Sipho

I'm giving a negative review for a very simple reason. There is not enough content to justify the price, AND, what little content there is, it's not polished and quality checked, this game could use a lot of improvement. They probably aren't, but I hope the developers read this review. After about 5 hours, I have no desire to play this game anymore at all. I've pretty much seen everything there is to see. Not the ending, admittedly, but I'll tell you why later. The game only has like 11 levels total, and there aren't many enemies in the game, including boss fights. If I'm not mistaken, there are only two possible boss fights for every boss level in the game, the final one might be the same every time I'm not sure. When I came into this I was expecting randomized enemies, I don't know how hard that is to program but seeing the same enemies all the time that even have specified names just brings down the experience. The game stops being survival and becomes more of a science to study. The gameplay is fundamentally flawed on numerous levels, the probably most egregious issue being energy cost. Certain parts of your Sipho cost so much energy, yet energy will not regenerate quick enough in order to compensate, which really damages a lot of synergies. Every single little thing on your Sipho needs energy and yet there's just practically nothing you can do to mitigate the problem. The second worst problem is a lot of weapons are just plain and simply inefficient. Caltrops or whatever they're called, are easily the best weapon in the entire game from my personal observation. It just tears through enemies like they're wet tissue paper, on top of destroying projectiles so you're pretty safe. All of the other weapons in the game are either too weak, or suffer fatal flaws that prevent them from being useful. One of the Siphos has like a literal gun that shoots out explosive orbs and yet its damage is so pitifully low that even with 4 of them you can't really kill anything with it, especially due to the fact that it's easy to simply miss your target or not hit important locations. My propose idea to solve this would be to make them sticky. My favorite strategy in the game, the red tentacles that steal life + the stunning thing, do not even work, because the damage they deal is so pitifully low that it just get destroyed constantly. And I don't understand what's wrong with the stun mechanic, but it doesn't even work most of the time, the enemy keeps moving and continues to attack me even though their weapons were clearly in the blast zone of the stun. I don't know what's going on. The bone Sipho as you can clearly see is my absolute favorite, but it's literally unusable and completely unviable. That brings me to my next issue. You can heal yourself, but that too costs energy, and a lot of it. Doing two actions at the same time as a sipho is basically a death sentence, yet the gameplay is clearly asking you to do that very thing in order to survive. However, if you want more energy with better regeneration, you have to add parts and pieces to your sipho, continually growing it bigger and bigger... which is a major issue. Being small is a death sentence, being huge severely limits your traversal abilities, and being medium sized leads to energy issues. I also think it's a problem everything is so manually activated. Why do I have to activate my own healing mechanisms, and why do they cost so much energy? If I heal, I can't attack anymore. If I can't attack anymore, I take damage. If I take damage, I need to heal. If I heal, I don't have energy anymore. Oh, and I also cannot out-heal the damage I'm taking either. I'm just forced into a death. I have utterly failed to beat the boss on Level 11 repeatedly over and over again. I'm pretty certain that's the final boss and I just cannot do it. There is no strategy. The most optimal run I've had yet still failed, the caltrops one. I got overwhelmed by three enemy Siphos at once and died. I can't seem to find any winning strategy.

after playing the main campaign for a few hrs its a textbook buyers remorse... did try most of the classes/species CRAMPED MAPS: even if you could ever afford to "get big" its a bad idea cause you will spend LOTS of extra time trying to find an accommodating path SCARCE RESOURCES: if you loose more than a few parts you more often then not, may as well just quit and restart, cause you arent going to be able to recover from the loss 5/6 times ALMOST NO ACTUAL COMBAT -mobs will always flee when weakened... or even worse... just zip by, ignoring you.. often faster than you even if you managed to afford several mobility attachments. -meaning you are going to spend almost all of your game time chasing down fast small mobs that will easily zip through tight spaces you can no longer dream of squeezing past due to the previously mentioned cramped play area -many of the enemies i "caught" either died on my first attack or i only got cause they jammed themselves into a corner of the cramped environment (anything else will just cheese you or pin you so you cant turn around and fire... instant loss of run when that happened) MOBILITY IS A NIGHTMARE (controller experience) -the one positive i can say, is all skills including boost can be easily rebinded and even overlapped so you can fire multiple part types at once (everything gets a separate button by default based on order attached) -going forward... aint happening... if you arent constantly aiming with the right stick you will often just... swivel in a random direction, often backwards.... -and realigning yourself or just trying to turn is really slow or wont even register the attempt for a second or two best way i could describe my experience in a sentence is "rick and morty's hyper realistic street fighter" cause i spent... so much wasted time even trying to find or chase something to fight in anything that wasnt a boss area

Being that [i]Sipho[/i] can be beaten within two hours, it would be an understatement to say that said product is overvaluing itself when its content is shallow, predictable, and functions more like a sandbox than a real game. Could you imagine if [i]SPORE™[/i] never made content after the [url=https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/Cell_Stage]cell stage[/url]? If so, then you have already visualized everything this so-called video game has to offer; avoid all cell-based video games as their developers have clearly enjoyed SPORE™ yet failed in adding anything new to the evolution simulator genre.

Great game with great replay value. Oddly enough my Twin daughters caught me playing this when they were four and absolutely love it, calling it "Cell game". They're almost 6 now and most of this play time so far is them wanting me to play it with them for 10-20 minutes at a time.

heavily underrated game similar to that of thrive, spore cell stage, and primordialis - however, its far more refined and has beautiful visuals. the gameplay is fun and very replayable, combat is rewarding yet surprisingly difficult. once you have the basic gameplay down, you can try going for achievements. the most difficult one requires you to beat the game without any combat zooids, and is a great challenge for completionists. heavily recommend to anyone interested in "build an organism" type games who like in-depth combat systems. the game could probably be classified as a roguelike, due to the randomly generated levels(except for boss rooms) and your run being deleted upon death. honestly, im surprised its such a niche game. the physics are a little jank (your zooids can be pushed around, sometimes to the extreme) but you get used to it after a while, and there aren't any common game breaking bugs aside from occasionally getting stuck somewhere due to levels being randomly generated. updates are few and far between, but the game shouldn't get abandoned anytime soon. also, the music's pretty great, if a little repetitive.

coll

I’m not sure how this is at all Steam Deck verified. It controls very clunky on the deck, and for the price I was expecting a lot more visual polish/UI feedback. Truly a programmers UI. There’s something fun here but it wasn’t for me.

Sipho has about 2 hours of content. I finished the game, beat all the bosses, and unlocked every species on my second attempt. The game quickly lost its purpose for me: I managed to create an overpowered build on my second try, and after that I was just replaying the same loop to unlock everything. I can only recommend buying the game at a 50% discount or higher.

fun for a little bit but gets repetitive fast. theres not alot of variety between runs and the game is extremely easy, though this could be seen as a positive since it means a variety of creature configurations are viable. theres not alot of creature parts either which limits what you can do. only recommend buying on a heavy discount.

The game is awesome, but it spawns the creatures you make, so when i'm trying to play a run without being op, i get obliterated (at the final boss especially) It needs a do not spawn all creatures button, but other than that, great game.