Recent reviews by Doctor Ekrotus

I believe people are grossly over-exaggerating when it comes to their complaints with this game.

There's a lot of puzzle-solving and thinking involved with the Barricades due to their new limited nature.

I think a lot of people are also coming here expecting Orcs Must Die! 4; this is not the case. This is a bit of a side-game (OMD! Unchained, my beloved) but built around the entire idea of a Roguelite system and high replayability.

Traps are fun, threads are an amazing concept. They have some weighting towards the traps you're using frequently in the run, and unlocking new threads often are always leaving me and my mate with a sense of impressed "OH, that's going to be awesome to get!" and mixes things up. I love getting a thread that just completely replaces a trap with its OMD! 3 siege version, or the cursed threads that get you to consider if the downside is worth the hefty bonus it provides. It's really rare that I have had to actively think about choices in a roguelite lately; a lot of the time there's just objectively better choices and I'd find myself picking the same things repeatedly. But in this game, I am constantly weighing my options for my current loadout and situation.

The maps are large, sure, but even with the 20 barricades with 2 players, we can easily funnel and route orcs into either two or narrow them down to one singular path in almost every one, then set up traps and utilize chokes as accordingly. You can't maze them like before, but you can absolutely funnel them. I genuinely believe anyone complaining about the barricades are either not thinking hard enough, or are just downright bad at utilizing them.

The heroes are expressive and fun, there's even some unique threads that synergize between two characters (for example, one that amps Wren's damage by 50% when they are inside Vaan's Rift Orb!). The abilities are all neat, but I do think Mac either needs a buff or some tuning, as he's the only one that feels bad to play at present; it's possible he's much stronger explicity for groups of 3 or 4.

The only complaint I have is that we did sort of "Cash out" after Mission 2 for the first 5-7 hours of gameplay, and it takes a rather long time to accumulate resources AT FIRST and amp your power doing so, but the permanent upgrades and meta-progression leave for a lot of build expression that previous games lacked. I find myself changing out the loadout of traps almost every run and mixing and matching new combinations to try and find ideal setups to make it through. 13 hours in and we find ourselves working forwards and through Mission 4 and cashing out there, with exponentially more score and currency than before.

One thing I would recommend to the devs is to perhaps add some more features that Unchained used to have? Or even some returning characters (there were SO many fun heroes in Unchained that would fit really well here!).

I want this game to succeed and look forward to more!!

The game at its core, mechanically, is good, but there are some decisions that I don't think were set to "reasonable" standards.

What do I mean by that? Well, there are some serious RNG problems that this game can have that can and will completely screw you over.

You could be playing through this game and be attempting to find the requisite tapes to progress through the game, yet go through over 6+ rooms, often filled with 4+ enemies at later levels (each only requiring a single hit to actually kill you and set you backwards one stage, meaning you'll need to REPEAT a level that's generally inferior and more tedious than entertaining or hard) and find ABSOLUTELY ZERO tapes. At later levels, this is debilitating and fatigue will quickly set in because you're slowly, methodically taking the time to get through each individual room, taking out every single enemy, scouring every single corner, nook, and cranny in hopes of hearing or seeing a tape, only to have no ammo or any drops in the room whatsoever, just the one or two bullets from a turret in the room since the drones you killed DO NOT DROP AMMO, meaning a net NEGATIVE for the player every time. You are then forced into trying to scrape together what little you can to proceed. The idea of having limited ammo is fine, but having a character whose "shaky hands" that aren't under player control is a horrible decision, as many shots that you can only safely make from certain angles purely rely on taking the exact same shot multiple times until the game decides not to fire a bullet 10 degrees off to the side. The game literally has several tapes explaining to focus on your breathing to calm down, why isn't breath holding a mechanic, then??

After a particularly grueling situation where I got to Stage 5 with 2/3 tapes and went TEN ROOMS without finding a tape, only to die due to having a room with 3 ceiling turrets and a flying drone patrolling it, then dying in Stage 4 and Stage 3 after 5+ tiles each with no tapes and, again, exhausting all ammunition (the game was spawning drones constantly and each turret was only dropping one bullet) I went through several runs using the developer console (CTRL+F12) and enabled God Mode, Noclip, Infinite Ammo, and X-Ray Items just to cleave through and see if the issue I had where a tape wasn't spawning was user error or the game itself. I had multiple instances where I would noclip-fly through roughly 4-5 rooms and have absolutely no tapes; just a stray magazine or a single bullet in an absurd location where the player wouldn't be able to feasibly see it (like on a ledge outside a window behind a curtain in the dark; the only way someone would see it in normal gameplay would be to waste what little ammo they had to shoot the window, as leaping through to "save" a bullet would have launched the player clear off the ledge to their death). In one instance, right after 6 rooms/tiles, I encountered one of the construction zone tiles that ended up having FOUR tapes in it, TWO of which were ENTIRELY inaccessible due to blocked off doors or level features. Why isn't the game set to have some sort of "bad-luck protection" to ensure that a player doesn't suffer through these conditions and actually makes progress? Why is a level-gen like this even POSSIBLE? It should be keeping a pace, not ending a level two rooms down with 4 tapes, then the next level you could go through 10 rooms, high and low, and find absolutely none. This is unacceptable. "Winning" this game is based entirely on luck, which is just a complete dealbreaker.

I would then say to purchase the game if you strictly enjoy the mechanics of the guns, but the issue that lies therein is that many of the guns do not unlock without progressing to higher Stages. The Compound was a nice addition, but I'm not sure if it requires you to unlock the gun prior to being eligible to use it in the Compound.

I tried the game on launch and had the crashing and difficulties that many others have mentioned, and completely dropped it for over a year. I picked it back up recently and noticed the considerable improvements that the developers made to the game's optimization and gameplay, but the core problem of the tapes just not spawning is still there.

You cannot gate a progression system behind such pure RNG that is out of the player's control, whilst also giving them barely or less than enough ammo to clear a room, then have a hacking mechanic that is impossible to do safely ~80%+ of the time due to enemies watching each other (not to mention the extremely common drones that, again, DO NOT DROP AMMO WHEN KILLED and are nearly impossible to hack save for a few EXTREMELY rare circumstances due to their positioning/movement!). I cannot and do not recommend this game without this core issue being adjusted. Fix the ammo economy at later stages, fix the tape spawnrate CONSISTENCY (a band-aid fix would be spawning tapes just "more often" but that doesn't fix the underlying issue of being able to reach them, or then they spawn too often and levels are too short), and I'll change the review to positive after playing through the adjustments myself and making another judgement. Players should not lose fun and grow exhausted clearing 6+ rooms to have absolutely no actual progress in the level, slowly bleeding their ammo dry until they just get into a forced-loss situation; this should be impossible and the game should forcibly spawn a tape after 3-4 rooms at WORST, in a location that MUST be reachable and not force a player to loop-back 4 rooms just to go upstairs and reach it (I understand shooting tapes collects them, I'm talking about tapes the player would never have found because they were high up and out of view or spawned in the aforementioned windowsill-behind-curtains locations I found in the devtool mode). This would mean that, in the worst-case scenario, at the hardest Stage (5), a player will be GUARANTEED to clear it after 9-12 rooms. Considering the enemy density and ammo economy in these levels, this is not unreasonable to request.

Not only that, the game closes after winning. At least let me see my previous session's stats when I relaunch the game. I understand having it close is part of the whole theme and saying any more borders spoiler territory, but.. seriously? You don't give us any reward or gratification for actually beating and persisting until the game deems us lucky enough to win? Come on.

It's like Pavlov ringing a bell for the dogs. They're only going to salivate for awhile, but as soon as the promise of "bell ringing = food" is lost? They're going to stop coming and ignore it entirely. (Keep losing because no tapes are spawning? I'm done with this game.) Bottom line.

Absolutely incredible co-op game with puzzles that aren't too complex and certainly adorable all the way through.

The love and care that the developers put into this game is greatly shown, and even when the game has the occasional whacky physics glitch where you truly ascend into the spaghetti you were destined to be, it's nothing but entertaining and hilarious, with no frustration involved whatsoever. I am incredibly glad to call this game one of a select few to have 100%'d on Steam, and to do all the collecting and extra challenges with my mate to accomplish this goal, earning lovely, cute little hats along the way, was some of the best entertainment I've had in years.

If you have a best friend or someone you love to do this game with, absolutely get it and do it with them. Again, the puzzles aren't too hard and they're easy enough to solve that they won't really cause any frustration, it's all a positive experience through and through.

I really hope the devs have an idea in mind for a PHOGS! 2, and maybe even with two pairs of co-op players (totaling 4 players) or even more for some true adorable puzzle-solving chaos, because I am dying to have more PHOGS! Content. Thank you. <3

One of my most favorite games of all time. Difficult, but fair. A good challenge, and great to actually notice improvement run-to-run! Casuals, though, should avoid unless the developers decide to create an Easy Mode. This isn't a pick-up and ♥♥♥♥ around roguelite, it's a true gamer's dream. Flawless animation, tiny sounds like the footsteps of a barefoot character, the clinking of the Gundead Bullet Kin as they wobble and hop, it's incredible the detailed lengths they went for this game. Devs are connected with the community and providing perfect patches based on feedback. Secrets to unlock, quests to do, enemies to shoot. This is truly a masterwork of gaming. Triple-A Devs could take a lesson from Dodge Roll.