Grimshade

I really wish there was a "merely okay" button for reviews. The game is by no means terrible, but it feels very much like a product still in Beta, rather than a "finished" game. The Pros: The artwork is gorgeous, the overall plot isn't bad and very 90's RPG in it's story arc. The tactical combat is clever in premise, and fun under certain circumstances, though falls down quite a bit on the execution. Like Divinity: Original Sin, it rewards you for wandering around and poking your nose into everything, except here it feels more like a chore. The minor quibbles: The English translation isn't great, and filled with spelling mistakes and random garbage characters. Several of the underlying game mechanics aren't properly explained. Your characters will spend a lot of time running back and forth across very pretty, but ultimately empty, spaces looking for the right person or thing to click on. The major quibbles: The difficulty is, at times, insane, and extremely unbalanced. I discovered that my game got set to hard difficulty (not sure if I tweaked something by accident myself during one of the many "everything but the icons and mouse icon go black" crashes) which as far as I can tell, makes several of the boss fights impossible. If you're going to have a hard difficulty, it should be at least physically possible to win the entire game at that setting. Even at Normal difficulty, several of the battles are either impossible or nearly impossible, so I actually found myself switching to Easy mode, just so I wouldn't have to constantly replay repetitive battles. I consider myself quite good at turn-based strategy/combat games, but I'm going to say this game mainly falls down due to a lack of playtesting and enemy balancing on the part of the game designers. There is no in-battle healing available, so your 5 health potions (which don't remove the negative status effects of injuries, and can only be used outside of combat) are vital to keep topped up at all times, but also prohibitively expensive. If you don't walk into one of the more difficult fights with all four characters in perfect condition, there's a very good chance you'll lose. Or if you survive, two to three of your characters will walk away with permanent injuries that will make the next battle even harder. There's no experience or level-up system, so all of your character stats and abilities come from equippable items that are either handed to you through story progression or by running around and clicking/fighting everything in sight, in the hope that doing so will reward you with something valuable. But because health is such a valuable commodity, it's extremely frustrating to explore the game and engage in unnecessary battles, when most of the time the risks outweigh the rewards, as many of the roving bands of skippable enemies are so strong, they can easily wipe out your party (or bog you down with injuries), even on Easy difficulty. Everybody loves getting hidden loot, but it turns large chunks of the game into a repetitive chore, especially as you will inevitably accumulate several debilitating status effects which can only be cured by returning to a Haven (which is also the only place you can craft certain valuable disposable items) but which also respawns most of the roaming monsters in your way to the next objective. It wouldn't be so bad, if your characters accumulated experience and gradually grew stronger from fighting battles, making future fights easier, but no... battles only serve to sometimes give you a few measly crafting components and gold (rarely enough to offset the $500 needed to buy more healing potions) and *very rarely* allow you to retrieve a new item that will make one of your characters a tiny bit stronger (but often at the expense of unequipping something else equally useful). If you skip a certain skippable area or battle, don't talk to the right peripheral characters, or fail to click on that barrel in the corner of the room, you may not get an item that is extremely important for that character's continued survival. I only learned after playing for several days that you can access the character inventory menu during the positioning phase of battle to toggle which items and characters you want to use. This would have been a very useful thing to explain during the tutorial phase, since there's no "abort" button to back out of a fight once you start. I do like that combat positioning is very important, but the play area is so small, and your pool of available skills so tiny, that this limits the "tactics" part of the battle severely. Basically, 90% of the strategy in the game is to try to keep Alister alive and in the front row, so he can block for Badger and the boy, who get obliterated in a few hits if he gets knocked down. This makes battles extremely repetitive, since your only hope of survival depends on using the same technique for every battle. Unfortunately, battle tactics do not change much, even when you eventually get a 4th, 5th, and 6th character. (though you can only use four at a time) Overall, the game feels extremely empty, with lots of running around, permanently depressing the TAB key to highlight clickable items, and engaging in lots of repetitive grinding-type battles, for very little reward. With some balancing tweaks, it could remove some of the frustration (and actual unplayability at higher difficulty levels) but the underlying game mechanics of making character improvement entirely item based has, I think, shot the designers in the foot and turned what could be a great game into something that will never be any better than 'okay.'

Inspired by JRPGs of the 90s, [url=https://noisypixel.net/grimshade-review-pc/]Grimshade[/url] had me curious. While Grimshade started out to be a fun experience in the beginning, sadly, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. It’s made clear after a few hours that it would have been better suited to release on Steam Early Access instead, as its current state is a complete mess. This is disappointing because Grimshade has the potential of becoming an interesting game with fun turn-based combat but unfortunately failed to do so. https://youtu.be/8860OwzfWH4 Grimshade follows the protagonist, Alister, who is considered a champion that’s on a quest to try and save the city of Brann. The high walls can no longer protect the town’s residents anymore and they’re getting threatened by strange monsters which are living in the nearby forests. As if that’s not bad enough already, the king and his champions have disappeared. Alister meets a strange guy Kiba in the forest and with him and several other people, the march forth to save Brann. The game’s first few hours are quite linear, as there is a main quest you have to follow. The game is surprisingly very detailed and you can interact with a lot of items, so you explore the streets of Brann. With that said, I found the descriptions a bit long at times and since I didn’t really care nor wanted to read a short text for every item, I started skipping their explanations altogether. Similar to the items, the text for NPCs is way too long and I found myself not really caring about their story. The turn-based combat is kept pretty straight forward, even though I needed some time to get used to it. If battles get too tough, there are options to set your difficulty lower if you’re having trouble. I liked that every character has special individual items with different effects, however, I felt that every encounter played out similar and there was no real difference between them. So inevitably, encounters get very repetitive and I found it especially tedious that you can’t entirely skip your enemies turns because a few characters have a special ability with a protective shield you have to destroy. Sometimes there are multiple protective shields for certain enemies — and they get reset after every round. This made it feel like the combat would never end when there are more than six enemies in a fight. Speaking of multiple enemies in the same combat, the game really starts to stutter when you’re fighting against more than a few enemies at once. Now, you could say it’s not a big deal, because the game is still playable, right? Well, sadly, it doesn’t end with this. While the first few hours of the game are alright and I didn’t notice anything strange, Grimshade is full of bugs as you continue into its later parts. I had to load my save file multiple times because I couldn’t go on with battles due to these glitches. Sometimes, even this wasn’t enough and I was forced to restart the whole game in order to go on in Grimshade. During these moments, the game basically worked, I just couldn’t interact with anything anymore and it didn’t react to my actions. There is a map available in Grimshade which really comes in handy because you can travel to certain points of the game. When you get injured in the combat, the only way to regain your health is to heal yourself with special items or go back to a Haven. I found this feature a bit unnecessary, as you could teleport directly to the Haven from the map and fill up your health immediately instead of using your items. The graphics and art style of Grimshade really do remind me JRPGs of the 90s, so everyone who enjoyed these games will like Grimshade‘s look. The first thing I always do, with every game, is to check the graphics settings. As someone who is really into pretty graphics, I was very pleased to see that Grimshade supports a resolution of up to 4k. However, as I was playing this game in 4k, although it looked really pretty, I noticed that this game is poorly optimized for this resolution and the text is way too small. I ended up getting a headache soon after reading it for a while and it doesn’t help that even the menu buttons are small. Suffice to say, I couldn’t go on playing it on this resolution anymore and changed it back to 1080p, yet, to be honest, the text is still too small for my taste. All in all, while Grimshade started off pretty fun, my immersion got destroyed due to its bugs and poor optimization. I really looked forward to playing Grimshade, but little things kept piling up which made the experience as a whole very frustrating. It’s such a shame, but I can not recommend Grimshade in its current state. With that said, Grimshade was a disappointing experience overall, as I wanted to enjoy the game. While it does have an interesting premise and some nice features that aren’t totally executed completely, I would have recommended the game goes through a bit more time in QA to maximize on its strengths and fix some of its game breaking bugs. [code]Feel free to follow my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34470115/]Curator Page[/url] or visit https://noisypixel.net/ for more Reviews!

Продали "кусок" игры. 1/3 от полного сюжета. Самое противное, что ни слова об этом на странице игры в стиме нет! Жадное и, главное, бесчестное отношение к комьюнити. Однозначно не рекомендую!

It is sad to say but the game is a mess for now. Non stop savegame problems text bugs. sometimes the game makes you fight the same fight twice in a row. If you realy want to play it wait a month or three until they patch it up.

Game is Fully Playable, no game-breaking bugs, however it is missing bits and pieces. Poorly optimized mechanics(Fights with more than 10 characters makes the game stuttery). There is no way to avoid 1 of your characters getting damaged when facing 6+ enemies. No advanced tactics. Missing dialogues. Farming and time-consuming but abusable loot rewards for money, which is essentially useless(money). Talk to barkeep for infinite rewards. Healing is laughable(fast travel to haven). Character equipment variety is dismal(1/10 score). No glossary(but indicated in-game there is one already). But that's ok,. at least the backers have their own statues. Rushed release game. Get it in a month or so after the bugs and texts are fixed, if ever. No game replayability.

Well as you can see I persevered for 30 plus hours, but now I have to sum it all up in one word. GARBAGE. I say this because I found myself in a situation where I had to escape from brann after a fight in the throne room. I have no health pots left, all my characters are zero or near to zero health, and there is no way to recover that health without potions. There are no merchants now, the path is linear and the battles on the way are unavoidable. Bottom line is that my team insta dies and I have no way to get more health pots to progress, hence game over. Absolutely disgraceful the devs consider this ok.

Didn't get a chance to devote more time to the game, but already want to share. Very interesting plot and characters, it's funny to see how their relationships evolve. Incredibly beautiful locations, I want to study them more thoroughly (maybe there will be a zoom option?). The main menu changes as you go through the game (I like that little feature so much and it is very beautiful picture !!), as more and more characters are running on the download screen - really neat! I really liked the music, especially the battle one! There are also some cons - bugs, but as I see - updates are going on regularly, which is good. I didn't stuck on any critical issues and I hope I never will. Personally, I really need the minimap, the ability to increase the text scale (it's to small now, it's hard to read) and speed up the battle - hoping to see these things real soon. Hugs ans foxes to ALL the team members!!

It doesn't appear to say this anywhere on the store page, but this is only Part 1 of the game. I discovered this upon reaching the end of Part 1, where it says that Part 2 comes in 2020. Had I known, I would've waited to play it. It isn't clear if Part 2 is going to be an update, DLC, or entirely separate game. I enjoy the story, which has some surprising plot twists, as well as the characters, art, lore, and music. For these reasons I'm recommending the game. Although, it can sometimes be hard to understand what's being said because the translation is pretty rough at times, causing you to get a little lost in your quest. If you're all about the battle system, I wouldn't necessarily recommend the game to you. Many character abilities are useless or not explained very well. While enemies tend to get more powerful in their initiative, ability to do AOEs, or ignore avoidance tokens, you really don't. I actually had a boss battle where I had to keep skipping everyone's turn because none of them could do a single useful thing. I restarted the battle and changed the setup, defeating it in a couple turns by spamming one of Alister's abilities. You may get new items, but they do little to increase your power or skill set. In many cases, it's like the same thing but a different element. The only elements that really matter are light and dark, so fire, wind, water--not really useful. And it's not like these items just drop after a battle, you either find them or get them as a quest reward. Like another reviewer wrote, you'll find yourself just avoiding battles because the pay off isn't worth it. I think if the developers take another look at some of the skills & rewards it could improve the battle system.

Наткнулся на эту игру совершенно случайно. Хоть я и любитель партийных RPG, слежу за этим жанром, но о Grimshade ничего не слышал довольно долго. Даже Steam не торопился рекомендовать мне ее. Наверное судьба меня берегла. Но удача вещь изменчивая, поэтому я наткнулся и купил. Установил, запустил, начал новую игру, откинулся на спинку стула, посмотрел пару-тройку кат-сцен. А затем перед моими глазами предстало окошко "Прекращена работа программы "Grimshade.exe"". Полазил в интернете, узнал, что владельцы компьютеров на Windows 7 полноценно поиграть в релизную версии не смогут, ибо у Unity есть баг с воспроизведением видео на Windows 7. Создатели данной игры извиняются и надеются на то, что со временем этот баг разработчики Unity исправят. А может просто стоит в настройки добавить опцию "Пропуск видео"? Я не встречал крашей и вылетов на Windows 7 вне показов видео. А если такую опцию не получается из-за технических ограничений сделать, то может не стоит писать в минимальных и рекомендуемых требованиях «Windows 7», а сразу указать, что работа игры гарантируется только при использовании беты? Ну, ладно, установили бету и начали играть. Кстати, стоит отметить, что потом снова придется устанавливать релизную версию, чтобы пройти сражение с одним боссом. Ну а потом снова устанавливать бету. О графике многого и не скажешь. Она приятная, симпатичная. Единственное, что не нравится – когда персонаж бегает по локациям, то окружающая обстановка становится «резковатой». К примеру, если зажать клавишу Tab, которая отвечает за подсветку NPC и предметов, то имена персонажей становится во время движения не очень хорошо читаемыми. Стоит отметить оптимальный баланс между сюжетом и сражениями. Сражения сменяются разговорами и сюжетными ставками ровно перед тем моментом, когда от них устаешь. Разговоры с NPC, изучение мира прекращается в тот момент, когда ты вот-вот начнешь зевать. Да и сами диалоги, описания предметов и объектов, внутриигровые заметки читать приятно. Информации по лору подается ровно столько, сколько нужно. Она грамотно знакомит с миром, отвечает на возникающие вопросы, но и не перегружает излишними подробностями. Спутники сделаны по проверенным временем шаблонам персонажей из ролевых игр. Хотя определенное их переосмысление наблюдается. К примеру, молодой воин с юношеским максимализмом не является аналогом Мэри Сью, а чаще принимает вредные для партии решения. От сюжета не ждите каких-либо шокирующих поворотов, вопросов, заставляющих задуматься. Его можно сравнить с бульварной литературой. Он не даст заскучать, но никакого отпечатка на вашу личность он не наложит, вспоминать о нем вы в будущем скорее всего не будете. Однако, одно исключение все-таки есть. Пожалуй, концовка данной игры запомнится мне надолго. Ибо такой бездарности я не видел никогда. Да даже концовки Mass Effect 3 кажутся шедевром. Игра тупо обрывается на совершенно рядовом моменте и вам говорят, что глава 1 закончена. Ждите главу 2 в 2020 году. Более вульгарно разве что было бы показать изображение руки, средний палец которой поднимается вверх, а остальные четыре пальца прижимаются к ладони. Я вообще не понял – я покупал Grimshade или Grimshade Episode 1? Почему в описании игры написано не «Grimshade – это первая часть саги», «Grimshade – это начало истории компании героев», а написано, что это «Grimshade — это партийная ролевая игра», «Grimshade — это история компании героев». Даже в тех случаях, когда разработчики хотят сделать продолжение, то они, как правило, заканчивают основной сюжет игры, а не обрывают все одной фразой. Кстати, уже прошла половина 2020 года. А о «главе 2» не слышно ни слова. Вообще непонятно, делают ее или нет.

I just love the fighting mechanics in this game. Every fight is different and you have various options in your disposal to approach the fights. The character progression and skill development is completely new and I have not come across something like this before and I loved it. Awesome boss fights and you have to figure out the strategy to defeat each of them. Story is very nice and it got me hooked, there was never a point where it felt boring and predictable. A must try game.