Protect the Grimoire

This game is for players who like starting with nothing and grinding out an op build with sweat and tears

Gostei bastante do jogo. É um estilo que já me é familiar, então foi bem fácil entrar no ritmo e aproveitar desde o começo. No geral, achei o jogo bem balanceado, divertido e bem leve. Uma coisa que curti bastante foi poder montar builds diferentes. Dá pra fazer algumas combinações bem legais que mudam um pouco a forma de jogar. Além disso, o jogo tem dois bosses que são realmente difíceis, o que rende algumas boas horas de gameplay. Como ponto negativo, senti que ainda poderia ter um pouco mais de variedade nas builds. Também achei que alguns power-ups acabam sendo menos úteis que outros, então às vezes nem compensa muito pegá-los. No geral, achei um ótimo jogo para o que ele se propõe a fazer. É divertido, tem bons desafios e consegue entreter por um bom tempo.

Protect the Grimoire is, I mean I guess someone at some point, someone thought this was going to be okay as an idea to launch as a game... it fails what I call the "look around you" test. Developers should take 60 seconds and look at the front page of Steam. If the game they are making doesn't look better than any of the games on the front page, this is a problem. See, games don't exist in a vaccuum. Gamers don't really need another incredibly weak Space Invaders ripoff in the age of games like Expedition 33. So this was an amateur attempt to make a ground based shoot 'em up/bullet hell where you run along the ground and shoot spells at monsters or whatever (a pixel blob is a pixel blob) coming at you from the sky. The developer clumsily bolted on an upgrade mechanism ripped directly out of Vampire Survivors (there's absolutely nothing new or original here), and barely worked out how to create a working GameMaker Studio project, which was quickly rushed onto Steam Direct. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The graphics aren't great. Incredibly lazy pixelcrap was used, worse than the majority of pixelcrap... like, some people spend a lot of time making pixelcrap "art" (which still looks terrible, we have 4K displays now as standard for contemporary gaming, no excuse for using VGA resolution anymore), this was probably done in less than half an hour. That will understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises. The amateur pixelcrap visual presentation here at best could have been an attempt to use "retro" as a crutch, a weak excuse to avoid admitting the developer wasn't capable of doing the job of a game developer this decade and creating cutting edge, high quality 3D visuals. While a lack of skill or funding is the explanation for this failure, it's no excuse. The end result of this incompetence is a game that looks dramatically inferior to professionally developed games. Terraria and Undertale succeeded [i]despite[/i] looking crap, not [i]because[/i] they look crap. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Mhbs has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical shortcomings push this game below minimum standards for any competently developed modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 2 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam? Protect the Grimoire is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]