Demon's Rise - War for the Deep

Good.

7/10 Looks promising with interesting tactical depth and delivers on "bunch of misfits dudes and monsters get stronger and kick ass as a team" fantasy, but it clearly lacks polish and "game feel juice" +1 point for the quite generous price tag Straightforward game mechanics that are somewhat soured by user interface flaws. High customization potential due to the varied classes and many item slots available. Environments look alright. Character models, character animations and skill animations could use some extra oomph. Music does its job but it's too short before looping, and I noticed some ackward looping glitches. Some sound effects feel out of place, some are jarinly too high-pitched but overall they're OK. I would love more monster classes in the roster. I disliked skill failure chance as a all-or-nothing way of balancing skills, it feels frustrating when it happens to player characters (and not that exciting when it happens with enemies). The one big problem: USER INTERFACE needs serious work and polish. That's a must for any kind of serious tactical RPG. Here is my hopefully constructive criticism towards the UX: * Cannot rotate map with mouse * Cannot rebind some important keys such as camera controls, there is also the issue of the game using QWERTY controls for camera that don't rebind correctly on my AZERTY keyboard * What difficulty affects is not explained * While hit%/dodge% and crit%/crit resist% are self-explanatory, the way damage reduction is calculated is unclear to me * How criticals affect damage calculation is unclear * I didn't want to bother with the tutorial past the first two, onboarding would serve the game better instead of having tutorial battles * For some reason scrolling screen left or up is twice as fast as scrolling right or down * Sometimes characters instantly snap to the target move location, sometimes they play a move animation, I don't know understand the governing logic behind this * Turn end button could use a confirmation prompt if a character hasn't performed any action * You cannot cancel class change or mercenary hiring * The lack of control over save files is very dangerous if something goes wrong with the game, I cannot make backup saves within the game itself * UI text looks blurry and sometimes distorted with varying sizes * UI textures feel washed out and overall look bad * UI needs more "juice" to feel more exciting and responsive when stuff happens in combat, such as animating health loss on HP bars * If user doesn't control the camera during enemy turn, then pan the camera to where stuff is happening * During enemy turn, it would be nice to show enemy hit rate and explanation of what's happening * Buffs should definitely be displayed alongside player character portraits * Consider displaying normal attack range of characters in addition to move range using pulsing hex or something, some characters have exotic attack ranges and the subtle red highlight on enemies is easy to miss * I find the skill unavailable icon (the 'X' texture) quite ugly and kinda confusing. Please consider displaying the skill icon with red overlay when it's unavailable, and maybe add a spinning black overlay when the ability is on cooldown. A number should be displayed on the icon for skills with limited uses. * The ability to move any character that has some remaining move range at any time, after the action of any other character during your turn make it trivial to avoid friendly fire or dangerous tiles, this mechanic feels a bit too gamey to me * Highlighting a skill button should display the AP that would be consumed on the AP bar * Danger zone feature when hovering on enemy unit would be nice to have * Got somewhat surprised by a line AoE skill that went through a wall * Some skills are cast instantly upon clicking, but the range is unclear without trying it first or looking for the range info in the tooltip * Core information about a unit should be displayed when hovering an unit, it's annoying to have to RMB to open a popup every time * Some typos in quest intro text (that I concede most players will gloss over anyway :D) * At some point I got weird "tile null" cast error messages and "target is friendly" while clicking on enemy target, I think the gameplay coding might be a bit sloppy there... * Some map have buggy tiles that lock the character in a movement animation and softlock the battle (battle restart is necessary)