Edit 2 (May 2022):
The dev contacted me about a new update coming to the game that added a new game mode. I refunded the game after my first review (https://pastebin.com/NEV8cWHs), so they gave me a key to try the game again and update the review. This update will just be a refreshed review. Originally, this review was "not recommended" and 34 people found it helpful. I'll be updating my original thoughts and talking about the updates, good and bad.
TL/DR:
The game has improves a lot technically and in gameplay. There are a lot of QoL and UX improvements which have made the game better and more enjoyable. At the game's price, you get what you pay for. It's less rough around the edges and I found it to be more enjoyable than it used to be. If you like monster taming games, give it a go, but bear in mind that it still has plenty of room for improvement.
I recently got a Steam Deck, so I've been playing the game on that. You can expect 30fps at 800p and low settings with dips. You can also turn on FSR and put the game down to 540p for some power savings (you will need to untick the "fullscreen" option in the graphics options to get it to activate). The game does ultrawide resolutions, but doesn't seem to do 16:10 outside of native res, so you end up with some small black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. One thing I'd like to see improved in the graphics settings is more granularity. Currently, you're limited to just low, medium and high presets. It would be great if we could turn on and off stuff like motion blur and depth of field, and adjust other effects like shadows, lighting, anti-aliasing etc.
The game has 2 game modes now: an "island adventure" mode and a "survival" mode. The adventure mode is an open world mode with a story. The survival mode is effectively the old "Slay the Spire"-esque mode, a randomised run with more replayability split into 3 sub-modes: a prequel story mode and modes where you get either a randomised team or you draft your team. I put about 5 hours into the adventure mode (some wasn't tracked as I played offline on my Deck).
The adventure mode starts off similarly to how it did before, you choose a name, choose a starter and go through a short-ish tutorial/prologue. After which you get thrown into an open world to explore, fight other tamers, tame more mython and save Mython Island. The story isn't anything amazing, it feels like it exists just so there's something to go with the rest of the gameplay. It's cheap and cheerful, and there's not much else to say about it.
One of the thing I immediate noticed was the updated soundtrack. Generally, the music is a lot better:
- A lot of the old tracks have been gutted for new tracks
- The new tracks loop properly or nearly seamlessly
- The tone and style of the music feels very appropriate and has a lot of depth to it.
- The battle theme is energetic, bouncy and has a catchy melody.
- The menu/town music has a lovely calming, yet upbeat feel to it and uses a nice selection of instruments to add depth and musicality.
- There's a few of the old tracks still in there but there's a lot of new stuff. The capture theme is still the same (and still has a noticeable loop points but it's not too bad on this track).
A great test to a soundtrack is how bearable it is if you're staying in one are or scenario for a long time, such as a town or battle and just seeing how annoyed you get. At minimum, it should just be background music and at best, it should resonate with you. For me, I rarely found it to be just background; I enjoyed listening to a lot of the music and was quite comfortable staying in one area finding all the secrets or taking my time in a battle.
The battle interface and flow is a lot better. Type icons are labelled, which is already a marked improvement, but some of the icons are a little odd still, such as the lunar icon, which looks more like a boomerang than a crescent moon. Skills have text boxes to communicate what they do and what element and type they are. Actions are proceeded by text boxes which describe what's happening and are dismissed by button press, giving you time to understand what's happening. The AI is a little dumb at points, spamming moves repeatedly shown to ineffective when it has moves which are neutral or super effective. When you use items in battle, they're applied at the same speed as your active mython, so you can't use them to get out of a rough situation half the time. This isn't really a positive or a negative. It makes the game a little more difficult by eliminating one of the main scumming methods commonly available in pokemon (item spamming) but for that same reason, its unintuitive. If you were ever confused about type match-ups, the game now has an element guide in the pause menu, which is a much appreciated addition. There are some UI/UX issues which I will note later.
The open world is a nice addition. It's adds a bright, colourful and stylistic world for you to explore, but it's not without its flaws. I have gotten stuck a few times where my character is forever falling above some odd terrain. I got into a scenario where my last save was when my character was falling and the auto save was the same, so I kinda lost all my progress. One simple fix for this would be to add a way to teleport to one of the other teleport locations or the last location visited/used/interacted with. There's no jump. Where's my jump? You can't have an open world game without the ability to jump. A lot of the world feels a little dead. NPCs and mython just stand still all the time, with some exceptions. Initially, it was a little difficult to tell which mython were wild and which were friendly/owned by other tamers, leading to unintentional battles. The level scaling is a little odd. After the each boss, further areas have higher leveled battles, but I found the levels to be higher than my mython, but it wasn't long before my party had over-leveled. I'd suggest adding dynamic level scaling, basing enemy mython on the levels of the player's mython, maybe with a minimum level per area. This will lead to a more balanced difficulty experience, which isn't bouncing between difficult to too easy.
There are some slight UI/UX problems. Here are some I experienced:
- The lack of a cursor in the text box, making it difficult to know if you're actually able to type in it
- The game tells you the controls early on but I think it would be nice to have a legend on screen or button prompts
- If you're using a controller and the cursor is hovering over a menu item, you won't be able to select another option until you move the cursor. Since the cursor disappears when using the controller, it can be pretty annoying if you don't know that's the cause. I've notified the dev about this one so they should be working on a fix for it soon.
- In the battle menu, your moves are arranged in a 2 by X grid. If you've got an odd amount of moves, when you try to scroll down, you can only get to the last row if you've highlighted the left column, otherwise it will just get stuck and you might not even know you had another move to choose.
- There's a mython overview screen which shows you stats and the moves they know. I mentioned in my previous review that splitting moves into sections by move type (physical, ether and support) was a little pointless, made navigation less fluid and wasted time. This issue isn't in the battle interface anymore, but it is present in the mython overview screen. Having these categories is further made redundant by having the move type in the move's description. The backpack menu has categories as well, but I find them to be more appropriate here, where there are far more unique items to choose from.
- In battle, there's no indication of which skills the opponent is using are physical or special, so you have a to guess a little when it comes to using support skills or which mython to use.
I've ran out of space so read the TL/DR for a summary.
