The Sorceress

Before I get on with the review in question, I’m going to talk about the controversy surrounding this game here, since I've been banned from the discussions before the game was even released and this review can't exactly be taken down by the developer as easily as a discussion can and frankly, this is something people need to be aware about what the developer was trying to pull before the game came out. Basically, before the game was released, the game had its store page set up for a certain amount of time before it actually released and during the time after the store page being set up and up until release, the game had a long list of awards that the game had apparently won: http://imgur.com/8R22Blf Among those was the devgamm award 2017 which hasn't even been given out yet, the Indie World Awards for best atmosphere which actually went to a game called "Heat Guardian" along with several others that I explained about in the discussion it's self along with me backing up these claims with evidence. The discussion that I originally posted reposted onto one of my groups: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store#announcements/detail/521691071104122156 Naturally, as I said earlier, I got banned for posting this in the discussions of the game because of "spam" and this also happened to some other users that called the guy out on it: http://imgur.com/ZTKa8n1 Anyway, the dev was willing to quickly censor anyone calling him out on it, however, I posted the news onto my twitter which ended up garnering some attention along with several media outlets covering the story that also ended up getting banned from the discussions after they made the articles centring around the developer lying about earning awards: My tweet: https://twitter.com/MellowOnline1/status/825752210676015105 MMOFallout's article: http://mmofallout.com/indie-developer-karabas-studio-lies-about-awards/ SoapBoxGamer's article: https://web.archive.org/web/20170818085241/http://www.soapboxgamer.com/2017/01/31/karabas-studios-the-sorceress-claims-false-awards/ SoapBoxGamer stating she was banned after posting the article: https://twitter.com/Farolessa/status/826560460992499712 After realising media outlets were picking up on this, the developer quickly removed the awards once he realised more and more people were noticing and even though it's good that he's removed the awards, I feel like he still hasn't learned from it, because he appears to be someone that believes it's okay to do this sh*t if he goes unnoticed which is the exact opposite of what happened here. [h1]Review[/h1] So after all the sh*t that happened with this thing prior to release, what's the game like? It's boring. I can’t really some it up in any other way. The first 5 minutes of the game are laughably bad with an opening scene that runs like a PowerPoint presentation along with terrible grammar on top of a black background. It's also painfully obvious early on that the game is a mobile port because little has been done to make the PC's controls actually quick to get the hang of. The feature to swipe across the screen wasn't even taken out from the PC version either. It also opens up with a quest where you have to stand on top of a barrel...and yes I'm not joking, you literally stand on a barrel and your first quest is completed. Combat is also flawed, the enemies, once they swing, they're almost defined a hit, even if you're 50 feet away from them, which also means there's no strategy to the game, you just go up to them, mash the attack button and run circles around them till your healing power recharges. The quests are also some of the most copy and pasted quests you can get in RPGs and are mostly just kill this, stand on a barrel, get this and that's as far as it goes. There's little to no story to play out to you because the game doesn't go into much about its own story as if it doesn't even care to tell you much which makes the story seem pointless and seems lazily tacked on which is something that's important in RPGs. Overall the game is boring and seems incredibly tacked on and the developer's behaviour just makes things worse. [h1]Update 02/02/2017[/h1] Since I've now gotten editing privileges back, I wanted to inform you all the developer flagged the review for being abusive temporarily and has of this date been unflagged after it had been reviewed by a Steam moderator: https://twitter.com/MellowOnline1/status/826946801337036800 My Steam curator group: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/MellowReviews

https://youtu.be/RTrD9uVp0bs The Sorceress is an MMO style-based single-player experience without any of the concepts that make an MMO worthwhile. Bland and overly generic gameplay that is marred extensively with broken english showing that the Developers couldn't even be bothered to hire an English translation service outside of Google. The game is so boring I couldn't even be bothered to suffer past the first 1/2 hour of gameplay. Nothing about this game is good. The controls are exceptionally counter-intuitive. The "I" button to engage dialogue, are you kidding me!?!?! Note to Dev: Standard practices for most video games denote a certain intuitive control scheme for most games. These are typically dictated by minimal movement of the entire hand to be able to control your game. That makes your control scheme objectively bad. But, to be fair it's indicative of the entire experience. This game is a chore. Not a game. The $7 price tag makes me want to punch my screen. It is an insult to any gamer to actually expect money for this crap. Final Verdict: Game 3/10 Developer integrity and honesty -1/10

Not too long ago I talked about The Sorceress, a game so good that it fraudulently touted itself as winning numerous awards and promptly banned anyone who dared to say otherwise. But how bad can a game be that, in a theoretical alternate universe, managed to take home best graphics, best atmosphere, best action, the Indie World Award, and the Dev Gamm award that hadn't even happened yet? Pretty bad. The sorceress tells the story of a world torn asunder by bad creatures, and you the sorceress are the only one that can stop them. The game tells you this through broken English narration and recorded video of the main character hitting things with her sword while numbers pop out. You'd be forgiven if you mistook this for a bad fan-made machinima project, all it's missing is the five frames per second video and the 'unregistered bandicam' logo splashed at the top. You often hear game critics talk about developers not bothering to put any effort into their quests, but I think Karabas Studio should be claiming a patent on the concept. The second quest you receive in the game is from an innkeeper and literally just says "I need to kill 2 Skeletons. Can you kill the skeletons for me, please?" So you kill the 2 skeletons, come back, and receive a healing potion. Your next quest? "I need to kill 10 skeletons. Can you kill the skeletons for me, please?" It has nothing to do with the broken English, that I could at least have some sympathy for. After you kill the skeleton king, the game gains more of a semblance of plot, but not really. There are monsters in a nearby dungeon and they want to destroy the town. If you want to stop them from doing that, you're going to have to kill them. That's pretty much it. The controls and mechanics in the game are an utter mess, almost as if it was developed by someone who didn't have the faintest clue on how to create a video game, from the action hotbar that doesn't work much of the time to the health/mana potions that are button operated and have no cooldown between use. Your first interaction will likely be wondering why the hell none of the NPCs are interactive until you figure out that the developer has mapped that button to I. Yes, I, the universally accepted interact button. The dungeon that makes up the breadth of the game is a one way series of corridors randomly dotted with a small assortment of lazily cobbled together generic fantasy mobs. Enemies in the game respawn so quickly, including bosses, that by the time you've cleared out a room the one behind you has repopulated. That's assuming of course that they don't just immediately respawn where the previous one dropped. That's also assuming that you can manage to stay locked on to an enemy, since the tab targeting barely functions and using the mouse to target is like trying to walk a cat on a leash. There are a ton of little things here and there that should be second grade knowledge when building a game, but somehow still managed to be missed. Inventory management is, well, nonexistent. You can't move items to different slots, you can't drop stacks, and the button disappears whenever you do something. In order to drop the stack of 20 'sculls' (their spelling, not mine) that you've collected, you need to click the skull, click drop, rinse, and repeat. And be sure to drop them in a place you'll never go back to, the items stay on the floor forever, even after shutting the game off, and you pick them up automatically by walking near them. By the end of the game, your inventory is a cluttered mess of teleport gems and keys that are forever placed at the earliest spot you had an open inventory space. The teleport gems, presumably a workaround to the game's awful spawning system, teleports you deeper into the dungeon since you respawn at the front when you die. There is a five minute cooldown, however there wasn't a visible countdown that I saw. You just have to keep using the item until it works. Characters and enemies in the game are a mixed bag of store bought assets, including your player character who appears to be a random stock anime girl. You pick up palette swap armor and weapons over the course of the game that don't affect your appearance, since that would require someone with modeling knowledge and thus be far beyond this game's technical budget. Armor and weapons are just six color swaps of the same items, and there's only a small handful of enemies that the game reuses prolifically. Enemy AI is, expectedly, idiotic. Since mobs respond based on your proximity alone rather than to damage received, it is entirely possible to set yourself up with longer range spells and just keep peppering them from afar. In fact, this is how I beat the final boss. A sad, but not unexpected end to an equally sad and not all that unexpected game. You should keep your eyes open, for a game with early 2000's graphics and not a hint of atmosphere, the draw distance is disgustingly short, rarely going as far as the length of the room you're in. I managed to beat The Sorceress in under five hours, because part of me wanted to finish the game and prove some semblance of "it wasn't all that bad," but I'm not going to turn this into a cost analysis based on the seven dollars I paid because it was five hours of pain and frustration. In a world where one-man games are becoming increasingly high quality, where Steam is getting piled on like a landfill with trash, games like The Sorceress don't have a place, not even for the people who like the 'so bad it's funny' aspect. It's not funny anymore. One thing I didn't mention about the game is the graphics, since they are Unity assets and it doesn't seem right to pass judgement on something the developer didn't make. It's like praising your dad's baking skills over the Marie Callender pie he picked up at Wal Mart and moved from the tin over to a fancy looking plate. What I will say is that the assets are the gaming equivalent of a ransom note made out of cut up newspaper clippings, with characters that look like they were hastily ripped from a dollar store toy box and thrown together without much thought to consistency or quality. The best we can hope for is that games like this continue to be smothered in the white noise that is the current Steam release climate.

Oh, look! World of Warcrack with no vertical mouse translation! Does it blow Skeleton Members? Unequivocal Yes. The game is empirically ♥♥♥♥. It wants to be World of Warcraft and Diablo all at the same time-- then sends you on a quest to kill a thing you can't kill until you've ground out a few thousand level 1 mooks... To even be *able* to kill the level 1 Boss monster. Go figure. Chief Minion S3cr3t4ryK1tt3h and I spent a bit more than half an hour with this game-- details below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-38ECqpeX0 TL;DW: You couldn't pay me enough to play the entire game. That's NOT going to happen.

The fact that I have received this game as a gift shouldn't take away from the fact that over an hour of my time that I have spent between this game's demo and the paid version have been completely and utterly wasted over the past week that I have encountered this game. [h1]First Off, A Little History Lesson[/h1] "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana (1863-1952) The whole saga begins precisely one week ago with Karabas_Studio releasing this game with awards from two shows, the Indie World show and the Dev Gamm show. The only issue is that this was all fake, and here's why. The award shows usually award games of the previous calendar year. So for example, in the case of Indie World show, he claimed that he won those awards in 2016. The only problem is that to be eligible for that show's awards, the developer has to release this game in 2015. The Dev Gamm award that he so featured on his game's store page was for this year, 2017. To generally be eligible for that award, on Planet Earth, the game would have to be released in 2016. By this humble reviewer's opinion, either he never was nominated for those awards, or he pulled a fast one on all of us and released the game on three separate occasions on three consecutive years, one for each year. Since we haven't heard of this game until last week, the former is the most likely scenario. When called out on the use of these awards to bolster the prestige of the game, the developer acted swiftly and banned everyone who had called him out on it, with one member eating a 48-hour Steam community ban over his review of the game. These bans have since been reversed by a Steam community moderator, but the damage has already been done to the developer. His reputation has been shot by censoring the criticism that he so desparitly tried to avoid. [h1]Now concerning the game[/h1] The game has a very simple plot that goes along the lines of this, "[i]On a very terrible and stormy night, the dead rises from the grave to cause terror to the citizens of a very peaceful kingdom. The king of the kingdom rallied his forces against the dead, but he fails to stop them from ravaging the countryside. The task then falls on a peasant girl in a remote village to stop the dead.[/i]" The plot is very basic, but it doesn't do much to bolster the game, which claims to be an RPG at its core. Gameplay wise, the game plays a lot like a MMO, but even then the execution is flawed, which doesn't speak for much. For example, To buy an weapon AND armor in the game, you have to interact with the relevant merchant twice, once for your weapon, and once for your armor. The armor in this game doesn't really boost your defense stat, but rather increases your HP by a relevant factor. The lowest armor boosts your HP by 10, for example. Weapons are not that much better, as your basic sword only does 1-2 points of damage, and to buy an upgrade to the next level cost you 500 gold. Speaking of gold, the way that you obtain gold in this game is completely laughable. You get gold from monsters as a drop (maybe even as a rare drop), but even then the amount of gold you get from monsters can vary from one gold to ten gold. The game actually encourages you to grind for your equipment rather than levels, which you can build rather quickly if you can track down the proper monsters, and you are willing to spend a little time killing them. On the subject of monsters, the monsters in this game is a joke at best. The skeletons in this game have only one behavior, charge and attack, something that only basic monsters with a little programming can do, but the first boss fight doesn't require the player to play with a little skill, and can defeat it by spaming one attack and healing up when necessary. The only good thing concerning monsters is that their levels do go up with the player's levels, so that there is a little bit of difficulty that is maintained when fighting them. But that doesn't even mention that when you defeat a monster, another one can sometimes spawn right on top of you, sometimes killing you in the process if you don't heal up in time. That isn't good game design. [h1]Overall, is it worth my money?[/h1] The winded answer is that the game does offer a bit of challenge for your gaming dollar, but with the current price point of $6.99 USD, there are a lot better games out there that offer a much greater value for your gaming dollar, and some are even free. Final Verdict: 1/10 [h1]Video[/h1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K91kHGTulOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVlT4nUc_BE

TLDR at bottom if you just want the bullet points. The following is my impressions of the game after about 3 hours of gameplay. I would really suggest you try the demo. If you do enjoy it, the rest of the game is more of the same. The graphics aren't mind blowing, but I find them to be really charming, and it kind of feels like a throwback. The gameplay is very basic and straight forward, kill things to get exp and gear to make your numbers bigger, so you can kill bigger things and get more bigger numbers to fight even more bigger things.The quests are basic kill/fetch quests and it's basically a grindfest. The English in the game isn't perfect and will make you crindge if you're a grammar nazi or intolerant of poor English. By pretty much all standards this game is bad. It's got the addictiveness of a clicker in that you are basically doing nothing, but seeing your numbers get bigger is fun; The narrative is weak (if there is one, feels like every quest is just side missions), all items are just "whites", your next chest piece will have more armor, and your next sword more damage, but that is all they're good for and there is no visual difference; sections of the game are poorly balanced and frustrating (around level 13 you have to go through a room of level 2 spiders, but there are so many that if they get off a volley of venom you get one shot unless you're drastically over geared, boss that spawns adds continued to spawn adds after death, etc.); spells feel uninspired, and so far seem to be featuring "enchanted" melee attacks and various bolts (fire bolt/lightning bolt/etc.); and lots of interface issues (you can't hotkey potions, all of the interfaces such as your bag, character screen, etc. can only be closed by clicking the X and can only be opened by physically clicking on them). Despite all this I just find the game damn charming and nostalgic. I'm not sure if that is what the developer was going for, but it truly feels like something I would have been playing as a kid about 15-16 years ago and has the same sort of issues as games of that time. Definitely not a game for everyone, but if a pointless grindfest sound like fun, you like clicker-esque games that are just all about getting bigger numbers, or you just want to remember how far games have come... Try the demo, it's a good representation of the whole. TLDR: The game is bad, but bad in a way that I think it has an audience. Ultimately, if you think this might appeal to you play the demo. Don't even finish it. If you don't like the game in the first 5 minutes, you're not going to like it. The Bad: Rehashes age old bad design decisions, bugs, imbalance, uninspired combat\loot, interface, grindfest, graphics, poor English, Comic Sans. The Good: Rehashes age old bad design decisions, bugs, imbalance, uninspired combat\loot, interface, grindfest, graphics, poor English, Comic Sans.

因为我还没玩到战斗的部分，所以就先不说，但是这款游戏真的有很多地方做得不好 -首先，开始游戏之后的介绍界面不能跳过，会耽搁许多时间 -不能修改按键，这点很不爽 -进入游戏之后存档你并不知道是否保存成功，游戏内也没有读档界面 -动作有些违和感，而且NPC头像画质太差了吧 -最后，在开始任务的时候选择了目标之后不知道按哪个键，反正我每个键都按了也没反应（虽然可能这个问题出在我身上）

セールだったので購入、一応クリア？　までプレイしたと思います 購入はオススメできません、最初のエリアはクリアできても次のエリアで投げたくなるでしょう モンスターはポップ位置が決まっており 必ずその場所で再出現・・・　ボスも リポップ間隔もよくわからず突然の時もあればしばらくわかない事もあります そして細かな所でイライラするシステム、インベントリの整理なんてまずできません 敵をクリックしたらいきなり一直線に走り出すわマップは記憶されないわ 捨てたアイテムは何故かずっと残ってるわ突然攻撃をやめて棒立ちしだすわ 後半になるとさらにイライラが増えていきます こんなゲームですが遠距離スキルを入手できればクリアまでは時間が解決してくれます なんせ敵さんはプレイヤーが一定範囲に入らない限り反応しないのです、やったね！ 唯一評価できるのは女の子のキャラモデル（NPC含む）だけは結構良いです、普通に可愛い しかしカメラがアレなので鑑賞はできません、間近に見ることもできないので期待しないように [spoiler] レベル１５になると違うエリアにお金を払って移動ができます その先に宝石と５万Gで変える武器防具があるのですが・・・ 武器の能力が無いんですよね、攻撃力も一切何も無し そういうもんなのか？　能力開放？　等の方法があるのか謎 [/spoiler]

Mouse camera controls are completely off from every other game of this type, and the dev can care less.

Waste of money for a 'game' that looks worst than most free games out here. No RPG elements here whatsoever. Looks more like a MMO and plays like one. A really bad one. I had much more fun playing Runscape for a whole 2 and a half hours mining some iron, silver and gold ores to craft some weapons and utensils to sell in the market than 5 damn minutes of this horrible joke of a game. Whatever you do, please don't waste 5 bucks on this bad joke unless you: a. Want to buy this game if you like wasting money or want to review it online; b. Want to collect as many games as possible (only god knows why); c. Are a masochist and like to suffer / have no soul; d. Don't know how to read (would be kinda sad though). Welp, that's my warning. Wanna waste money? Wanna slowly poison your soul? Wanna have no fun whatsoever while wasting precious life time (without godmode you're life has a limited lifespan, sorry. And no respawns allowed. Server admin just wants to see us suffer) and brain cells? Wanna expirience the true definition of S H I T on your own computer? Well I'll be damned! Just buy this game!