Fantom Feast

gamesense

Full review at: https://thegamehoard.com/2019/10/08/the-haunted-hoard-fantom-feast-pc/ Fantom Feast really shows the importance of proper difficulty balancing. The eat-and-grow formula at the center has very little pushback, the slow and predictable enemies making the growth process dull even before the game gets too generous with its shield power up to further erode the risk of failure. Fantom Feast encourages safe and boring movement without rewarding dangerous play, with the few gimmicks that do get added along the way only really requiring small adjustments to your approach that slow things down even more. If the regular play was just a bit harder it could be exciting, but Fantom Feast is far too careful and thus lacks the challenge needed to make its replay-focused design worth diving back into. The sad truth of Fantom Feast is that most of its elements aren’t really bad on their own. The odd shape of Fantom could be easily ignored if the slow linear level progression didn’t make going for risky eats early on too dangerous, and the shield power does mean you can afford to take them later on, but the reliability of the shield power-up appearing then softens an already far too easy level of difficulty. You are stuck either being too cautious or having little punishment for being careless. The enemies, even when the laser spewing ones appear, are just too passive and easily avoided, making gimmicks like the wind that could work fail since they don’t impact things enough to account for your bland foes. Fantom Feast is a collection of ideas that don’t sound like they would be bad when put together, but the game misuses them all by not pushing them to really endanger the player. With no real incentive to break away from patiently waiting to eat what you can even when a dangerous gimmick is active, there’s just nothing compelling the player to want to continue, let alone shoot for a high score that requires moving through the even easier early levels first to get there.