Recent reviews by flitterish

I have a little experience painting miniatures, and this simulates those techniques pretty well -- you can do washes for shading and dry-brushing. Wet blending is harder, but you can get similar effects if you go into free mode. It allows a really high degree of customization for such a simple tool. Unlike with actual miniatures, you can also hide parts of the mini to make it easier to paint the remaining parts, nice for if you want to isolate a small detail with another piece partially blocking it.

The paints are limited (I gather that you can open access to new paints in the full game, so presumably there's a more complete palette for people who are playing actively) so there is only one light emitting color, but that can be shaded pretty well by blending into other colors, and likewise the lack of steel or silver can be somewhat remedied by color blending, though it would be nice to have a steel color in the basic set.

One nice thing is that it's possible to get a decent looking custom mini with very little effort: Go into "color components" mode, and paint on whatever base color you like to each sub-component (you can use the hide command to hide elements as you go to make sure you don't leave any little blank bits, since some of the components can be pretty small, or mostly buried inside the model.) Then go into the second wash mode and layer on either black or dark sepia. (The default mask of 50% will do fine for most models.) This will give depth and shadow. Then go into the third dry-brush mode and add a lighter version of the base color for highlights, or two different light colors if you want to blend to another color. This doesn't require any free brushing at all to get a decent look. If something seems too heavy, adjust either the mask or the opacity of the color to make it more subtle.

One flaw is that some of the sub-components are stuck together in illogical ways. For instance, in the first offered mini, all the armor is all one piece, including the horns and the lavish assortment of skull ornaments encrusting various joints, so if you want to paint those in a different color you have to go into manual mode and paint each little bit (I ended up doing a model where I did the skulls in a different color, and also "gilded" some of the little raised details on the armor, a level of detail that would be difficult on an actual 25mm mini, but was merely a bit finicky with zoom and a tiny brush size here.) Some of these details are isolated in some minis, and glommed together in others. So if you want to get exactly the look you want, you're probably going to need to get comfortable with the manual brush as well as the section paint mode. Zooming and panning can get glitchy as well if you're working on close details. I found that hiding all but whatever I was working on made it easier to zoom in, and if the panning got stuck I could zoom out to maximum, pan a bit to center the item I wanted, and then zoom back in and be able to pan again. These flaws are minor; the tool is quite functional.

All in all it's a very satisfying toy, and gives a good example of the kind of detail you can get on your minis if you want to play the full game.

What a shame. This is a pretty tower-defense with decent but grindy and mobile-oriented mechanics (all of the sorts of traps littered into f2p games on mobile platforms, designed to entice you into paying money to speed up gameplay), but with the only way to get them on PC being to rather tediously grind for them. This still would have gotten a thumb's up from me despite the grinding (because it was enjoyable to play through the campaign, and I liked the art and core gameplay loops), and I was sort of slowly grinding my way through the final achievements, when the servers were unceremoniously shut down for this SINGLE PLAYER GAME, which breaks the achievements and makes the gameplay lag.

It was barely excusable to have this game have an online component when the servers still worked, but it is inexcusable for this company to continue to sell an game whose abandonment degrades its performance. It also never got the updates and bug fixes that other platforms got, and the developers ignored the bug reports from Steam. Don't put it onto Steam at all if you don't want to support it here, or stop taking money for it when you discontinue support, please. Without the server requirement and with updates done in parallel with mobile (or even freezing updates here after the major bugs were fixed), this game would have been a good example of a completed and satisfactory tower defense game. Without them, it's a black mark on this developer's record.

This game just keeps getting better. I've had it for years and I keep coming back to it. It offers both building and a progression plot that encourages exploration. You can build quite complicated machines and traps in it. And the developers keep working on it even though they're also working on a sequel.

As an update almost two years from my last review, I'm still playing -- not every day, as I like to play many other games and tend to run in streaks in my gameplay, but I keep wanting to come back and do more and build more. And it's still getting updates! I adore all of the details and love that have gone into this game. I know the modding community is also incredibly active and has added a lot, but other than dabbling very gently in the mods to get an idea of how they work, I've barely scratched the surface, because the vanilla experience still satisfies me, though sometimes I also enjoy the design-only approach of building in the world editor, and then seeing how it looks and flows in-game.

This could have been a lovely game if more effort had been made, but it failed to live up to its vision. The best part of it was the art style and the "Celt-punk" mythology used in the game, a fresh take on things, but it's spoiled by mushy controls, tedious slogging around for overly simple quests, identikit maps, and downright bad sounds.

Pros:

+ Beautiful and often evocative and/or creepy art, with some unique ideas.
+ While there are Celtic fantasy games, this is the first technology-based idea I've seen, and that's creative.
+ Some good music was struggling to get heard in some of the areas.
+ The characters had an interesting basic design, and Ku seemed true to his namesake.
+ The fighting progression was well done.
+ Some fairly creative change-ups on the quest, with new challenges.
+ Imaginative monster/villain design that needed different approaches for different monsters.
+ Easy to figure out what to do in a particular challenge.

Cons:

- Incredibly bad sound effects. Some very common sounds such as walking and fighting are actively obnoxious.
- If you enter a cut scene while walking, you get to hear the obnoxious walking sound effect during the entire scene, because it doesn't stop the character from walking.
- Some of the cut scenes should be more tightly scripted or meaningful. They steal control from the player and can be tedious to wait through.- Tedious quest design, with overly simple puzzles, and some quests which required slogging all the way back through long and empty maps.
- Very little interactivity in most of the maps. So, interesting art but very little to touch or do. Very dull character interaction on most of the NPCs.
- Poor/weird animation in many areas.
- The map designs should be a little more distinctively landmarked; the maps hindered exploration a bit.
- A little bugginess: fighting charges you to an opponent, and it's possible to bug onto an opponent in an area that you can't get down from, like a wall. (Workaround: reload the game; you have to do the fight again but it gets you off the wall.)
- Mushy fighting which isn't very kinetic and it's not always apparent that your actions aren't taking effect.
- Inferior writing. (There are bits that were funny, but sharper writing would have made this much better.)
- Uneven pacing. (The beginning particularly is poorly paced.)
- Short. (Not as much of a con at this quality level, but if the game were improved and had more to do, this would be a con.)

All in all, while it's not outright bad, it's not outright good either -- I find myself unable to recommend it, but it's a shame because I think this could have been a good game with more attention to quality.

This is a beautiful and incredibly charming game that is too short but very sweet, and a good teaser for future games. I might have been disappointed by its brevity if I had backed it on Kickstarter (which I might have, except I had missed the Kickstarter.) It was appealing enough that I actually played the demo, which I almost never do, and the demo charmed me so much that I put it on my wishlist. I feel that I very much got my money's worth, but I also bought it on sale. I do hope that future chapters will be forthcoming. The developers have been busy fixing some issues that are causing lag for some players (it played smoothly on my own system) and will allow long animations to be skipped -- these fixes will make the hoped-for future chapters even better.

The puzzles are on the simple side for the most part, but with a few where it's hard to figure out what to do at all. Even with the simplicity, I think there are some very creative setups and uses of sound, color, and sequencing that make them very satisfying. However, the use of color could be insurmountable for some players, given the lack of accessibility workarounds. I was able to finish the entire game in a few hours while zonked out with the flu and napping occasionally, as evidence of how the puzzles are more like way-points in an adventure than anything convoluted or fiendish.

The emotional tone of the game is wonderful, with the mannerisms and expressions of the children making it easy to care about them. The conflict is all about searching, without combat, which is refreshing. All in all it's very enjoyable to play, but I would recommend buying it on sale so you don't feel like you should have gotten a few more hours of gameplay.

Pros:
+ Gorgeous art style, including the movement styles of the animation.
+ No cumbersome inventory management or hunting for the exact pixel.
+ Creative use of simple thematic building blocks.
+ Expressive and emotional without being cloying; it's very pleasing to play.

Cons:
- It's very short; it feels more like an introduction or first chapter than a full game, and it ends on a cliffhanger.
- Rather obtuse UI can sometimes be frustrating.
- No accessibility options for color blind players. (And possibly some sound-only puzzles without visual cues? It's been a while since I did those puzzles.)

Tower Defense meets RPG, and the towers are actually characters. I love how the story supports the mechanics, and the variety of personalities and their interactions. The art is colorful and stylized but the story is surprisingly deep. While there is not much branching, there's replay value in going through the battles at higher difficulties (as the monsters change, not just tougher monsters), Hero mode where you don't recruit additional soldiers (quite a challenge on some maps), and the extended replay which adds funny journal entries and weapon upgrades. I've only scratched the surface of that last so far, but that's where I'm going next.

"Where did the evening go?" This game actually plays out pretty quickly, in fairly bite-sized chunks of a planet or a map at a time, but it has a "you can't explore just one" addictive nature that keeps me restarting and playing. I've played it a bunch on GOG and liked it so much I got it again on Steam.