Defend the Rook - PC Review

Defend The Rook by developer One Up Plus Entertainment and publishers Goblinz Publishing and Maple Whispering—PC review written by Hayden with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

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Defend The Rook by developer One Up Plus Entertainment and publishers Goblinz Publishing and Maple Whispering bills itself as “a roguelike tactics board combat combined with tower defense elements.” Beyond operating on a grid and being turn-based, however, there really isn’t much roguelike here - no permadeath or procedurally generated endless dungeon levels await us here. Instead, Defend The Rook welcomes players into a series of playing fields that strongly resemble chess boards with terrain blocks, and gives them control of exactly four moveable pieces - the eponymous castle-like Rook, and three nameless heroes known simply as the Warrior, Rogue and Sorceress.

Gameplay is turn-based, with no timers or other restrictions to hurry the player along on the default setup. Each piece can move and attack by default, and the player can use a few off-board actions to help their pieces and hinder opponents. The player wins by surviving through multiple waves of enemy pieces, and loses if the enemy manages to destroy the Rook - simple, straightforward and easy to grasp conditions.

While some of the off-map actions the player can perform can place static AI-controlled towers, traps and barricades, there are never enough of these provided that any meaningful portion of the map can be turned into a maze like a true tower defense game. To further drive home the point that this is not a tower defense game, barricades and towers placed by the player are open to attack by enemy units - a direct difference from most tower defense games where the attackers mindlessly shamble like cattle between the players walls.

One Up Plus’s game design hits an interesting note in how they have made the player’s pieces synergize together. Each piece starts with at least one special effect, and more can be unlocked as the player progresses. Often, these effects are positioning-dependent - like a character healing adjacent static structures (towers, barricades) when they end their turn next to them - which gives a refreshing extra layer to a game that would otherwise risk devolving into “move next to the enemy, smash, end turn, repeat”.

My only gripe with this system is that the abilities show up quite quickly at the start of the game and aren’t easily referenced on the game board, making it harder for a player to learn how to use their pieces to their best advantage. If this was a deliberate design choice, it isn’t one that I personally agree with, but it admittedly does force the player to pay close attention to what they are doing and rewards those who can hold onto a mental list of all the conditional abilities their pieces have.

The art style and UI design for Defend The Rook is generally quite clean and pleasant to look at. The majority of the player’s time will be spent looking at the chessboard-like battlefield in an isometric view, and a few issues inevitably spring from this style. Most notably, pieces and terrain can occlude items ‘behind’ them from the player’s perspective, and while the front piece turns translucent when the player mouses over the occluded piece, it is still possible to miss seeing a small enemy piece behind a larger sprite, or having the normally visible stat block hidden out of the player’s view. Given that the playing field is of quite limited size this isn’t often too bad of an issue as it is less likely the player will have lost track of a piece moving into an occluded position, but it is still an item worth noting.

In summary, Defend The Rook leans successfully into a mix of movement and interpiece synergies to keep players engaged with its turn-based action. Don’t expect the classic tower defense tropes of militarized mazes and mindless hordes of minions, however, as this plays more as an evolution of chess than a tower defense game. Good for players who want a lightweight tactics game, but avoid it if you are just looking to watch hundreds of peons march into your custom-built meat grinder. Overall a fun game to play, but I doubt it will make a lot of player’s ‘best of 2021’ lists as few of its features really stand out with a “wow” factor to make it truly memorable.

Summary

Defend The Rook leans successfully into a mix of movement and interpiece synergies to keep players engaged. Don’t expect the classic tower defense tropes of militarized mazes and mindless hordes of minions, however, as this plays more as an evolution of chess than a tower defense game. Great for players who want a lightweight tactics game, but avoid it if you are just looking to watch hundreds of peons march into your custom-built meat grinder.

Score: 7 / 10

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Dreamscaper - PC Review

Dreamscaper by developer Afterburner Studios and publishers Freedom Games and Maple Whispering Limited—PC review written by Pierre-Yves.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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This has been a long journey for me but even longer for the devs behind their brilliantly designed roguelite. Having seen several versions from the original Prologue to its Early Access debut, Afterburner Studio's Dreamscaper is both now finished and its final format bringing about an even more pleasant experience than anything having led up to it.

The premise is a fairly simple one though the execution however is much more complex and will engage and challenge you to continuously push further. Our protagonist Cassidy is a lucid dreamer and in their dreams they fight against monsters both big and small trying to reach something just over the next battle. With plenty of environments strewn with their own sets of challenges, there are more than enough weapons and abilities to help in this fight. If Cassidy falls in battle though, then it's game over, they wake up, and you get to start it all over again the next night.

For the three versions that I've dreamt my way through, this is how it starts. Cassidy goes to sleep and then falls into a realm far different from our own. Every night they find themselves with different weapons (melee and ranged) but the constant is their special ability and dodge style which remain the same until new ones are picked up. From there, the layouts of the environment are randomized from placement to enemies and items. Your goal is to make it to the boss of that realm, defeat them, and then move on. As time goes on however, Cassidy can unlock gear to start with so that you at least always have an edge at the start of the first realm.

It's simple, it's effective, but it's a roguelite so the journey will be anything but an easy one. So it's for this reason that each environment can contain upgrades to your current gear if you either find them or have enough accumulated sand to pay for them. What some people may not find working well for them is honestly a part of the challenge and even while I didn't like it at times, it's something to deal with and that is the actual weapons that you pick up. Each one of these has a different style from the amount of damage they can do per second (DPS) to their speeds and ease of use. Being behind a wall that needs to be created, Cloud’s Buster Sword is stupid powerful but slow in Cassidy’s hands while Lloyd’s Twin-Blades are stupid fast but don’t do as much damage. Add in wolf head gauntlets, bare fists, and a variety of other bladed weapons and those of higher DPS may not always be your cup of tea. But like I said, this is a roguelite and with roguelites / likes, there’s always a challenge factor and this is part of Dreamscaper’s.

Upfront this may sound like a lot to get adjusted to but in practice, you start to barely notice it as time goes on due to the fact that on average a realm can take you about ten minutes to clear based off of how many rooms you actually want to go through versus how many rooms it takes to find the boss. From the beginning though, there’s been an ease of use or accessibility with Dreamscaper as it’s instantly possible to teleport between any room that has been visited. Making that even easier at times is that the boss room can be entered and then exited as long as you haven’t “touched the big shiny object” that will lead you to fights of epic proportions.

Between all of this though is perhaps my favorite addition to Dreamscaper that came about at the beginning of its Early Access, Cassidy’s real life. Before going to sleep every night, Cassidy can explore the city that she’s living in. The book store, coffee shop, the bar, the park, the record store, each of these areas add a bit more to see outside of the dream realms. In Early Access, perhaps my one issue with the real world was that you had to do well in the dream world in order to not be tired enough the next day “after work” in order to explore the town and get to know the people. Gone from that version is requiring having to do well and keeping an accumulation of sand which acts as your currency. Now? Now you get to explore the town with a few new twists added into the mix.

Now being able to use sand to hearts content in the dream world to upgrade and buy new weapons, the real world will see you using a few other things that you picked up in order to help both the real and dream worlds explorations. From Cassidy’s room, you can craft gifts to give to people in order to increase their relationships which lead into dialog scenes. It’s a bit in the Persona vein but it does more than add a bit of slice of life as for every level increase of Cassidy’s relationships, Cassidy can use those as a bonus in the dream world such as extra armor, higher ranged attack, etc. From there, Cassidy can also meditate in the park to raise attributes such as max health or damage to bosses, go to the cafe to sketch new items to appear, or go to the bar to daydream new elements to show up within the dream realm.

A lot of these features are new to the full release, or new in that they are now their own thing and can be goals to strive towards. That said, I like how this progression has been structured and that Cassidy can now view all of these places and potentially interact with all of the other NPCs instead of just select ones depending on the amount of time that was available after a successful or semi-successful run. It feels more natural and less punishing than the other way around that was being rewarded for having done well, but not every run will go well. Just last week I went on a fresh run to try something out and I aced the first two floors and their bosses only to die stupidly to a combination of lightning strikes and getting cornered by a bad dodge. That’s all it took to wipe out and game over for that night. So with how brutal things can get, it was nice to have some of the other elements soften up.

Now here are my two big things with Dreamscaper. First, it has gorgeous artwork that makes it easy to look at for hours on end. The second, the background audio regardless of the volume level never gets boring or stagnant, it just works. I guess third, the loading times were amazing and when in either the realm or the dream realm, going from location to location takes seconds and there’s never a wait time, it’s just done. Everything just felt right and properly optimized to the points that the CPU fans never even kicked in as they didn’t need to while other titles have thrown the damn thing into overdrive making me wonder how what I was looking at could even come close to taxing a RTX 3080.

Summary

So from the Prologue to Early Access and then to full release, Afterbuner Studios’ Dreamscaper has been an amazing adventure. With multiple easy to use systems, an intuitive combat system and plenty of upgrades to be discovered and unlocked, there’s more than enough dungeon crawling and rogueliting to keep anyone busy for a long while. If it gets too easy? Just add in some extra modifiers and see if you’re still swinging the same tune or getting kicked out of the record store for not knowing what Math Rock was.

Score: 8.75 / 10

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Edge of Eternity - PC Review

Edge of Eternity by developer Midgar Studio and publishers Dear Villagers & Maple Whispering Limited PC review written by Richard.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

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Edge of Eternity is probably one of the weirdest JRPGs I've played in a while. Not a bad weird, just a "this is really hard to describe well" sort of weird. It's large and sprawling, but weirdly enclosed. The characters are well written and relatable, but are cringy and trope filled. Combat is both excessively complicated yet incredibly basic. Edge of Eternity is a game full of contrasting elements, but I'll be damned if it didn't suck me in like a king ooze.

The story of Edge of Eternity is best learned through playing it yourself, but if I'm trying to avoid early game spoilers, it could probably be summed up as "jaded/angsty teens try to save the world". The world in Edge of Eternity is set on a planet that was visited by a space-faring race sometime in the past. This race provided technology, knowledge, and aide to those on the planet. After a number of years, that same space-faring race decided "nah, we don't want them anymore" and decided to get rid of the people they had attempted to uplift. Needless to say, the native inhabitants weren't too pleased with the decision, so now they're in a war, and they aren't doing super geat. As if that weren't enough, a disease called "corrosion" is spreading amongst the people, slowly taking over their minds.

Through all this we meet Daryon, a standard JRPG protagonist with cringey one-liners, a big two-handed sword, a haircut that screams "I'm the protagonist", and a clingy "would be girlfriend". Daryon is part of the war effort as a soldier, albeit a rather green one, but who has spent a number of years in the army. He still acts like you would expect from a typical protagonist though. I say all this, but his personal interactions with others are generally quite different from how he acts with his family, namely his mother or his sister Selene. After receiving a letter from Selene telling him their mother has the Corruption, Daryon has to find a way back to visit his mother, as well as Selene, who might be able to find a cure. Now I know I said Daryon was rather cookie cutter protagonist, but the tropes are there for a reason. Furthermore, when interacting with his sister, you realize that maybe Daryon is just acting the way he does as a facade for others after becoming jaded from the horrors of war.

Daryon's sister, Selene, is somewhat similar. She comes off as an altruistic priestess, but it isn't necessarily for the reasons you would expect. These two characters, who you will see a lot of, provide both an interesting contrast as well as offering insights into their characters and the world around them. But you aren't here to listen to me drone on about character development and emotional scarring, so let's talk about some gameplay.

Edge of Eternity feels like a bunch of Final Fantasy titles mashed together with a hex-grid strategy vibe thrown in for good measure. Exploration is done on a feild map, where you can roam around, pick up shining items, get into battles, talk to people and accept side quests, as well as other things like crafting. Locations are also weather and time dynamic. Yeah, time is an interesting mechanic in Edge of Eternity, as it has a large impact on not only the monsters you fight (as some may only come out after dark), but also on elemental effects. Combat is…both a strategy nightmare as well as a hardcore stategists gift from the gods. You fight using a turn-based ATB system, that may be reminiscient of older Final Fantasy titles, set on a Hex grid styled field. You can backstab for additional damage, move around, use items, skills, normal attacks, and inspect enemies, all of which, except inspecting, will use your action bar, or a chunk of it, that will refill faster depending on your stats. This makes Edge of Eternity great for those who like to plan out their battlefields meticulously, although enemies won't always cater to your whims. On the other hand, it isn't too difficult to simply slap the enemies till they die if you really want.

To compound this, while ally and enemy action gauges are paused while making a command, you can choose to delay your turn and guard, or "hold" your turn and wait for time to pass. Throw in the fact that the time of day affects both your own and enemy resistances towards elemntal damage, and you've got a lot of planning and strategizing to be done. If you hadn't guessed, Daryon is the melee and Selene is the mage, a traditional combo that works quite well with the Hex grid system. See, mages take time to cast, but deal a lot of damage and can get interrupted if they take too much damage. On the other hand, they have a bit more range to their attacks. Throw in a few interactable battle elements, such as magical balistae or crystals that give effects, and you get a really in depth system where you could be chasing and running away from your foes to pen them in or prep attacks. Or you could bonk them in the face, up to you.

Now, the Hex grid is used for more than just combat. During your travels you will come across puzzle areas, where you have your characters moving around, stepping on pressure plates in order to reach a path to the goal. I loved this. It was so unexpected, and such a great use of the battle system in an entirely non-combat function. I will take a moment here to talk about the battle camera: it isn't super great. The zoomed in camera makes it really hard to see anything on the field, and the zoomed out camera has moments where it gets shaky, or caught on a tree or wall or something. It isn't the worst, in fact it isn't even all that bad really, but it is distinctly noticeable.

Speaking of noticeable, the graphics are really nice for an indie studio. I'm not saying that indie studios can't put out graphically pleasing games, but Edge of Eternity looks really sharp. A little iffy in towns though, as I found I got some pretty major framerate drops while in or near populated areas. The worst part is, it isn't even consistent. The first time I entered the first town, I had 2 seconds of smooth frames, then a full second of dropped frames, just cycling like that. When I cam back? No problems. A small drop when the town got within render distance for the inhabitants, but that was it. Thankfully I only had this happen in towns and not during battle or on the field maps.

Another small little complaint is about the crafting tables: they are individual per crafting type. You wanna make weapons at the item bench? NO. But I haven't mentioned the crafting yet, have I? Well, it's pretty basic: find recipe, find materials, consume materials to make items or equipment. The real important thing is what you get from the equipment. See, while the characters have levels, so do your weapons. Increasing the level on your weapons opens up slots on a grid that is tied to the the weapon, where you can insert crystals in for stat boosts and skills tied to the crystals. or general increases tied to the node. Think of it kind of similar to Final Fantasy X sphere grid, but tied to weapons, and unique per weapon. You can only go down one "branch" of the tree, but you can remove and place crystals to swap branches whenever you want. You want to one-shot the weak enemies you're farming for materials? Go down the attack increase branch. You now coming up to a heavy hitting boss? Remove the crystals from the attack branch, move them over to the defense branch. To add to this, some crystals have spells or skill attacks attached to them, which can then be "equipped" to your action menu as long as the crystal is slotted in your current weapon.

Summary

Overall, I have to say I'm really impressed with Edge of Eternity. While it does have some misses here and there, with a few moments of cringy or campy writing or general trouble, the adventure as a whole is well thought out and put together. The battle system feels more fresh than I expected, and the addition of the puzzle challenges really shows that the developers were putting a lot of thought into how to work it. Edge of Eternity provides a great experience for those looking for a new RPG to try out.

Score: 8 / 10

 

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Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands - PS4 Review

Setting out with your father on one type of adventure, you'll soon find yourself and the crew of your father's ship stranded on a desert island after the ship you set sail on capsizes in the middle of a storm. Now stranded on a set of relatively warm and sunny islands, you'll be building shacks and making food for everyone as you could be here for a little while.

Coming right out and saying it, Stranded Sails is probably one of the most relaxing games that I’ve played in 2019. Having thought that I was going to be getting into a survival for dear life, I was instead treated to a rather light and easily paced simulation experience. Starting off with nothing more than your now bedridden father and two others, you’re going to slowly get around to growing crops and building shacks for each crew member to live in. It’s fairly straight forward and while there is a fair amount of emphasis on the exploration, the key is experimenting with cooking and building up other materials.

Starting off with learning to move around, the only thing that you’ll ever have to concern yourself with is the stamina meter that tells you how much more you can do before passing out. Walking, running, digging the ground with your shovel, chopping trees and just picking things up, each has a varying stamina cost as certain actions will obviously take more out of you than others. While your mind may be tempted to go the route of Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, management of your stamina is actually quite easy and only gets easier as hours move on.

In the beginning you’ll have to head to bed to replenish your stamina once it gets low. A bit of a nice touch is that going to bed only makes the hours go by, it doesn’t actually make it skip to the next morning. This means that you aren’t wasting loads of time, but neither do you need to worry about it as days don’t actually count for anything out here. It’s really more of your hands are always on your controller and you can just get up and go when needed. There is a benefit however to sleeping to the sunrise as it gives you an added bonus to your movement which makes your stamina degrade slower. For everything else? There’s the food that you’ll be making.

Once you’ve gotten around to plowing a bit of your vegetable garden and planting corn followed by carrots, onions, potatoes and eggplants, you can start making food. In the beginning, food is only really for you, not everyone else, as you’ll be bringing your dishes with you in order to replenish your stamina once you’re far from base. As you’ve progressed a bit further and have gotten the hang of planting each type of vegetable as some renew while others need to be dug out and replaced, you get access to a cauldron that allows you to make stew for everyone. This stew lasts for hours at a time and while it feeds the crew that you’ve rescued, it’s really for you to avoid needing to sleep and to gain other bonuses before heading back out in the wild either to search for those still missing or materials that you need to build something new or getting your hands a little dirty with enemies that show up WAY down the line.

Stranded Sails: Explorers of the Cursed Islands is a fun and relaxing title that allows hours to simply tick past as you walk / run or row your boat from one island to the next. Exploring sandy shores is just as relaxing as going into caves or fishing underneath a stone outcrop. There’s nothing really hard about it as everything will come to you in time, you just need to get there first.

Game Information

Platform:
Sony PlayStation 4
Developer(s):
Lemonbomb Entertainment
Publisher(s):
rokaplay, Maple Whispering Limited
Genre(s):
Simulation
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

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