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A bit too unbalanced, but neat non-the-less

  • Liberty
  • 04/15/2015 10:34 PM
  • 412 views
The Warello Network was one of the entries for the IGMC (Indie Game Making Contest) for 2014. As one of the judges for the RPG portion of the competition it is my pleasure to share my thoughts on the game. This review will basically just be the notes I took cleaned up. It will be based on the competition version of the game, so certain aspects of the game may have been changed.

Presentation
Graphics are resource pack (DS+) and edits there-of, as well as some custom tiles. Mapping is pretty good and everything fits together well.

The GUI is nice and sleek, looking rather professional.

Music is really nice and gives a great boost to the general atmosphere of the game. The sound effects, when used, are also nice and fit well.

he story is pretty basic and short. The writing is nicely done and solid, for the most part. Characterisation is well done, too - the two main characters show enough personality to differentiate between them.

Gameplay

You are given a lot of choices about how to build your characters but for the most part it's hard to understand how things work due to to the large amount of afflictions and boosts that are changed. Remembering what they all do in battle straight away is almost impossible and battles themselves are enough of a challenge without having to worry about what everything does.

Battles are challenging - you will die a few times before you start to understand the flow of battle (they are fast!) and what things do. Your choice in weapons and skills will directly effect just how useful you are in battle against certain enemies. Indeed, sometimes the wrong equipment will see you fail even against the normal encounters.

Bosses are another kettle of fish altogether. They are practically impossible and you have to have a lot of luck, coupled with the exact right skills to beat them. Having started with a lot of skills already, picking the right ones for the job can be a hassle. Add in that enemies hit very hard, will swap afflictions/bonuses with you and are capable of OHKOing a character, (in fact the hidden boss can do this to the whole party) and you might understand how this is quite frustrating.

There was one puzzle that I could tell, and it involved waiting for time to run out... and that was all. Oh, and one where you pulled switches to open bridges but that was pretty simplistic.

The menu system had a lot of different options including checking out the resistances of certain enemies (you had to defeat them first, so no luck for the bosses), equipping items and the like. There was a little 'floaty' lag going on between some moves.

Enemies were on map and moved very fast some of the time. It was hard to avoid some of them which was annoying. At least your HP was restored after battle, but not so for SP (MP) which you had to restore yourself.

Fun factor
While the characters were interesting and the battles had a lot of potential, it was hard to consider the game fun, per se. Battles were a bit too stressful to think of as fun and while interesting, dying all the time was only frustrating. It really could have done with a bit more balancing.

I gave the game a solid 38 out of 60 for the IGMC. On RMN I'm giving it 3.5 stars.