Reviews - feillyne

It is quite enjoyable despite a few AI and difficulty issues, but it gets boring and repetitive pretty fast. It seems simply too unvaried and monocultural, and it also lacks expansion packs or DLC or any real modding capability (at the moment at least, developers plan to introduce modding support later on).

Gameplay: 8/10
Content: 3/10
Replayability: 6/10
AI/Difficulty: 7/10
Other: okay/okay (Soundtrack, etc)

Overview
This is basically a Terraria clone at the moment. More of an RPG. Almost like Skyrim in 2D. No magic yet, except for alchemy. No multiplayer, no overworld/level randomisation. Combat is difficult, if not downright hard or even brutal. The game overall is quite cool, albeit feels too grindy (for instance weaving does not give new recipes every skill level). (Quite a few bugs right there too, but some of them, like using merchant's items, were fixed in the latest patch. Others such as not being able to finish a quest even after killing the specified target... are still in.) Gaining profession experience and doing quests seems to be fun. There are even some dialogue choices. Books show a tad of penmanship and consequently some promise in them, too, well... apart from typos and other minor issues like that. There seems to be quite a few references to Fallout and Skyrim as well, a bit of humour (the barrel guy). Hmmm. No, to reiterate, haven't encountered any actual magic yet, or at least, the character themself has no magic skills either so not sure if the game deserves its namesake.

Well, the one wish? For the races to be more meaningful. Not quite what RavnosFX mentioned, cosmetic things, but some real, vital things. Such as being able to raid and destroy the "starting" village, some essential consequences to choosing a race at the character creation screen. Different abilities. Something. Well, at least the game itself says nothing about their differences.

Issues:
1. Misc Colors do not show what they change (and there is only one Misc Color 3 option?)
2. Races have no descriptions (quite unlike the races described on the IndieDB page) or any unique or special non-cosmetic characteristics
3. Wolves seem to be OP at the moment, at least so early in the game especially if you skip the tutorial (skipping tutorial also means you don't get any tutorial items, perhaps this should be an advanced start, not simply skipping and losing starting items)
4. No incentive to build a shelter or make a stand (no randomly respawning monsters, nightly zombies etc. wolves/rats only respawn in their original locations)
5. No herding? No building skill?
6. As mentioned earlier, no magic skills yet?
7. Setting up keys sometimes swap the primary and secondary (it also mucks up the skill bar labels), shifted keys sometimes can't be remapped to non-shifted key shortcuts
8. Could planting cones/acorns be done without tilling?
9. Skill experience could be mentioned as skill experience, not simply as experience (it's a little confusing which is which)
(perhaps more issues, this is early access after all, no need to mention everything)

Grossly imbalanced, very hard even on lower difficulty levels, unless you can guess developer's intentions or properly learn the properties of the plague you are dealing out to the unsuspecting victims. Almost a steep learning curve. All of which leads to the main problem: unintuitivity and accidentality of this indie gem. The moderate amount of mutation traits is what seems to be lacking as well. When it comes to pros, Plague Inc. tends to be fluid, engrossing and sports multiplayer, moddability, well-rounded scenario editor and a rather decent amount of content (plague types and scenarios, not the number of genetic traits).

Cons and issues:
- failure by design, fails forced upon you by design, when you fail just because one well-isolated country can't be infected (plague type fail)
- hard even on lower difficulty levels, and very easy to fail especially if you don't follow the "correct" way of spreading the plague around
- way too moderate amount of genetic bonuses
- random mutation, which makes it a pain to strategically control the plague
- ugly pop-up boxes instead of side notifications
- visually lacking, and with so little 2D graphics, it could easily be enhanced more
- everything is locked behind unlockables which makes multiplayer slightly riskier and less enjoyable (excluding co-op)
- no multiple plagues in singleplayer games and scenarios (not a comp stomp, just a scenario with multiple AI plagues in it)

No idea about the price and whether it is fully justified, still, this indie game is quite enjoyable and captivating enough to buy and play.

Quite a lot of fun, if someone ignores incredibly nasty mid-air ball-kicking game mechanics. (As that really should be made easier.)

Pros
+ wheel-burning action
+ lots of battle cars, battle car customisation

Cons
- very few arenas
- very few game settings, for example no match time settings
- no game mechanics/physics settings
- no way to fully customise teams
- only smaller teams (1-4 vs 1-4, or 1v4), no setting to increase the number of battle cars or make it less unfair (instead of just 1v4, there could be 2v4, 3v4 as well)
- "grinding" achievements which should not be there
- battle car customisation is mostly cosmetic, zero impact on the gameplay (both kinds would be more welcome)
- the ball is very hard to manipulate if it is in the air

... and more. ;-)

Some details and other features were also missing, for example in the past it was impossible to play on a randomly selected level, but it has been surprisingly corrected in the latest content update.

This duelling concept is very cool, the gameplay is unfathomably abstract, dynamic and fast-paced, and quite much like action painting.

Would die/dodge & escape/kill again...