Wormskull

[b]Playing status:[/b] finished the game, beaten the secret boss [h1]Intro[/h1] [b]Wormskull[/b] is a prequel to [b]Ashes of the Night[/b] ([url=https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198132503739/recommended/973050]my review[/url]), a turn-based RPG Maker game with party-building as its focus. Although it still retains the same concept as [b]Ashes of the Night[/b], [b]Wormskull[/b] tries to be different by providing more features from its predecessor. [b]Pros:[/b] - 14 party members - Rewarding optional areas - Stat allocation to customize your build [b]Cons:[/b] - No sprint in most areas - Repetitive grinding - Bosses are too easy - Lack of MP regen items in some areas make it hard to level your skills [b]Specs[/b] Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 [h1]Should you buy this game?[/h1] [b]No.[/b] [i]I don't recommend you to buy this game unless if you enjoy grinding and doing repetitive fights.[/i] [hr][/hr] [h1]In-Depth Review[/h1] [h3]Visuals[/h3] Most maps feel empty. They are usually categorized into three types: an empty, bland map where you have to follow in 1-3 directions to explore, a very huge map with some decorations in it, and a dungeon that I assume to be generated by an automatic dungeon generator due to its emptiness. The good-looking maps feel like a premade map with slight edits to fit the game, especially since there aren't that many of them. Some areas are also reused from [b]Ashes of the Night[/b] despite one of them to be not related to each other. Mappings aside, the game has a lot of custom graphics. I think most of its 4 GB file size was spent on the various background battle images and asset packs. Although the background battles look nice, the asset packs don't match with the default assets, which are the dominant portion in the game. Some assets and battle screens look inconsistent when they are placed next to each other because of this. [h3]Story[/h3] There aren't a lot of stories to tell in the first half. Most of it was just about recruiting party members, which somehow were willing to join your party with no complaints. The game will advance its story in the latter half, introducing the main meat of the story. Surprisingly, the plot still blends well together with its simplistic writing and short dialogues - it still provides a nice conclusion while giving a plausible connection to its sequel. [h3]The Game[/h3] [b]Gameplay[/b] As I said before, [b]Wormskull[/b] is focused on party-building, with you having to create a party of four from fourteen party members. Most of them are not available from the start - more members will join your party as you progress. Your party will be reset in the latter half, forcing you to experience two sets of party members and combining the best ones later on. The game doesn't only focus on party-building, but it also focuses on character stats. Some points can be allocated to your party members' stat after each level up, allowing you to build them as you want. However, there is no way to reset your stat, so you're bound to ditch the said party member if you screw up badly in the stat allocation. Exploration is also the main focus of the game. A lot of optional areas are available to explore which will reward you with useful gears and boss fights. Some villagers will tell you the whereabouts of them although you also can do the exploration by yourself with the risk of going to the main path by accident. However, as an exploration-focused game, the walking speed of your party is very slow. To make it worse, dashing is only available in few areas, forcing you to waste most of your time walking around between places. [b]Optional Activities[/b] Despite its good concept, optional activities are just another word of grind. You can fish, mine, and forage in some areas to get good items, which will increase in rarity as you level up. However, everything can be done in the same way: spam the Z button until you got bored. The game also seems to encourage you to do this by introducing side quests that require you to increase these skills' level to get the quest items. It was tiring to spend hours just to increase the levels, not to mention that you'll have to repeat it as you move to other towns. You can, of course, ignore these optional activities to finish the game, but the game seems to punish you for doing so. Doing these quests will reward you with either rare items or a huge chunk of money, which is needed to buy new gears or crafting manuals. Although the latter types can be avoided, the alternative is to grind until you have enough money. Heck, I didn't even have enough money to complete one quest after I finished every quest that the game has to offer. Crafting manuals are available to craft gears. However, you need to mine or farm enough minerals to craft most gears, which translates to more grinding. Some of the best gears also can only be obtained from crafting, giving you more reason to do the grinding. The thing is, the grind doesn't feel rewarding enough compared to the time that you have to waste doing repetitive tasks over and over again. [b]Combat[/b] The feature to level up your skills as you used them seems clever at first, although it soon overshadowed by repetitiveness. There are only one or two useful skills that you need to use, and wasting your time to use other skills will result in your important skills being low leveled. Moreover, all skills require MP to cast, so you also need to have a steady supply of MP regen gears or a party member that can do the same thing. However, MP regen items are lacking in the early game, which will be scarce at the latter half of the game if you don't grind enough of them. The party member that can heal your MP is also not available at some point, making it harder to level up your skill levels. Bosses are way too weak. All bosses can be defeated by repeatedly spamming 1-2 skills that you used for other bosses. The final boss can even be defeated in one turn without grinding, while the secret boss feels unfair rather than challenging - the only reason that I couldn't beat it is because of my inferior stats, not because of my poor choice of skill usage. [b]Length and Difficulty[/b] I finished the game in 24.2h and I spent 2.6 more hours grinding and defeating the secret boss. You might die a few times at first, but everything will turn into a grind as you progress the game. If you are not a completionist, you can risk your way to finish the game without doing optional quests and grinds, although I'm not sure whether you can beat the secret boss that way. [b]Problems[/b] There are some minor bugs, although the most problematic one is where you can't select a target, whether ally or enemy, whenever you use a single-target skill in battle. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] To be honest, I had a great expectation of this game. Despite its cons, I enjoyed the battle in [b]Ashes of the Night[/b] and I expected to experience something similar to that one. This game might look similar to that game at first, although the improvements ruined the best thing that that game has to offer. Grinding is part of this game, whether to finish some quests or craft good gears. Bosses also don't feel challenging at all with you having to spam the same skill over and over. I don't want to spend hours mindlessly pressing the same button to get better in a game - I'd rather restart a difficult fight because I need to figure out a better strategy to defeat them. I hate to say this, but this game feels like a setback compared to the previous one. [quote]This game was reviewed with a key provided by the developer for free through [url=https://discord.gg/xc22zZP]Reviewers' Paradise[/url], a group that connects both developers and reviewers in one place[/quote] [quote]Visit SaveOrQuit.com for detailed game reviews, posted daily![/quote]

VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Ratings 9/10 (Epic Story, Detailed Game World, Great Mechanics) [Disclaimer: The achievements in this game are all not working, so if you are an achievement hunter like me, please take that into consideration before buying] Wormskull is one of the 3 great RPGs that is developed by a single developer, Shane. The 3 great features of this game are Epic Story, Detailed Game World and Great Game Mechanics. I will explain all these in details. The developer has a great story to tell, and he tells his story through the eyes of 14 recruitable characters with 14 different classes. These character can form teams up to 4 people each, but the team and location are all story driven. The developer is able to blend the classes and skills set into one large coherent story, with a overarching mission, where the teams all do small parts in advancing the story. At the end of the game, I am very impressed at how all the details come together to form an epic story, and not just a hodgepodge of fragmented little stories. Excellent !! The second great thing about this game is the extensive and detailed game world that is crafted with love. To me, the game is much more than just doing all the story quests. It's a matter of exploring all the tiny details of the game world. There are many hidden locations in the game, and some of them will have awesome items (like "Gift of LIfe" and "Gift of Magic", which are described as 1 in a billion type of items). You will also encounter hidden bosses, and be rewarded with legendary items, permanent stats enhancing elixirs and ancient tomes that permanently increase hit rates and critical rates. Of course, you can just waltz through the game without finding all these little details, but I do enjoy smelling the roses and taking a leisure walk through the game world. The 3rd awesome feature of this game is the fun-filled game mechanics. Everything in this game improves with repeated uses, and the developer let you keep track of all the little progresses as you play the game. The 14 character classes all come with their own set of 5 to 6 unique skills. You may not need to use all of the skills, but there is great advantages in just focusing on 1 or 2 skills and repeatedly using them. For example, the Ranger class has a skill called Multi-Arrows. When you use the skill initally, it is pretty weak (Level 0), but with repeated using, it will level up to Level 10. If you equip your Ranger with a Legendary Bow and use a level 10 Multi-Arrow skill, it will devastate the entire battle field, and wipe everything that is in it. So, the smart thing to do is to focus on specific grindings, You do not need to grind your character levels or even grind all the skills. Just choose a single, powerful, AoE skill for that class, and keep grinding it to level 10. If you the coupled the level 10 skill with a Legendary Weapon, you will be unstoppable. The there is also the grindings from Fishing, Mining, Crafting, Foraging and Alchemy. Each of them have 10 levels as well. Any of your 14 different character can do their part in helping with say "Crafting". By repeatedly crafting items, you can increase your crafting levels from 0 to 10. The higher levels enable you to make awesome stuffs if you can find the right crafting manuals. At the extreme end in level 10, you will even be able to craft the awesome "Apocalypse Pendant", which will give you immense power. However, things are all inter-connected. The crafting materials for the pendant will include Diamonds and Lapis Lazulli stones which will need you to develop Mining to level 10. You will also need your Foraging to be at level 10 so that you can find Meteorites. And of course, you need to be powerful enough to slay some fearsome fire breathing dragons to get Hellstone as one of the ingredients. So, the thrill of these games is all those tiny little grinding steps. 10 levels of grindings for different skills, crafting, foraging, minings, etc. Imagine the excitement I have when I finally got my first "Apocalypse Pendant" - the immense power was a culmination of many little stages of level improvements. This is the kind of grindings that I loved!!! So, I would unreservedly recommend Wormskull to any old school RPG gamers who loves to grind. Finally I finish writing my review and am going back to play the next game Verdungo by the same developer.

I haven't played a turn-based like this in a while, great monster art and spell animations. It's definitely worth it for fans of old FF/BoF games who like the idea of improved visual quality at a fair price!

This game is loads of fun for old school turn based RPG fans. There are dozens of RPG Maker games on Steam. The thing that sets Wolfs Moon games apart from others is the balance of gameplay. Wormskull and other games from this developer are hard, but not too hard. They really hit the sweet spot in terms of difficulty. The other thing that sets them apart is the huge amount of gear available. Just when you think your party is tweaked to the max, you'll often stumble across new gear that does even more damage. Don't expect the fine polish of a Final Fantasy game, but do expect a solid gaming experience that will leave you feeling very satisfied.

this is a very long exciting game but does tend to become tedious with trying to level up foraging, fishing and mining as you need to get 20000 experience and level 10 to get better equipment etc. There are awesome characters to choose from and lots of side quest which need to be accomplished before moving on with game. that being said your need to build up characters levels and well as their skill levels to get the most from your team. there are no hidden goodies but are found in chests or in bookcases. Many weapons armours items to craft. Overall the graphics are beautiful and a lot of effort has gone into making the storyline. Different music is played throughout the game so it does not become boring. Ending is unusual but fits in well with the story. Secret bosses (very hard) to be found if you want more play. What I did not like was the fact that the npc's do not talk much after giving you a quest. also disappointing was Solomon's cave - I expected it to be full of places to mine for gems etc but alas still only the one rock giving random items prolonging the game. Overall it is a great game and well worth playing

Long playtime (dozens of hours), interesting story (its ramifications can even be seen in some of this developer's other games), many party members with diverse skill sets, lots of fantastic loot - there's a lot to like about Wolfs Moon Studios' second game. It's a clear improvement compared to their first game Ashes of the Night, all the more so since certain mechanics make their debut here (like the first version of "Veteran Experience" that allows the player to strengthen certain stats permanently). Mapping and dungeon design are serviceable, but not the game's high points, although this is of no consequence, since there are always new exciting equipment pieces to loot from a multitude of vicious foes. Unfortunately, the game features many (not properly signaled) one-time-only areas and points of no return, resulting in a lot of permanently missable stuff (this issue is fortunately remedied in the developer's later games). If you enjoy getting stronger and looting all kinds of powerful stuff in epic classic old-school JRPGs, this is the game for you, and then the same most likely applies to all other games made by this developer.

If you enjoy classic turn based RPGs, then games by this developer definitely fit the bill. Wormskull is actually a prequel to Ashes of the Night, and while it's nice to have that familiarity with the story and characters, in no way do you need to play AotN in order to play Wormskull. The battle mechanics are sound, and with 14 different playable characters (4 at a time), there are a lot of different classes/attributes to satisfy anyone. Tons of crafting, mining, fishing to do, which is actually pretty important (and I didn't realize that until a little too late). By far the best parts of this game are the story and the individual characters, which are very engaging, interesting, and entertaining. It took me 40 hrs to finish, and unfortunately I couldn't beat the final secret boss, b/c I would've had to level up an awful lot first. The only con for me, I would say, is that I felt like there was a fair amount of grinding necessary, whether just not to get killed, or to get whatever materials you needed etc. Also, I didn't realize that you can't backtrack, so for example, when a NPC wanted an item, I thought "Oh, I'll bring it back once I'm at a level where I'll have that." Nope. Once you move ahead, there's revisiting towns. Overall, I think this is a great turn based RPG, just like the classics we all love. Definitely recommend it!

I'm having a blast with this game! I'm someone who really like RPG games (trail of cold steel, bravely default, crystal project, breath of fire, xenosaga, xenoblade, final fantasy, etc you get my point :D) Anyway, this game is great for its story, battle mechanic, and in depth progression such as crafting, foraging, and character builds. If you like an old school RPG with complex progression, there you have it! I completely recommend this game for those who like RPG and challenges (no spoiler, there is a hidden boss with a crazy amount of HP). So, give it a go and enjoy the game! :)

It is hard to find good old style rpgs on Steam. This one is good so it is hard for me to criticize because I want people to make more like this either way. I would like to call it a great game because I liked the characters, the story, the battling, and the actual crafting. Unfortunately, there were few things that took it out of the great category for me. 1) I had to sit and watch a tv show while mining. Clicking over and over mindlessly without getting what I needed most of the time. It was a darned good thing I bought enough pickaxes because you never know when another mining opportunity would come and you can't go back far, if at all, Which brings up my second major issue. 2) I was built up to think if you don't get a crafting book, then you can get it at the next town because that is the way it happens, at first. I had to choose between one book or another at one town and then I never saw the other one again. The foraging and fishing were good in the beginning because I needed whatever I could get but, like the mining, sitting there forever watching tv to wait and see if you even got anything good is completely dull and, to be honest, I stopped foraging and fishing at all pretty early on. I did get a diamond while mining a few times but I wasn't about to go hours before I possibly would get another one. Which brings me to 3) I was unable to get all the crafting items I wanted to complete the sets because the mining was mind numbing and I couldn't go back to get the book. I don't like to not complete sets. haha. The mining was such an issue that I would never play it again. I am bummed because I usually like to play these again. Especially when I can build characters up differently. Anyway, very good game but not that re-playable to me. I like to play things in story order so, I played this one first. I bought three of these so I will certainly go on to the next and see how the story progresses.

This is a pretty massive game with many twists and turns. You get many party members to choose from. It is hard to pick your main 4 party characters. There are two things to keep in mind during gameplay. First, when you are in Oni's town the second time in late game, do NOT exit the town to the north or you suffer a game ending glitch. I had to go back 30 hours to my last save. I am not good at multiple slot saving, so totally my fault. Second, if you are a completionist and you want to craft all item, be sure to keep at least one honey. It is required for late game crafting and the material is not available anywhere, you get it early on.