Shadowveil: Legend of The Five Rings

The game is not great. The main gameplay loop is overly simple, and many of the upgrades are actually detrimental to you early on in the game. For example, you are given 2 "Political Capital", one of the many meta currencies that exist in the game, early on. IF YOU BUY ANY OF THE UPGRADES THAT COST 2 POLITICAL CAPITAL before buying the quest board, which costs 1 political capital, you will be soft-locked out of getting any more political capital unless you pick an RNG reward for "+1 Political Capital", which will likely be a run ender early on, as you need to be using those rewards to buy Command Points, which directly correlate to how many characters you can field during battle. Not a game breaking bug, but you may not even see a reward for political capital for several runs early on, as you start out very weak. The main problem is that this game is full of situations like that. Early on, unlocking any new item components will make you weaker, as you will likely only have room to equip a few items at a time. All items are stronger when fused with a duplicate of themselves, often giving +5% power every 5 or 10 seconds. This means your characters will get stronger as the fight goes on. When fusing item components with different components, the result will likely not be as powerful. Once you've trudged along and are capable of beating bosses, if you chose Strategist as your trait, the flag you place down to buff your characters will be stuck behind the oni boss. If you have 4 strategists, you at least get 2 flags, and can pull one of them out from behind him. My advice would be to unlock quartermaster ASAP and just put it on everyone until you know what you're doing. It gives free blue cards at max level. The story is also worse than non-existent. It's actively annoying. Half way through, you'll get bombarded with an annoying tag-along character that just tells you how terrible you are. I think that's actually the vast majority of the voice lines in the game. Overall, I wouldn't really recommend this game. I got about an hour of playtime for each dollar I spent, as I got it on sale, but honestly half of my playtime was like pulling teeth. It was kind of fun as a little autobattler for like 6-8 hours, but your money is probably spent better elsewhere.

Oh, this is a bad game lmao. The art and music are fine. The sound effects are a little weird and intrusive---lots of crispy crackly and little pings at odd times, fully apart from the traditional instruments in the soundtrack. The writing is okay, although dragged down by the supremely mid voice directing. But none of these are the actual problem with Shadowveil, because Shadowveil is both boring and grindy. And by grindy, I don't mean in a fun brain off way. I mean I spent two hours retrying the first mission and that is a standard gameplay experience. Shadowveil is a dumb as rocks autobattler that feels like it was designed to be a gacha, then awkwardly pivoted into single player on the way out the door. You drop some units on the field, they run at and rng swing on the nearest enemy mob, often they find the most innovative ways to pathfind into death zones and spots where they can be useless. You can speed up combat, but there's still lots of little waits built into the UI which sucks because these would be fine in a more deliberate and reflective game but here you just wanna grind five hundred goblins to see if you can finally get past the starting boss. The game also does a miserable job communicating this. The UI is stiff and the tooltips you kind of have to coax into popping up. It feels buggy, even if they mostly got rid of the last wave of bugs in their "I'm done with this game forever" patch. Shadowveil does not tell you that you need to sandbag a bunch of runs to get your two supporting characters levelled, nor do most substats and values that you need to calculate actually have an explanation for what they do. Energy does.. something. It's probably important, but Shadowveil shuts up when you ask. Progression is slow and meager and you can screw it up, and this isn't even getting into the basebuilding. In regular roguelites, you get some currency to build your base between runs. But Shadowveil REALLY wants you to clear the first chapter before it'll let you touch any of that, and in order to clear the first chapter you have to sandbag for over two hours. I think there's a playable jankslop title under all of this, but it's just not worth the effort to monotonously grind a game that doesn't feel fun to play and isn't offering any hope that it'll get better. Just play Mahokenshi. It's the same type of thing but you can schmoove, it's tutorialized well, and it's actually fun to play. Edit: Oh, you can super brick yourself in a lot of easy to miss ways. Such as, if you spend political capital on an upgrade, you lock yourself out of getting any more political capital ever (pending a very rare rng drop). I'm assuming there are issues like this in the game because the playtesters kept screaming and climbing out of the building rather than be forced to play it.

This game is very good. I've played L5R RPG table for many years with my friends, and it is a blast having to play this game now. A few points to consider, that could make the game even better: 1 - The watchtower have little improvements 2 - It is sad to only have the crab to choose from on the main game (I know that fighting the shadow lands is their thing, however, many other clans send Samurais to the wall and with that said, could be a nice storytelling opening for other characters) 3 - Having just 2 main characters is lackluster 4 - A few conversations would make no sense in the kingdom of Rokugan due to Honor 5 - Would be nice to have more into play, it could be even more close to what is a RPG player sheet

Really enjoy the lore aspect of the game and deck building. It is very similar to Inscryption so if you enjoy games like that with the lore of LoTFR then I highly suggest trying this game. There is quite a bit of voice acting in the game so it isnt just some odd noises or walls of text to read. Right now the game is still in early design and as such has a decent amount of content ,but I do not suggest binging on it as you can burn thru both storylines fast. I really think it has a solid start and hope they full expand on more stories plus clans as I think the base of the game is pretty fun and worth playing. I would like to include that it seems many negative reviews are focused on a misunderstanding of the combat cycle. This is a deck builder with tactical placement again like games like Inscryption although you do not have to worry about random draws during the fight as much as RNG rewards where you equip the cards on the hero characters that auto fire during combat phases. I will point out that it takes getting use to placing guys on the grid to try and get the AI to focus attacks where you want them too. Think of Balloon defense games like placing a barrier to for enemy on traps or your own guys to funnel toward a specific target. There is more tactics than I think some give credit for with placement of your army.

As a casual player who has only spend a very limited amount of time trying deck building strategy games and who enjoyed auto-battler like TFT, I have to say this game is pretty fun and I beat the game in 15 hours. Beating the game caught me by surprise as I have a lot of things(I would say more than half of the buffs, and I haven't unlocked anything beyond the basic cards for each class). The only real issue(BUG) I had was in one of the Boss round (which you will encounter a few times), the boss blocked one of the battle flag (maybe because the boss collision fully covers the flag) and the flag just happen to by default spawn behind the boss and I can't grab the flag to place it where I want which is crucial to the tactic strategy but I was still able to beat the game fairly easy and quickly. The classes and cards are all pretty fun and I wish I unlocked the classes earlier too since they really have cool card and combos. In my opinion this game did well of introducing each class and game mechanism in a not overwhelming way and keep the new player hooked to keep playing, the repetitiveness wasn't to bad but I do think there is lack of content in the campaign and basically no end game. I bought this game on discount so I enjoyed it a lot. I probably wouldn't suggest buy it at the full price and I am looking forward to new updates or even DLC!

I like this game but it has too many flaws. The atmosphere is dark and broody, the characters have lots of charm, the theme is cohesive and well put together. For an autobattler, it has a decent foundation to work off but falls flat for a number of reasons. Going through some easy reasons, there are graphical bugs. For example, there are times you will be offered a reward, switch to your inventory to evaluate your options, and shift back to your rewards and find that everything is blurry and hard to read. There are also screens mid-run which will show your character's HP but they are simply too small to make out despite sitting in front of a computer screen. Moving away from graphical complaints, this game has very poor gameplay mechanics that do not respect your time. For one, lots of upgrades cost resources from your runs. Your runs have some resources which are abundant and other resources which you may never randomly pick-up during your run, such as a resource called "Political Capital". This is important because you will be locked out of ~12 upgrades until you obtain ~24 political capital which must be randomly obtained during a random run. Mind you, by selecting political capital as a resource reward, you will also be shorting yourself manpower, thus, ending your run in the near future... Did I mention this game is grindy and doesn't respect your time? Yes? Well, unlike most roguelikes, Shadowveil uses stat based mechanics. This is important because friendly units and enemies will have their own stats as well, such as Health Points, Defense, Attack, etc. This is important because as you progress through the game, your characters will encounter stronger enemies, which have higher stats, and you will lose, simply because you don't have enough upgrades and enough stats. You will have to grind run after run, after run, after run, ad nauseum, and reducing the difficulty by 30% just to start making some progress while slowly leveling up your characters. I have also run into some bugs such as my one unit disappearing at the beginning of a fight, costing me a loss, and my synergy bonus (a moveable flag that gives buffs), getting stuck behind a big boss. Ultimately, I did like this game, some what. But there is just so much wrong with this game that I dislike it even more and cannot recommend it to other players.

A casual rogue-like. You equip and level your characters, and gradually build your expeditions resources during a run. Combats you set your characters initial positioning, choose what abilities are equipped...but the auto-attacking and moving after combat starts is all automatic. Between fights you'll tweak the setups, possibly deal with weird events or shops, etc before your next combat. On its own this is a satisfactory game, as there are few casual rogue-likes that have semi-idle combat (which is rather chill) But chances are very good if you are looking at this game because its set in the world of 5 rings. If you enjoy that, you'll enjoy this. If you have no idea what the world of five rings is, come on in, its a good introduction to the Crab Clan. I cleared the game in about 20 hours, which was great. I got all the content and there wasn't a needless grind so the game didn't overstay it's welcome.

Entertaining game. The only frustrating thing is that - due to the plotline - you end up "falling back" at the end of a run even if you've built an unstoppable fortress that the final boss can't even damage let alone kill. At some point if you're overkilling the boss, it'd be great for it to say "you know what, actually you *are* stronger than this oni. Finish the poor bastard off." I recognize that this is infeasible due to the nature of the plot, but I would get very disappointed when I'd have an amazing run and it ended with my invincible army deciding to fall back despite being uninjured.

There's nothing to really do in this game. It's an auto-battler. I thought it would be turn based combat where I would be making decisions about what to do as the battle progressed. Nope. You sit there and watch the game play itself. I love this setting, but I wanted a GAME to play in this setting. I can't recommend.

Fantastic game! I loved every minute of it except for when my computer crashed one morning while I was starting it up. My laptop powered off during start up and since then I get a "Fatal Error" message and the game will not work. I tried asking for a refund; but to no avail. After 2 hours of gameplay, they will not refund you. Customer support does not exist. I've tried everything to fix this error; but, nothing is working. I've tried uninstalling it and reinstalling it, I've updated my BIOS drivers, C++, no corrupted files. Anyone have a fix for this?