Wastelanders

Overall the game is pretty good with nice pixel art, good enemy design and a unique combat design. However, I do have some qualms with said combat. My biggest issue is with the action economy. The game currently has a system where skills cannot take up the same speed value and this system works great when you are only controlling one character but starts to get annoying fast when you are controlling multiple. There are many instances where I've been completely locked out of acting with one character because the other one already took up all the speed values. This felt even worse when I realized that the enemies are not restricted like this. In the boss encounter, the boss likes to summon these beetles which can spam a singular move with 4 speed. This means that if you want to redirect the skill, you can only do it once since there can only be one skill with 5 speed. Trying to clash with 6 skills at 4 speed when you only can only redirect with one skill feels awful and unfair to play against. Additionally, I think the dialogue feels very unnatural. The characters feel one dimensional and say things that no one would really say like "Oh I should switch my deck around" or something to that extent. Also, The story is hard to follow since you are just dropped into this world and they constantly throw phrases at you like "NITES" which I still have no idea what "NITES" is supposed to refer to (Although I didn't read the story very carefully after how unnatural the beginning dialogue felt.) The game could also use some major quality of life improvements. I'll just list all the ones that I feel would be solutions to things that annoyed me in the game - A toggle that shows all enemy intents or active clashes. It was really annoying having to check every skill to see who it was targetting and whether or not it was clashing or not. - Being able to directly click on an enemy skill to clash instead of having to click on the main body. It's annoying having to hover over skills to see what they have to do and then to click on the main body instead of the skill to clash. - Clash highlight feature on the clashbar. If I wanted to undo a clash, I'd have to find the clash in the clashbar which got annoying to look through when there were many clashes at once. A feature that highlighted the clash you were hovering over on the clashbar would be very nice -Keyboard shortcuts. Always nice. - Buffer dice rolls. Sometimes the clash wouldn't occur because I clicked too early. In essence, the only real complaint I have with the game is the action economy. Not all games need excellent dialogue to be enjoyable and the QOL issues are pretty minor. I think this game has serious potential and I am looking forward to season 1.