Been awhile since I've done a random Steam code blind review, but
@a-Lager gave me a few codes so I'll have a few to go through.
First up is
Deep Dungeons of Doom which I picked first for the very well thought out reason of I thought the pixel art looked nice! Well, it's a very simple game at it's core. The primary mechanic is traveling to rooms in a dungeon where you face an enemy, or some floors having random buff shrines or merchants. You have an attack with a cooldown and you just attack until you win, the when the enemies attack which you can tell because they'll start an animation you block. Ultimately, the goal is just to watch enemies and memorized their moves and attack when they aren't... though if you hit them during their attack animation you do double damage, but with the exception of a few enemies with very long attack animations this is likely to just get you hit in 90% of cases. As you travel the dungeon you will level up and be able to pic more damage, HP, agility which reduced your attack cooldown and magic... I never once used magic so I can't say too much about it. The levels you get do not carry over to new dungeons which appear on a map after you clear the initial one. You start as a knight paladin guy and you quickly unlock a thief assassin guy and a witch lady... neither of which I used as there is a permanent upgrade system that uses the already stingy amount of gold you get for defeating enemies, but it is per character and I did not feel like grinding. On top of gold you can also find equipment after fights consisting of one equipment slot and one slot for consumables like potions, these do things like increasing your stats or healing you on use and there are overworld shops that sell them, though I never used them because of the for-mentioned gold shortage.
Initially the game is very simple with enemy attack patterns, but they start to get a little more complex with things like them attacking several times in a row or a few bosses who will be invulnerable until you attack at certain times or reflect their own projectile at them. Eventually they start making enemies that don't work with the system which is a problem - some enemies start summoning attacks that persist for several seconds as they go back and fourth instead of just a single instance of blocking. I can see the developers intention is for you to weave attacks in-between blocking, but the issue is the enemies themselves still use their more basic attacks while this is going on and blocking has an infuriating little window where it doesn't work when spamming so in practice you just get into situations where you cannot avoid damage and you just have to kill them before they kill you. Another issue with this is any equipment you have is lost when you die and while you can instantly retry the dungeon to retrieve what you lost you have to defeat the enemy you died to which you probably died to via RNG and without your equipment it'll be harder to DPS race them (unless it was just a dumb fairy who for some reason does more damage than most bosses and attacks 3 times in a row that sometimes slip by the defending gap).
The final level is the largest dungeon with almost every boss and enemy from the game, including several of the stupid lingering attack ones, as well as those randomly OP faeries. Ultimately the devil who is the final boss has two phases with his first phase comprising of an attack where random circular explosions appear with no telegraph as to where they will appear, managing to just squeak by it with like 2 hp his second phase killed me and I had no interest in going through the gauntlet again without my good weapon which was now lost unless I wanted to grind it out again, which I did not. The game really fell apart at the end with the attacks that aren't really readable.
Then I read the Steam reviews and found out the game is mobile slop ported to PC with minimal changes to go from the micro-transaction system to not having one, which explains why all the controls are done with direction keys or clicking. I didn't grind at all, but apparently I was supposed to as I only got half-way up the permanent upgrade tree, but I'd seen 99% of what the game had to offer so I consider that good enough because I didn't wanna re-do old levels 50 times! All in all I suppose it would have been fine as a dumb mobile game, but it's pretty lacking when compared to non-mobile games. I completely forgot to mention it's quirky "erm... that just happened!" and "Medieval knights don't talk like that, lul!" story segments between levels... but I guess it really wasn't that interesting. The game is a 6/10 mobile game, not too engaging but would have been pretty beatable even without paying for micro-transactions, and maybe a 3/10 regular game for it's lack of engaging content. The pixel graphics are nice as they often are and the music while limited in amount was perfectly fine. Not the biggest waste of close to 3 hours, I suppose.
Well, let's hope some of the remaing codes are better.
S2 is it's almost completely unrelated to the first in terms of world-building. I thought it was kind of stupid but finished it anyway. Fun turn-based tactical engine. Witcher 3 is very good, that's the one I recommend.
is how quick and intense these maps are. I seem to spend a lot of time in Eternal just wandering around, flipping through upgrade menus, reading the codes, navigating a jump puzzle, or watching cutscenes, or backtracking to find a secret. You need to find every secret to unlock all the widgets to upgrade your gear, which makes scouring the map for the thing you missed more important. Doom II, I'm mostly blasting demons. The level designs also tend to be much more clever.
