Journey to Luonto

Жена сказала, что если на этом обзоре наберётся 10 лайков и 5 наград, то она подарит ящик пива. Мужики, выручайте!

Rammstein

1920

[h1] [/h1]

RPG Maker strikes again! "Journey to Luonto" is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. This is a completely and utterly generic minimum effort RPG Maker asset flip. It's like a perfect, pure example of just how garbage RPG Maker asset flips are. Almost no effort went into this. The writing is cringey, junior high school anime club dropout stuff. Map and encounter designs and everything else are incredibly basic, uninspired, and mostly straight off-the-rack. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers. This game is fairly dated at 8 years old... and even back then it looked old and busted compared to contemporary, professionally made 3D games of the same period. It looked bad then, it looks worse now. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 9 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Nope. This isn't worth downloading. While this didn't cost me any money up front, I still feel ripped off.

☀️

Без русского.

So I played this after seeing the ToastyTime video and here's what I have to say: 1.) The maps feel bare bones. There's a lot of rooms in this game where there's just tons of empty space that could be filled in, or just don't need to exist at all. 1.5.) The game is heavy with RTP and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I feel that developers should create their own assets in order to give off a unique or stylized feel. 2.) All (or most?) battles use the same music. After a while I turned off the music but from your average encounter, all the way to the bosses of this game, they all use the same battle music which gets grating after a while. 2.5) The characters clip into the enemies during battles. I don't know why this wasn't tweaked, it's as if the developer wanted the game to be in frontview but then suddenly decided "nah, sideview it is" so now every enemy is in the center, causing clipping errors, when they should've been towards the left of the screen. 3.) Every AOE spell with Liss is a reskin of each other. When I was leveling up and gaining new spells I was excited, they're very cheap and seem to hit every target! That is, until I realized they all did the exact same thing which was hit every target twice for about 200-350+ damage. I don't know why because Trist and Viktor's skills remain unique and usable in all different sorts of situations compared to Liss'. 3.2) A nitpick, but why DO Viktor and Trist's skills require MP? The highest level I got in the game so far is about 46 (from overlevelling) so I don't know if it changes but they seem like skills that could just require TP instead, the bar goes unused for the entirety of the game and it kinda peeves me off. 4.) Calm down with the text boxes, please! Sometimes when characters talk they just go on and on in a single text box, speaking in run-off sentences per box when multiple could've done the job. Also I feel you underutilized it as there could be moments where the text takes a brief, unskippable pause so as to make sure that players are actually reading the information being provided. 5.) After a while most fights become free. I'm not usually one to complain about things being too easy but this is ridiculous! A lot of the later-game enemies (and certain bosses) can just not damage you after a certain point, and the ones that do only deal 20-100 damage which is easily out-healed when Caine gets 500+ MP and can heal up to 2k HP for all members, along with them having quadruple digit health bars! The hardest boss I've encountered so far was the pixel-art Japanese boss which did about 700 damage to all my party members, but again I was way too powerful (5k HP on Viktor, my highest ranking character for comparison) and was able to easily outheal and defeat the boss without needing to reconsider my strategy. 6.) Out of all the complaints I have here this is the most upsetting to me. NPCs will give you certain (special, undroppable) armor and weapons that are IMMEDIATELY outclassed in the next world. There's nothing wrong with special items being outclassed but it feels as though you can just get a special armor/weapon, steamroll through the world, go to the next one and buy a new armor/weapon that just blatantly outclasses the previous in every way possible! Now onto my rating... 6/10 The game's pretty fun, and I not-so-secretly loved the feeling of being overwhelmingly stronger than all my enemies, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it but if you're reading this page you should go play it! After all it's free and pretty short so you won't really waste too much time. So if you enjoy simple turn-based combat, extreme numbers, and want to waste a few hours then this is the game for you! Also to the developer, please make another game, despite how critical I was I did enjoy playing this and you should make more, y'know, if ya wanna..