Excellent game for the first 4-6 hours, but the price tag and genre are contingent on enjoying repeated playthroughs after you "beat the game" the first time. The game is too easy up until the original final boss, and then after that the difficulty reaches the point you'd like it to start at, so that you can learn the harder stuff. Instead, if you die, you have to blow through the whole game again.

The variety between runs is nonexistent; each one feels the same, with the properties of the weapons mattering little. The various mechanics feel underbaked too—the dash is rarely useful past the easy parts of the game. The harder parts require precision, not wild burst movement, and the bosses and minibosses don't feel like they're designed to make the dash relevant. The fact that there are different types of bombs is confusing too, because they all serve the purpose of removing projectiles from the screen the exact same way. They might do damage differently, or sometimes they don't do damage at all, I dunno. It wouldn't have been too hard to have the bombs have vastly different effects, like a temporary shield that circles you, or a bomb that creates a small, moving circle that deletes bullets as it travels, or a bomb that fires a big beam in front of you that slows your movement and only erases bullets in its path (so not ones from the sides).

The fundamental gameplay just doesn't make runs feel meaningfully different, nor does it feel like the decisions you make in the first 80% of the run affect the last 20%. The game's fun until you've beaten the first "final boss", but after that you have to replay weaker sections too much, with too many uninteresting decisions, to get to new stuff.

It's too much like Slay the Spire without adding anything different or compelling enough. It just made me want to play more Slay the Spire. This game is more shallow; the card synergies are a little too obvious and set-in-stone, to the point that too many cards outside of your "build" are useless.

The retro graphics are cool, but they're only cool in screenshots. The game has too much visual noise when you make a decision or go to a new screen. Things like multiple UI elements flashing and popping into existence at the same time, leaving you disoriented and confused about where you should look to find relevant information. In combat, it's often unclear in what order actions will resolve, and then because of some of the aforementioned visual flashiness, it can be hard to track what's even happening on the opponent's turn. In this regard, StS's simplicity is a huge boon—you're never confused about what the enemies just did on their turn, since they aren't teleporting or gaining damage modifiers while they move (since they don't move).

Two things drag this game down: the fact that there’s no baseline way to defeat enemies, and the simplicity of the gameplay.

As you get farther, enemies take up more space, and they get faster and harder to deal with. But you remain unable to deal with them in any way except by using the items that the levels drop. Sometimes, though, the levels don’t give any weapons, and they’re all unwieldy anyway.

The gameplay being as simple as “walk over all the tiles (sometimes twice) to win” is a problem because losing isn’t fun. If you get stuck on a level you’re trying to V rank, failing it gets tiresome quickly because you’re just going to follow the same route you’ve optimized, over and over, until the enemy spawns and pathing AI stop killing you. It doesn’t feel like a puzzle game because the enemies are more of an obstacle than the routing. That’s fine, it doesn’t have to be a pure puzzle game, BUT your methods of dealing with enemies are really poor. So it’s not a great puzzle game, and it’s an even worse combat game.

There's just too much in this game. It's inspired by Slay the Spire, but in StS, enemy actions and YOUR actions are relatively simple, and that's a very good thing, after seeing this game.

After you beat the first "act" in this game, each turn is so bloated and so unsatisfying to play. You aren't playing lots of actions that scale you up like in StS. You're just playing dice for 1-4 damage here and there, mostly. But you have to do this for yourself and your two low-HP, low-impact allies. And each action you look at is actually a die with 6 sides. And you can't easily distinguish between the dice, so you have to inspect each individual one, each turn, to even remember what sides are available, because you have resources to reroll them.

And it doesn't end at reading the dice for all of your and your allies' actions. You also have to read all the dice sides of the enemies. Good luck associating their appearance with their dice—the enemies all look similar. You'll have to read their buffs too.

The other annoying thing is that the game focuses heavily on risking major downsides for power. The artifacts in this game that have no downside are really weak—intentionally. The strong effects come with major downsides that can get you killed. The strongest dice make you risk potentially run-ending downsides on 4/6 of the dice faces; the other two are very positive. The problem is, rolling those positive effects will usually not automatically win your current fight for you, but being stuck with the negative sides CAN end your run. If you get lucky and you can always mitigate the downsides of the bad dice, and you roll well, you'll do well. Get bad luck and you're done. Or you can avoid the risky dice (which you're offered twice, every single time you beat a fight) and gather a bunch of safe, weak effects, which make your fights take forever, so you can keep inspecting each rolled dice, each turn. It's interminable and not very interesting.

The keywords on the dice aren't clear either. The "Enhance" effect, for example, allows you to upgrade a dice face until the end of the turn by a random amount from +1 to +6, as long as the dice being upgraded has "Purification" on it. Well a lot of the time your Enhance dice can't target a dice face even when it has Purification. I have no idea why, and the game doesn't explain it.

To top it off, if you close the game when you're at the rewards screen after a fight, continuing your run will resume the game from the beginning of the fight you just beat. In Slay the Spire, you resume the run from the beginning of the reward screen. The game warns you that this will happen, but it's still awful design. If you have to close the game while thinking through a tough reward decision, or the game crashes, or closes for any other reason, you're going to have to play through the long-ass fight again.

I was a backer for this game. I'll update the review as I play through.

Sea of Stars focuses too much on the spectacle of games (art, music, animation), when it really needed more time on the gameplay and story.

The developers are French Canadian (like me), and it shows in the amateur English writing. The spoken dialogue is often missing commas or other pauses. The characters tend to have the same style of speech too, barring a few eccentricities shoehorned into the dialogue. They have the same sense of humor, they make sarcastic or ironic quips. None of the characters stand out or feel like they have any personality because of this. Another reviewer described it as being a "modern, Internet casual" style of writing, and that perfectly encompasses it. Too many times, characters respond with “??” when they’re confused. It looks like they’re writing on Discord instead of being adventurers in a magic world.

There's too much dialogue for every little thing. It ruins the flow of the story; just let me start the dungeon instead of having the characters talk to each other about how the boss must be at the end of the dungeon and that perhaps defeating the boss will solve the nearby town's problem. Everything is talked about, nothing is implied, alluded to, or expressed through visuals. Good writing is concise, and this game doesn't have good writing.

The two main characters have no personalities or aspirations beyond "adventure yay". The game is lacking in emotional impact. Even when tragic or traumatizing events happen to people close to the protagonists, they don't spend any time dealing with their feelings. Old Final Fantasy games like 4, 6, and 9 had better character writing. Writing was a weak point of The Messenger too though, so I didn't expect much.

The protagonists claim to have combat styles—the boy is speedy, and the girl is strong. Except this never materializes in the gameplay. The boy doesn’t have attacks that look speedy. He doesn’t gain additional turns or have fast QTE inputs for his skills. The girl doesn’t have any shows of strength. What was the point of having them talk about their combat styles if they don’t actually exist? Oversights like these are a sign of a lack of attention paid toward ensuring the game’s different elements (like writing and gameplay) form a cohesive whole.

The game has “Relics” that are toggleable items that affect combat. Most of them just make the game easier, like making your characters take 30% less damage “for those who prefer a lighter challenge”. These have no cost to toggle or to use. There’s no maximum. You just gradually unlock an easier and easier game. This is a huge missed opportunity to follow in the footsteps of games like Paper Mario and Hollow Knight, where you have a limited number of Badge Points to equip effects that you like. Sea of Stars is already easy, so why make it more tedious by NOT turning these on? It’s not like the combat is fun.

The relic system is unbelievably lazy design. It puts the onus of designing and balancing the game on the player. It’s the developer’s job to make the game, not the player’s. The developer sets the rules and boundaries. Structure is what makes games what they are, and structure is defined by limitations, not freedoms. Imagine playing basketball, but the rules are that each team can have any number of players they feel is fair, and they’re allowed to play with however many balls they think is fun. Everyone can have their own ball if they think that’s fun. Points are scored however you like; just do whatever you think is fun!

How about the recent Armored Core 6? What if you could use as many repair packs as you’d like? You have an infinite amount. Limit yourself to however many you think is fair, or just mash the button the whole time if that’s your thing! Or Slay the Spire? Cuphead? Health getting low? Here’s a button. Push the button to refill your health to full any time, if that makes the game more fun for you.

Games are fun because overcoming challenges is fun. Sea of Stars doesn't present much of a challenge in the first place, and they keep giving you conveniences that undermine the combat and turn the game into the very long interactive picture book it wants to be.

edit: The game's also still got bugs, so save often. Here's a hardlock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaPvUbVZJ7s

Very different from Hammerwatch 1 and Heroes of Hammerwatch, in a good way. They're all fun for different reasons. Hammerwatch 1 is like the Gauntlet series of games (Gauntlet Legends, Gauntlet Dark Legacy, etc.), Heroes of Hammerwatch is a roguelite that's heavy on meta progression (upgrading your town after each run for permanent boosts), and this game, Hammerwatch 2, is like a Larian Studios game but without turn-based gameplay. The classes are varied and have interesting talent trees.

The two big reasons for the low review score are: people expecting this game to be like the previous two Hammerwatch games, and people who don't like the fact that if you play multiplayer, your character is tied to the host's savefile. Your character doesn't exist outside of the host's savefile, which isn't a dealbreaker if you don't mind only playing with your friends.

Weak wannabe oldschool FPS with way too many unnecessary UI elements and numbers (the stamina system shouldn't exist, the double jump you start with is rarely used and your air control is almost nonexistent anyway). The English translation sucks, but that barely matters because the game doesn't bother to explain what most things do. You'll pay for upgrades that affect guns in ways you have no way of knowing, and then when you accidentally find out what the upgrade was, you'll wonder what practical use it could have. The game doesn't explain what a "bloodbonus" is or how to use "blood packs" or what food is and how to eat it (it doesn't heal you or interact with stamina except that regenerating stamina increases your food depletion rate).

So many things are poorly thought out, like the vendor and currency. You shouldn't be able to sell ammo, because ammo sells for so much that you can enter a room, find that there's excess ammo on the floor that you can't pick up, return to the vendor, sell your ammo for that gun, and then pick up the ammo from the floor. You make so much more money doing this than you make from the currency pickups littered around that aren't even worth the time to pick up.

The load times are awful, which is really bad when on 90% of your deaths you'll go from full health to dead in under a second because the only threatening enemies fire a gigantic wave of bullets that, if fired from a direction you're not looking, will do more than 100% of your health in damage. Considering the game's minimal graphical assets, it shouldn't take 30 seconds to go from dying to replaying the level.

The bosses, of which there are too many, are all boring and badly designed (you can cheese most of them by either standing somewhere they can't shoot, or just permanently slow down time with your oxygen packs, which you can do, somehow) bullet sponges. Even the ones that stand still will eat up most of your ammo and you'll wonder whether you're even doing damage, because there's no feedback of any kind when they take damage.

dumb horny game bad story

the puzzles and examtaker boss (until the last part of its last phase) are pretty good though

The fun of discovery and experimentation ends after the first couple of hours. The game sells itself on the variety of builds and the breadth of its spells, but there’s no reason to deviate from your intended build, once you’ve begun refining one.

Part of what makes roguelikes fun is that your initial plan for a character changes when you find cool rare stuff. Rift Wizard only has shrines, and their effects aren’t powerful enough to justify making impromptu changes to your build. You end up going down the same upgrade route regardless of what the game throws at you, and each run just feels like spinning a slot machine and hoping you find favorable encounters for the build you’re trying to do.

Many spells are inferior to the stronger ones, so there isn’t even a reason to experiment with most spells once you’ve found 3-4 builds you like. The exploration and depth happens before the game even begins, when you’re looking at the list of spells, rather than during a run.

Faux-deep story, and weak gameplay. The "rhythm" combat sections are more of a visual spectacle than good gameplay. You don't play to the beat, the attacks come at you (roughly) to the beat. You only interact with 1-2 lanes out of the 5 at a given moment, so most of the pattern doesn't matter.

The achievements are the worst kind possible. Don't even try them. Not because they're hard—they're just a boring waste of time and they'll shorten the lifespan of your input device (controller / keyboard). Doing the bosses no-hit is a huge chore, more a test of patience than skill. Getting hit once in a 5 minute "fight" means you have to restart from the beginning, and the first 3-4 minutes are tedious. In some segments you just stand still for 10 seconds at a time because the pattern doesn't touch the column you're standing in.

The achievement for jump-rolling 150,000 times shows the low brain activity of the developers. It's not interesting, challenging, or fun. Why not increase the number to 150,000,000? That'll teach people to play the game. Your keyboard or controller's buttons are rated for a certain number of pushes per key/button before failure. All you'll get for "achieving" 150,000 jump-rolls is an input device that needs a replacement part sooner.