One of the greatest francises in gaming history revived in an awesome manner

Absolutelly astounding

Disclaimer: while I didn't get this game from developer for free, I've won it in a giveaway asking for my honest review in return.

If Steam would allow neutral reviews Juicy realm would get exactly this from me - neutral score. Because the game isn't bad, but at the same time it has absolutelly nothing special going on for it that would make you choose this one over dozens upon dozens of similar games on Steam.

It's a generic rogue-lite with top-down view. It's got nice and unique artstyle - very childish, but maybe it's your thing. You get to choose among 4 characters, with slightly different stats and starting weapon, but choice is rather cosmetic as you change weapons after 1-2 screens. Your enemies are sentient fruits trying to destroy humanity, there's a very basic story behind it which in itself was a funny idea, until developers ran out of original fruits and started coming up with silly enemies like sentient icecream cones, sentient birthday cakes and so on and on - it give you more unique looking enemies, but totally does not fit original narration.

Now to the meat of any roguelike - gameplay. Sadly it's the weakest part of Juicy Realm. Characters move very slow and gameplay is very slow as well, weapons are unimaginative and in most cases only difference is their range or how fast they shoot plus different animation, it's obvious they targeted for gameplay similar to Enter the Gungeon but lacked skills to pull it off. There are not enough unique weapons and your whole run is luck based - you can get best weapon the very first room and will not bother with anything else for the rest of the run. No intresting powerups as well, just generic stuff like "get 5 more HP", or "Your Stamina regenerates faster". If you get lucky runs can be very short - whole game can be completed in 30 minutes and then there is little point in replaying it again. There is no meta-progression of any kind between the runs, you always have almost the same set of rooms with the very same boss at the end and very same generic biomes in the very same order, characters play almost the same so no point playing all of them unless for achievement hunting, only actual fun can be found I guess in screwing around in co-op mode for a while, but I think it will get boring pretty soon as well.

Summarizing - the game is not bad per se, it's quite polished, runs well, looks fine, but it doesn't offer anything special and does not hook you up to stay and play more of it. And with dozens of other rogue-likes avaiable on Steam, many of them really great, there is really no reason to pick up Juicy Realm over them.

Graphics may get dated.
Gameplay may get dated.
UI may get dated.
Writing, story and worldbuilding never gets dated.

And despite old-fashioned gameplay, ugly low-res graphics and irritating UI - it is still and will always be the best video game ever created. Because no game ever got even close to the astonishing level of creating a timeless story, world and lore that Planescape:Torment did.

It's thew love letter to old Harvest Moon Games, probably the best indie ever to get released on Steam :3