Recent reviews by Reik

Just a few hours in mind but already this is the level of awesome I was expecting.

Feels a lot like D2 in the gameplay, bit of a slower pace than what we became accustomed to in POE. The music, sound and environments also carry a heavy Diablo II influence.

Bosses telegraph their deadly attacks, and you can dodge roll etc to avoid the brunt of it. I said "can"... more like "Should", unless you're over leveled and over powered for a boss, there's no reason to try and face tank it and every reason to avoid doing so.

So far it doesn't feel any more difficult than POE, but it does play a bit different. The dodge roll feels a bit sluggish at first, but you have to understand it's not a substitue for movement, it's there for you to use to avoid big hits etc.

Dieing isn't so much the enemy many people seem to think it is (unless you're not learning from what killed you...). What dieing definitely is, is a wake up call that either you weren't be careful enough OR that you need to level more and or improve your gear more. And dieing will respawn all of the stuff you've killed to get to the boss etc or whatever killed you. So now you've got more fodder for xp gain, and drops.

Inevitably, like Path of Exile 1, dieing will at times also be a result of poor skill choices and combos. Sometimes what you thought was great as you were leveling, or great in theory, turns out to fall kinda flat when facing end game content. For my money, trying something that seemed interesting to me and having it turn out to be bad, is preferable to finding a build someone else created and has proven it works. But if that's your bag, then have no doubt there will be plenty of those out there soon.

For now, many of the MTX I've purchased in POE 1 are not available yet, all of my stash tabs are there though. And at least some of my POE 1 MTX have already been carried over. GGG has mentioned that acclimating all of our various MTX will be a process but the intention is for everything to be brought in.

The game... WAS great. Then it moved from Battlenet to Steam, reset a few things and was frustrating, but ok. Then they phased out a bunch of content, story, and progression. Now the game is a dumpster fire. Avoid it like the plague it is. Their lore has been turned into swiss cheese at this point.

Ultimately, Bungie is not a company deserving of your time or your money. They have zero respect for their playerbase. They take the attitude that players don't know what they want. So Bungie will tell players what players want. And players will like it and do that. Their track record speaks for itself and only blind sheep like versions of gamers give them a chance at this point.

Wake Up.

Does what it says on the package. For $4 it's a great deal. There is a lot more to it than just managing your desktop or mobile device wallpapers, but I have not gotten into any of that so far. Without diving into that aspect of it, there's not much more to say.

However... why the hell does this have Steam Achievements? Achievements for favoriting wallpapers, etc. And Trading Cards, seriously? Regardless, however pointless achievements and cards are for an app like this, it's well worth the money and minimal amount of setup time to get it working and find some wallpapers that fit your aesthetic.

Do you fondly recall the best of the Heroes of Might & Magic franchise, Heroes III? In many ways Songs of Conquest is the first worthy successor to that outstanding title. However, in many more ways their ambition to take things beyond that is readily apparent after a game or two of playing, whether in the campaign or just playing a random matchup with friends, or vs AI. All of the tools, bells and whistles you may fondly remember from Heroes III (I certainly do) are here.

Random item rewards early on from investigating camps, defeating level appropriate challenging enemy groups (and at times recognizing an enemy group that beyond your current capacity, save them for later!) or finding treasure chests.

Trees of knowledge and ancient statues to interact with to give your Wielders (say Heroes?) permanent skill boosts, xp increases or bonuses to atk, def and other stats.

Tranquil waterfalls, forgotten battlegrounds and cheery taverns dot the landscape to give recurring bonuses to movement or combat bonuses for your next battle.

Here we have a handful of factions fully realized each with their own advancement trees to recruit better and more powerful troops as your game progresses. Each faction has it's own sets of champions (the aforementioned Wielders). Much like in Heroes III, your champions here can equip items and find artifacts to boost their stats and offer special abilities and bonuses in combat. Your champion's stats will boost the attack, defense, etc of the troops they have in their army. Fully upgraded Command skill allows your champion to include up to 9 units in their army. These can be each of a different unit type you have available from your castle(s), all of the same unit type if you wish or any mix thereof. Each unit type has a maximum unit size per Command slot, most if not all of units can be upgraded with your Town/Castle to increase that unit size limit, to an extent.

Everything is carefully balanced between the factions, though undoubtedly as with any game, certain players will excel with theory crafting and find combinations and playstyles that "seem" broken.

Lavapotion's first attempt at a game is a stellar first start and an anthem for indie developers everywhere. Not all of the ideas herein are new, or their own per se, but everything they've borrowed has their own spin on it, and exists more than anything as a framework for the story and world building they are striving to achieve.

Coffee Stain has a history of publishing independent developers who create wonderful gems. For anyone who is a fan of turn based strategy games, this hits all the right marks in all the right places. If like me, you have an overflowing level of nostalgia for Heroes III of Might & Magic, then I don't see how you could fail to fall in love with this game.

Worth the price at full, $35, if you can get this on sale this November/December, that is a helluva deal (at the time of this review its' on sale 60% off, just $14!!).

A tentative yes.

tl;dr
It's a good substitute for spending money on real cards and being able to find people to play against. Just avoid the cash shop and play recreationally and it can be a good time. Several other positive reviews here on Steam say the same thing.

As others have posted with their reviews, this is a passable magic experience without needing to actually buy any cards, and also with the benefit of being able to play from your PC or other device (you don't have to play it on Steam if that matters to you). Both of these things are important to me as 1) I'd prefer to avoid actually giving WoTC money, and 2) I just don't have time anymore to get out to a game store and be active in my gaming. If I did, I'd likely be playing any number of tabletop games instead of MTG.

Out of the gate starting, finish the tutorial and they give you a literal pile of starter decks to work with, like 12 or more. And then, over on the left side of the screen is an Inbox, with in game mail from the devs. I spent probably 2-3 hours opening and perusing all of the cards I got from that inbox. Easily 40-50 packs of cards, with standard card proliferation, ie one rare or mythic rare card, three uncommons, six commons, each pack also always seemed to give me 1-4 "wild cards" of varying rarities. Sometimes these seemed to take the place of one of the aforementioned 10 cards per pack, other times I wasn't so sure. The "wild cards" can be used to create specific cards later on when you get to deck building (later on, ie. literally soon as you finish opening all of those cards and go to build deck or edit one of the myriad starter decks).

Finished opening all of my new cards and was able to turn around and modify an existing vampire deck to have more vampires and life gain tricks, used several of the "wild cards" to create duplicates of things I had only 1 of including rares and mythic rares.

Felt somewhat timid about jumping right into playing (haven't actually played in more than 6 years), played a couple matches vs a bot, and the deck worked well. For what it's worth, the bot matches did seem to count for daily quest tracking or something. I didn't pay close attention to that. So, feeling a bit more confident I jumped into finding a random opponent, first two fights happened within 20 seconds of queing up. Did three more fights after that and the wait time skewed longer but not too bad. Worst was a wait that took about 3-4 minutes before it found a match.

So as to the actual gameplay, how it handles playing cards, lands, creatures, instants, sorceries, abilities... It works. Nothing stood out as problematic to me, the game prompts you and gives you the chance to activate abilities and cast instants at the appropriate times during combat and during opponents turn. This is not so obvious when playing the bot, and is almost non-existent during the tutorial. My first match with an actual opponent I kept having to remember to click the button down in the bottom right of the screen to Next, Pass or Advance. Yeah, that could be aggravating waiting for someone who might have looked away or even walked away from their screen/device, but less so than if the game just advanced for you, like it did with MTG Duels here on Steam.

So yeah, in actual gameplay the game seems to work well. I'm sure if I were to play enough I might encounter issues, but in ten or so matchups I had no problems.

The tutorial though... was annoying, frustrating, horrible, for me at least. Hated it. First, when you start up the game they ask a few questions to determine your familiarity and to an extent skill level with MTG. Then they ignore that and shove you into a tutorial that assumes that at best you've seen cards when you played solitaire at some point. I quickly accessed the options menu and turned down the voice acting. The dialogue was awful. It was bad enough I still had to see it on screen and click through it all. My take away from playing through the tutorial matches was that whomever designed that tutorial, understood the basics of how to play magic, but was not an actual player. Guess they just understood how to create the tutorial better than anyone else who was available. There's no avoiding the tutorial, which bites, but if you enjoy playing MTG, then I encourage you to suffer through it and then enjoy opening a truck load of packs. Then start building and modifying decks and go play.

Last but not least, the cash shop <shudders>. Well, I can call it bad, awful, oppurtunistic, but who would be surprised? Noone. MTG is already like that anyway, although being that your bits of paper here are imaginary, makes this a bit worse in my opinion, however that generally doesn't stop gamers who enjoy microtransactions. However, the value is spurious at best. You can't actually click on the various packs and bundles to see what's in them, so at the least stay away from the shop till you are very familiar with things in game. My hope would be, that by the time you're that familiar, you will see no incentive for bothering with the cash shop. The amount of stuff they give you for free is amazing. You can earn more just by playing. I have considered the Master Pass (think Battle Pass like most any game with MTX has now-days). Master Pass will run you ~$20 worth of gems, a $19.99 pack is just a tiny bit more than is needed to purchase the pass. There is no direct cash option to buy the pass, if that matters to you. The pass is extensive, with over 90 levels to work through and if you can manage to do that in a season, then every level after 90 is another uncommon card reward. The whole scheme is VERY Pay to Get Moar. You can advance your pass by +20 levels by buying the advanced pass, cost almost twice as much as the standard pass upgrade. Note, I did say upgrade. There is a pass for those who stick to playing for free, the ~$20 upgrade just unlocks all of the Master Pass rewards. If you have the money, that part is probably worth it if you're going to play enough to unlock a lot of stuff. You can also choose to wait and see, play a bit, get advanced down the track and then upgrade, this will unlock all of the rewards you've already qualified for from the Master Pass.

In addition to cards and packs, there are also a growing collection of cosmetics to entice you. Avatars, card sleeves/backs, a companion (no clue what that actually does in game). Likely more kinds of cosmetics in development, anything to seperate fans from their cash. I would avoid all of that, but it's there if that's what floats your wallet.

Yet another game from my library that I now find is no longer available on Steam. WTF is going on around here? Left and right, good board game adaptations are being pulled off Steam. Some to be replaced with poorly designed trash that serve only as a vehicle for DLCs and micro transactions. Others, like this, just appear to have been yanked "just cus".

Fortunate I suppose in that since I already own it, I can still install and play it, for now at least. But sad that I can no longer obtain the expansion that went with it.

What would be great, is if there were some transparency on the part of either Valve, or the developer/publisher, as to WHY they've pulled their game.

It's not as if a negative review is meaningful now, just frustrated that yet another solid conversion of a tabletop game to PC has been de-listed and co-opted into a worthless excuse for a game, designed for mobile originally, and rife with micro transactions and poor excuses for content options.

Warhammer quest itself, both as a tabletop game and in it's video game version were excellent. It only ever really appealed to a minority of the gaming community, even as a tabletop game, it didn't find all that large an audience among Warhammer gamers. I can only guess that this was the impetus behind the reasoning which lead to entrusting the IP's continued production to Perhchang! - a sorry excuse for a games developer.

When Ticket to Ride was done wrong in similar fashion, I resolved to boycott not just the purveyor of the video game they shifted to (ie. Ticket to Ride is a board game, that got an excellent video game adaptation, and then got their license sold off to another company which caused their digital game version to become defunct and no longer available. While the new controlling entity moved all content behind a paywall and proceeded to generate a dumbed down version of the game for PC etc), I also resolved to boycott the company which created the IP and owns the title for printing the board game, in their entirety. I won't purchase from or support them in any way, given how atrociously they've decided to treat paying customers.

So then, should I do the same with Games Workshop and Warhammer? GW and the Warhammer universe have been such a large part of my gaming landscape for decades, going back to buying White Dwarf off the rack at the comic book shop before I knew what a game store was. Buying miniatures by mail, for my friend and I to try and create our own war game (we had very little idea what Warhammer really was, or what a war game would look like, and we certainly knew of noone to play with, there was no game store in our town). Eventually that all changed and someone started a store in our town, I fell quickly into the rabbit hole of D&D, Paladium, Rifts, Shadowrun, GURPS, Cyberpunk, Magic the Gathering and of course Warhammer. Tough to walk away from any of that, those were my worlds for decades of my life. Sadly many of them have gone so far in efforts to pander to greed executives, I don't recognize the worlds they try to provide any longer (D&D, MTG & WOTC, but also GW & Warhammer to a great extent). So yeah, I will walk away from Games Workshop and Warhammer, same as I've done for D&D, MTG and Wizards of the Coast. When I say walk away, I don't mean I'm going to uninstall and toss in the trash everything I own from them, but rather, I won't give them further money. They can't be trusted with it, obviously.

How bout you? Do you care what sort of content or quality your money goes to support? Or do you not care, as long as you get the next big flashy thing? Just note, that now days, 9 times out of 10, you do NOT get what you pay for... and the gaming community is full of players who have grown up in an environment where that's fine, cause that's all they've ever known. We should blame ourselves for that, as we're the ones who didn't hold content creators to better standards of quality. Too late now? Perhaps. Whatever you're playing, where ever you are, I'll be tilting windmills somewhere else very likely.

I suppose this style of game might be for some people. Gathering resources, to build your equipment, your food, your housing. While also managing the minutiae of every aspect of your group members lives. Sounds like an extremely boring chore to me, and for .2 hours, it was just that. Boring. I got the feeling that hadn't even passed the tutorial. I was already so incredibly bored, I wanted to stop. Then I got to the point of having it explained to me how I had to balance my Chosen's sanity, with using their morale to rebuild it over time, and that having either aspect drop to 0 would mean the character would leave my party and be gone. Wow... what a needlessly complex, overwrought and boring mechanic to deal with, multiplied by every single character you bring into your party. I'm not sure what's more amazing, how mindbogglingly dull that would be to deal with or the fact that there seem to be no small amount of gamers who felt it was worthy of a thumbs up in their review.

I thought I had played Thea (the first one), and perhaps I had, I can no longer recall. However, if I enjoyed it, then it played nothing like this. Nothing about this was fun, or even hinted at becoming fun if I stuck with it long enough. If anything it only hinted at how much tedium would be in store for me if I stuck with it, so I did not.

tl;dr - This is a solid puzzle/strategy game wrapped up in an idle game experience. Lots of moving parts and different ways to challenge you or for you to challenge yourself. I'm sure the variations are not limitless, but they are significant in number and just as a game you're not interested in spending money on, it is absolutely worth spending some time on. The rest of my review if you care to read it, is just my experience dealing with support and how much I appreciate them and intend to support them.

Hadn't played this in years. Not since Kongregate imploded. Recently tried to reconnect with the game on Kong, only to find there was nothing there to reconnect to. I had spent a fair amount of money on the game back then, so much so, that I couldn't see myself seeking the time, much less the money, into the game a second time to get back to an approximation of where I was.

I contacted support from within the game on a "new account" created from starting the game here on Steam. I gave an explanation similar to what I've mentioned above, included the email address ad mentioned that I could provide screenshots of my purchase history via Kong if necessary.

I figured some amount of back and forth would be the bare minimum to recover the account, and feared with the game effectively "dead" on Kong, I might just be out of luck. That was Saturday. Here we are two days later and I got a reply from support. Not asking for more info, or needing to clarify anything. Just,

"Here's your code, if you input this it should migrate your account from the previous platform over to Steam. We hope this resolves everything. Have a nice day!"

And ten seconds later I was amazed and felt all warm and fuzzy as I looked through my account I had presumed likely lost forever.

I see a lot of flack in the reviews here about the need to purchase currency to be able to buy most of the desirable stuff in game. From my perspective that's no different than it was before really. I used to have to purchase Kredits on Kong, to then use those to buy stuff in game. I still have a lingering 240 Kreds over there, and nothing to spend them on. Somewhat lamentable, surely. But not a big deal really. If you're ready and willing to pay money for ephemeral pixels that might be shut down and gone forever somewhere down the road, then who cares about a few extra currency lingering about that didn't get spent. Now, if you're issue is with the prices of what you can buy that you would want, using those currency in game, then yeah I'm sure there's a solid argument to be made there for "greedy devs" - I expect as much really, as this is all tied to Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, and anyone with a lick of sense knows that those guys care only about their bottom line. I won't argue that their's is a reasonable attitude, I don't believe it is. I don't believe it's truly defensible in any sane discussion.

But the good folks at Codename Entertainment also didn't have to help me recover my account from a platform that's basically dead. But they did it anyway.

I've loved this game ever since a room mate introduced it to me at the local game store. I was ecstatic years ago to find that it was available on Steam, bought it up. Bought all the expansion DLC. Was awesome to have the game digitally. Also awesome to be able to support the devs who made it possible here. 100% absolutely worth the money.

Just recently a friend from work has found her way into watching old episodes of Table Top with Wil Weaton etc. and she mentioned a couple episodes where they played Ticket to Ride. I was immediately super excited, finally found another person to play with!! Logged in to walk through setting up to play with someone else (we all work from home, meeting up to play isn't feasible), only to find out the Developers, Days of Wonder, decided to remove functionality from purchases I had paid for, they did this about a year ago!

It's not uncommon for me to find dev update posts that I disagree with. I think their update about screwing over the owners of this game is one of the only posts I've seen on Steam with 0 thumbs up from users. There are usually at least a few people who for whatever reason think what's been done is a good thing. Not for this. over 307 pages of replies about it, and not even 1 single thumbs up. That's more telling really than even the "Mostly Negative" recent reviews tag here on Steam. Course, you won't notice really the responses to that if you're new to this, not before you see that Mostly Negative reviews tag, so moot point I suppose. But still, very telling about how the community felt about these changes.

I may be approximately a year late in providing a response to these changes, but figured here it is all the same. I can only presume that Days of Wonder the developer is the same as the company which makes the physical board game. With a such a trash move on your part, I would rather see your company fail and vanish than buy or recommend any of your products to others whether digital or physical copies. You deserve nothing less than to have your proverbial fields salted. I honestly don't know who Twin Sails Interactive is, but just the fact that your names are connected as publishers is good enough reason for them to deserve to sink with you. For all I know it was Twin Sails who made the decision to screw over your loyal customers. Any company which willing does that deserves to fail most spectacularly.

Not only was this a poor faith move on your part in general, removing existing functionality to package and sell a new product for further profit, but you did this in the wake of Covid, and the entire world largely moving to more insular, less social (physically at least) lifestyles. You actually did this as an attempt to make money off of the aftermath of Covid's impact on the entire world. That's just as bad if not worse that war profiteering. What argument could there be for this being necessity, what excuse? None. If your business were failing (it sadly does not appear to be), then you come up with a new better product but you don't pull the rug out from under your existing customer base to pressure them to purchase your new product. That kind of shady BS can work when you control access to a vast majority of PC operating systems (Microsoft does this all the time, every new OS), but you don't. You don't have a captive market, just a pissed off one.

The level of disdain I have for Days of Wonder and Twin Sails Interactive is something I don't feel comfortable fully voicing here in a Steam review.