From features that are well-fleshed-out but barely worth investing in to inconsistent and shallow worldbuilding to characters who contradict themselves in the span of two sentences, the best word I could ascribe to this game is "schizophrenic". It's an experience designed by committee that fully fails to create an interesting world, a deep story or compelling characters, and everything that isn't looting + shooting is just boring and frustrating.

No matter what you're hoping for, another game does it better.

My disappointment with this game is pretty profound, to be honest.

FixFox is a game that is *almost* good. It has a very interesting core concept for its gameplay, a story that makes it clear its author has thoughts they'd like to share and themes they want to explore, and a world that they spent some amount of time thinking about and detailing for you to explore. It has a fun art style, a cozy world, good music, and colorful characters.

Then, it thoroughly kneecaps itself by being absolutely terrified that the player might get lost. Despite being called a puzzle game, the game has almost no puzzles in it because it is almost always *telling* you the solutions, whether it's in basic gameplay, or giving you objective markers to lead you from place to place by the nose. The game is so afraid that you'll get stuck on a puzzle or won't figure out where to go next that it gives you almost no agency except to push the buttons that make the plot progress. It feels like a tutorial without a real game attached to it.

Not only that, but what puzzles and exploration exist get easier rather than harder, because as you go on the game starts giving you tools to skip them that can be used indefinitely. It speaks volumes of your opinion of your game's basic gameplay loop if skipping it is considered to be a *reward*.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking applies to its actual plot as well. Characters in the plot aren't just telling you what to do, they're also telling you what the plot *means* and what its messages are at almost every juncture, as literally as possible. Characters will have arcs and then essentially tell you to your face what they've learned and how they think they can be better. They will tell you about what happened and what about it was right or wrong, and why, in about the most literal terms possible. The game isn't just afraid of the audience not getting to continue the story, it's also afraid of the audience not *understanding* the story, so instead of letting you think about what it's showing you and why, the game just tells you what to think. Even if in general I don't disagree with what the game says, being constantly told what to think about the game's events leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

And then, the piece de resistance, the ending. The game ends with what is effectively an "it was all a dream" twist where the events of the plot turned out to have been a dream game being played by a kid version of the protagonist, with an implication that maybe *some* parts of it were in some way real, and then it gives you a complete binary choice to determine your ending with nothing else you did in the entire game mattering at all. And then it doesn't even *show* what happens after the choice, even though they went as far as to make separate achievements for picking each "ending".

I'll be frank, this ending made any goodwill that I had for this game shrivel up and die. I genuinely don't even understand why any of it was necessary, that part could've been cut out and replaced with *literally nothing* and the end product would've been improved. The entire last act of the story already felt like budget or time were running out and actual gameplay content was getting thin on the ground (the entire last chapter basically gives up and becomes a full-on walking simulator), but the ending feels like the part where the bottom just falls out of the whole thing.

TL;DR, a game with interesting ideas and good worldbuilding absolutely hamstringed by poor execution and a dogged aversion to giving players agency. Wish I could recommend, but at the end of the day I can't.

Tl;dr, this has all of the frustration of playing a difficult RPG where you have to viciously minmax in order to win even simple encounters, and also all of the frustration of playing an incredibly boring resource management sim.

In more depth, as an avid tabletop roleplayer (and player of Pathfinder), if I played in a campaign run like this game I would consider it one of the worst campaigns I've ever played. The design of the whole game encourages a tense atmosphere where you worry about getting things done in time, main quests all have timers saying when you'll automatically fail them, random Kingdom management events have limits on when they can be done, and then the game actually punishes you for trying to go quickly. Many sidequests for specific chapters of the game become unavailable if you finished the main quest of that chapter too early, for basically no reason. You can miss companion characters because you tried to do what the game was telling you instead of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around in the forest exploring for twelve hours.

The game also incorporates all of the most brutal failures of D&D and Pathfinder (and the d20 rulesystem) with very little self-awareness. In order to maintain proper scaling, many checks throughout the game become punishingly difficult for little to no reason, to the point where in the first twenty hours of the game you can encounter DC 35 checks for the most banal of things. I remember one of my characters passing a DC 25 Arcana check to investigate a mural, and on a SUCCESS all they said was it looked like someone in the mural was casting a spell. Thanks, game, that was obviously really hard. By doing this, the game is robbing you of the feeling of actually getting stronger by leveling up and building your character well - now you have to build your character well to keep your head above water in the most basic of things. Instead of getting the feeling of slowly getting stronger and better at the more mundane tasks in between your challenging ones, even the mundanities keep getting harder just as quickly.

It doesn't help that a lot of D&D and Pathfinder's more problematic elements rear their ugly heads with complete earnest honesty. During the main quest, there are many times where you are obligated to basically commit genocide, because even when it comes to entire cities of monstrous races there are no peaceful options. You will kill them, or you will die. The most mercy you can show is allowing some to run away while you murder all their friends.

If you can get through the first twenty hours of this game without feeling like it's a slog, more power to you. I'll just be sticking to playing my tabletop games with people.

Buggy and broken. Game has lots of known issues, but developers are known for releasing and then never updating products so crashes and softlocks are still all over the place. Even for a LEGO game this one's pretty bad.

Since I can't review the Season Pass (DLC was included separately in bundle), I'll include some comments here. The DLC for this game is pretty shameless and cynical even by LEGO's standards, basically all just ads for different marvel movies and properties. Most of the levels are short and have barely any content, several of them ending abruptly with a limp "story continues elsewhere" to try and hook into other properties.

When it goes on sale, it's one of the best deals you could get.

This is complete garbage. The controls are clunky, the fighting is garbage and the boss fights are wank. Don't play it, don't let your friends play it.

Semi-playable building defense game.

You could honestly find better quality flash games with the same premise. Don't spend money on this.

Some of the humor in this game was funny, but most of it was very painful, or simply references without any actual jokes.

Also, I seriously did not appreciate how many times this game changed the enemy types/terrain so that certain builds would stop working. Rather than offer multiple ways to achieve the same goal, the game simply becomes unplayable if you allocated your skill points to skills that aren't helpful in the current area.

Tl;dr, middle of the road RPG action platformer with cringy humor and a 100% chance to become incredibly frustrating later on.

I did nothing but play this game or sleep for about 27 hours. A+.

Most in-depth and character-filled story I have ever played about jumping rectangles.