funny.
The sequel, and therefore the Directors Cut, do not add that much to the experience, and the feel is essentially the same.

Soft pass unless you get this on steep discount and are truly desperate for something to click on and see stuff happen.

This is a pretty decent Isometric RPG built around the Cyberpunky Shadowrun universe.

There are plenty of campaigns, and character building is both fun and engaging.

For how old this is, it plays well, and holds up.

Good writing. Good polish. Fun stuff.


If you are here, you likely know what you are looking at. All I can say is that for the money you will likely spend on this, the hours contained herein are well worth the value.

There is a plethora of mods out there to customize your game, and I don't think there is really anything to complain about in this.

This is a pretty decent Isometric RPG built around the Cyberpunky Shadowrun universe.

There are plenty of campaigns, and character building is both fun and engaging.

For how old this is, it plays well, and holds up.

Good writing. Good polish. Fun stuff.


If you are here, you likely know what you are looking at. All I can say is that for the money you will likely spend on this, the hours contained herein are well worth the value.

There is a plethora of mods out there to customize your game, and I don't think there is really anything to complain about in this.

I kinda understand what they were going for here, and can sort of see what the vision was...

This is a boiled-down Diablo with souls-like combat. 90% of your combats will be white-knuckle dodge-fests, and the other 10% will be trivial, because you out-gear your target by so much.

This plays a lot like Path of Exile 2 in terms of how terrible combat feels, and how often you get donked over by random bull-shot you have no control over.

The only thing this game does that none of those did was punctuate your combat with Resource Gathering, refining, and Base-building.
You will be smashing rocks and chopping trees to get the stuff you need to actually go play the game.

Generally, the expectation is that the tedium of resource gathering is rewarded with engaging gameplay, but here it is merely rewarded with more tedium.

You will never feel like you are properly equipped to engage enemies at any point...
Having Co-Op players with you only means you need more crap in chests to equip your buddies.
Having PVP-ers means your chests will sometimes get mugged, and you will sometimes get mogged while trying to slay a boss.

There is nothing here worth the effort, and the tedious and monotonous grind just never feels like it pays off, because any real progression you make in climbing the crafting tree is only rewarded with a taller tree to climb next time. And bigger monkeys trying to kick you off said tree.

The day/night cycle just means you will end up waiting in your base 50% of the time, and occasionally your resource gathering will be abruptly ended by the searing pain of being cooked in the sun.

There is a system where you need to feed on enemies to refill your meter that refills your other meters. I guess that's neat?
On top of that, enemies all have like a... percentage... of how strong their blood is, and the higher that number is, the better passive bonuses you get to your stats.. but its rather random and very temporary, so you will end up having to hunt down a high-percentage enemy to replace your waning buffs, as they expire both with time, and with damage you take that needs to be regenerated.

Between the sun and the blood-buffs, your expeditions into new territories will be time-gated and short-lived, strongly limiting how much you can actually get done in any given session.

Again. I see the vision... but the vision is blurry, here.
The actually enjoyable bits are hindered and held back by all the tedious nonsense that you have to manage in between fighting bosses.

Overall I didn't really enjoy my time here, and just wanted to be doing something else 95% of the experience.

So.. my suggestion is to do something else.

I don't really know what to say here.
If you're here, then you probably have a pretty good idea what you're getting into.

This is one of the most complete, and fully realized isometric RPG's in existence.
It is truly a wonder and amazement at how deep and complex this game is, and continues to become.

Just buy it. You will either absolutely hate this, or you will end up with hundreds of hours dumped into it.

There's some good bones, here, If I'm gonna be honest.

I am quite interested in how this might progress with time, but as it sits, it's a bit buggy, hard to figure out how to build and upgrade some stuff, and has an obtuse and archaic-feeling UI for most crafting and building.

The core premise is fine, and seems to be a clever, if not unoriginal, take on the genre.

Acquiring materials is pretty intuitive, and boring as hell. I have come to accept that 50% of my effort in games like this will go to smashing rocks and chopping trees, but at some point I have to get a payoff for all the tedium...
This game rewards you with more tedium.

Core breakdown:
Get stuff. Build Stuff. Defend against nightly waves of monsters. Repair stuff. Do it again.

There are skills. There are engrams. You've probably played this game nine times by now.

The actual process of defending yourself from the hordes of enemies is gonna go one of two ways:
1: You constructed sufficient walls to protect yourself and traps to passively kill anything that tries to smack the wall, and will be waiting out the siege for about 10 minutes... maybe dealing with occasional zombie manta ray bird thing that flies over your wall.
2: You were mistaken in your estimation of how effective your walls, wall-placement, or trap durability was, and you will die horribly.

There is no gripping, "Just barely made it through that one" balance to be had here. If the zombies get to you, they are gonna get there en-force, and you will be overwhelmed quickly.

If you actually fight a zombie in the siege, and survive the process, then you made a conscious decision to try and fight that zombie. (ie. you opened your gate because you bored).


Overall, I think the game is a good start, and can't really say anything too terribly bad about it.
It's just not all that exciting, and after about 5 hours, I really have no desire to do whatever it wants me to do next.

*shrug*
Get it on sale and try it out. You'll probably enjoy some portion of it, I guess.

This is about as basic as it gets for a Survival Crafting game.

Char. Customization is pretty decent, and models are okay.
Crafting is slow, tedious, and brain-meltingly boring.

There is very little content here, and it feels like a "Proof of Concept" more than an actual game.

I applaud the dev for making the effort they have, and achieving what they have, but this is not a playable experience that is worth anyone's time or effort.

Enemies are pretty basic and their animations are extremely basic.
The vast majority of bugs are UI related, like not having a cursor when you open up the crafting menu 50% of the time, making you have to close it and open it again... or items getting dropped when you try to move them, and not being able to find them on the ground to pick them up.

I thought losing a stack of ingots would be problematic, but to be honest, I was swimming in them before too long.
Losing my 5 rifle rounds? Much bigger issue. Those 5 bullets took almost 30 minutes to craft!

Pass on this for now. If I could give it a neutral rating I would, but as it stands, it gets a "no" from me, dog.