Recent reviews by Rhea

Note: Received this game for free as part of curator connect. My curator group!


Princess Covenant is a pretty good game for the low price, and you'll definitely get your money's worth from it as a roguelike deckbuilder fan due to the variation involved, the different battlers to play around with, and the roguelike element! I can easily see myself spending more than 3 hours on the game. However, it could do with more quality of life fixes along with UI changes to make it more welcoming along with having some kind of draw to differentiate it from other games in the genre.

• The game has a very cute artstyle, good writing, and nice little blurbs of information on the cards to allow you to quickly learn what they do.
  
• Very easy to pick up and play, with fast gameplay and short areas that you can easily burn through.
  
• Good tutorial that allows you to get into the game quickly!
  
• Fairly difficult, had to use my brain a few times to figure out a good strategy.

• Extremely poor choice of font. A roguelike deckbuilder, or any card game, really, needs to have a very good font due to the player needing to sit there and read for quite awhile. I had to stop playing due to my eyes beginning to hurt from reading the character dialogue whilst trying to decipher the fantasy-esque font. It fits the artstyle well, but an option like other games to make the font more readable could definitely do well.
  
• It needs some UI fixes to waste less of the player's time. For instance, when 'swapping battlers' after an area, you can't actually read what the new battler does. You just need to go back to your town and into your armory to view them there.
  
• QoL fixes. I don't need to watch the coin toss every time, I shouldn't need to click fast-forward every time. These could be toggles to help players who like to blitz their roguelike deckbuilders a ton.
  
• Some battles feel like foregone conclusions in the early game/second area, especially when you get a few bad draws due to not having enough cards to build a proper deck yet. That snowballs it into defeat quickly, especially if you get unlucky with which of your cards get turned to souls.
  
• The second player definitely has the advantage most of the time, due to being able to attack the enemy's unit first whilst having more energy to work with in the case of a bad draw.
  
• Swarming the battlefield is most definitely the best strategy at the moment to shove out a quick win/counter the enemy swarms, which makes bad draws even more damaging.
  
• The game just kind of feels like an autobattler sometimes, especially when you just... have nothing good and only gain 2 energy per turn. Your deck bricks entirely at the first sign of a bad draw, especially due to drawing cards needing all of your energy economy. It's quite unforgiving in that sense, and not in an enjoyable way.

Despite all the cons, for a solo(?) dev's first game, this is excellent! Greatly priced, well-written, and a nice little experiment that is definitely charming. Will definitely play it more on my own, and I thank Curator Connect for bringing awareness of this game to me. Now I'll repay the favour.

Disclaimer: I mostly played singleplayer/Co-Op, with no interest in the PvP aspect of the game.

Songs of Conquest is a really good game, and I enjoyed my time with it, and will continue to play it. It gives me the same "One-More-Turn" syndrome that Civ 5 did back then, and I easily sunk in 35 hours in a week just playing over and over to optimise my strategies and build order.

Most people would compare it to Heroes of Might and Magic, but as I haven't had the time to play those games yet, I'll review it on its own as a turn-based strategy game.



The game has a wealth of single-player and Co-Op content, along with a ton of workshop maps from the amazing community to ensure that you never run out of things to do. From challenge maps which are structured more like puzzles than anything else to skirmish maps with gimmicks to a structured campaign, the game has it all to ensure that you can get the gameplay experience that you want.

Most of my playtime was spent on the enjoyable challenge maps, with most of them being well-balanced and curated towards the assigned faction/wielder, while the more open-ended ones were understandably easier due to having to account for every single faction and wielder in the game. "Get Out!" was particularly enjoyable for me due to how open-ended it was in terms of the approaches that you could take to 'solving' it.

In terms of factions, I particularly enjoyed Barya and Rana due to their extremely aggressive styles of gameplay which suited me well, with good Tier 1 units and fantastic snowballing due to the magic schools on their wielders and the choice of starting units that the optimal wielders have.


The UI for the game and the graphics are genuinely good, with a good font and decent enough text-size to not cause eye-strain after playing for a few hours, and the animations are very, very cute. I was laughing the entire time when a wolf died from poison and got launched 3 meters backwards in the most dramatic manner possible.

The artstyle complements the game well, and I can't find any fault with it, honestly.


It was very fun to experiment with magic in this game to see how they interacted with my troops. For instance, pushing an enemy out of my melee range would give my unit a free Attack of Opportunity, making it so that I could potentially get two attacks in one-turn. The same went for sending my Dragons in for a quick turn 1 assault before teleporting them out of there before retaliation could come for them.



I always dislike when the AI is chained on lower difficulties, and this game is no different when it comes to drawing my ire.

I found a comfortable difficulty at "Challenging", but kept noticing that the AI would handicap itself by doing suboptimal actions like refusing to attack my final city after defeating my army to give me another chance.

Meanwhile, the AI is cheating the entire way, with heavily increased stats on their wielders, more XP gain, cheaper units, what seems like better auto-resolve, and so-on, so forth. I can't say that it's particularly fun for the only way to win against a cheating AI to be to hunker in the corner and spam magic at them, considering that you can't use T3 units against the AI due to them being able to use Justice 4 times in one round.

The AI will just snowball better than you in every way possible on "Overwhelming" difficulty and higher, and on smaller maps, you're basically doomed due to how quickly they'll attack you with full stacks of upgraded T2 units. Even when spamming Dire Dreads on Barya and manually fighting battles to guarantee no troop losses, it was quite pointless and a slog to fight the AI, since the start of every fight would be them killing at least 20 Dire Dreads through spells before running into a corner to spam more spells for the rest of the fight around turn 15.

My Wielder with a full clear of the surrounding area and the natural expansion would be around level 11, while theirs would be level 16 or higher.

It's just not enjoyable to do skirmishes against the AI at the moment due to the artificial stupidity mixed with the AI cheats, making it difficult for the player to find a comfortable difficulty, even with handicaps on. That's why I swapped to Challenge Maps for my time on the game.


What can I say, the game is about might and magic (haha), but it's more of solely magic. Splitting your army up into single troops to generate magic faster is about the only way to complete a ton of challenge maps, same for fighting the AI on higher difficulties. A Poison Fog or identical magic spam will always beat having T3 units in this game, and that just rubs me the wrong way. You can rush T3 units on any faction just fine, but you'll lose to an enemy with 9 Troubadour/Piper stacks that just spams you down with magic before you can move.


Following up from the previous point, most wielders are just... not optimal in this game compared to the ones that give you better magic, essence every round, or so on, so forth. Any 'might' wielders almost need to have Magic Resistance somewhere in their skill tree to be viable, and it just sucks. I can't really use the wielders that look 'cool' to me, since I know that that's just asking for defeat, since they either have no viability in the mid-game, or have a slow clear in the early game.

Most of the wielders feel quite samey as well, and with how the seeming 'meta' of the game is to stack all of your XP on one wielder to make them a doomstack, well, your third wielder onwards will just be whoever gives a good unit that fits into your main wielder's army, or has good support skills to generate resources, or has good movement to capture landmarks along the way.


Honestly, as a new player, you're going to be lost, especially if you got the game to play with friends. The "projected strength" feature is an outright lie, and can bait you into bad early game fights where you'll lose your entire army since you have no idea what each individual unit is or what they do.

For example, a new player might see an enemy camp with 'just' 4 fists of order, and might pit their entire army against it, only to realise that those are upgraded T2 units, and some of the best in the game. It quickly results in a defeat, and they've more or less lost their entire early game, forcing a restart which is especially annoying with friends.

The game not having a good in-game beastiary or the like to be able to see what the heck everything is is just painful as a new player, as it resulted in a ton of trial and error to even know what the enemy units did. And as DLC factions can show up as enemies, good luck trying to find out which Root enemy is which when you don't even own the DLC.



Despite all that, however, Songs of Conquest was still a very fun game for me, considering that I hardly play more than 10+ hours of a game unless I really like it. It drew me in with charming graphics and good gameplay, and kept me as a player for the enjoyment of solving the challenge maps.

Most of the cons that I mentioned can hopefully be fixed, and I write this review as I'm passionate about the game and hope that it continues to achieve success. If the devs can help to ease new player on-boarding into the game, they'll be able to nurture a player base that can last for a few years, I'm sure.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to most people looking for a fun Co-Op romp with friends, or just to mess around with for awhile. Considering the very affordable price, you'll easily get your money's worth.

My curator group!

Disclaimer: I have mostly only played Nightmare difficulty with 4 modifiers on, with only a few games on lower difficulties thanks to them boring me.

Introduction:

Shape of Dreams is a downright incredible game, and one of my most anticipated games of the year, ever since I played the demo that came out a few months ago.

I was drawn to it by the extremely smooth MOBA controls, good animations and places for skill expression along with the high difficulty of it, which really sets it apart from its competitors in the Action Roguelike genre.

While it is obvious that most of the characters and memories in the game are almost 1:1 copies of League of Legends characters or a mishmash of them, from Mist being Fiora, with the Lunge, Parry and vital procs as her memories and passive to Lacerta having the Lucian passive and Graves ult, Singed's poison trail being a memory in the game, and so on, so forth, that doesn't detract from the gameplay.

I'd even say that the above contributes heavily to the gameplay. The main downside of League of Legends is having to deal with the toxic player base, having to play a PvP game, and having to sit in queue, and Shape of Dreams solves all of that with a bunch of extremely inspired Korean/Chinese developers who clearly know what they're doing.

Pros:

- Extremely tight and difficult gameplay
The game can be considered quite difficult, to the point where it can get harder than Hades and Ravenswatch easily, providing a good challenge for players whilst remaining customisable. Modifiers are in the game to either make your journey easier or harder, or to just put a twist on it, from Healing Shrines only granting Dream Dust, every enemy being a Hunter, so on, so forth.

- Engaging Bossfights
The bosses are genuinely enjoyable to fight, with interesting mechanics that really stand out whilst providing a tough challenge. Getting killed by a boss is normally a case where the player can clearly see where they messed up, instead of having it be through bad luck. For the final boss, the developers clearly took some inspiration from bullet hell games/the infamous Terraria Calamity mod with one of his phases, making for a difficult challenge to end your loop.

- Good Customisation
The new rune system that came out with the main game is extremely good, allowing you to build every character exactly how you like them, from ensuring that you're able to snowball your run with Gold and Dream Dust generation to being able to scale well as you level up to changing how your characters play by modifying their abilities!

Cons:

- Stardust Grind
This downside has been addressed to be more manageable through a hot-fix, but it is still a decent problem. Even if you're optimising Stardust gain and playing with a ton of Lucid Dreams(modifiers), it's still only about 200-300 Stardust a run with the 1-2 quests that you'll complete along the way.

That's not sufficient to max out a basic skill, so you'll be at it for quite awhile, especially since the game introduced the Deja Vu feature after beating a run that allows you to take a memory/essence into your next run, costing a whopping 180 Stardust for a Epic memory or essence.

I feel that this encourages you to stick to a character and 'main' them instead of being able to branch out much, as you'll be spending most of your stardust on a character's unique perks that can only be used on them instead of the common ones, due to them being oriented towards the character's strengths.

- Mastery Grind and how this links to character viability
Unfortunately on the highest difficulty, plenty of characters aren't viable until they have enough mastery and stardust to get upgrades, typically around level 30, which is around 10 runs after the buff to mastery gain.

This holds plenty of characters back, and can cause players to drop a character after not having fun with them (E.g, Shell and Aurena are extremely weak pre-mastery, and much stronger once they get the perks that they require, such as being able to reset your dodge cooldown on a kill as Shell.)

Every character has a nigh essential perk that's stuck in their higher levels, causing some frustration when it comes to being able to view the perk and just *know* that the character could be more viable in your hands if you could have it.

- Lack of healing/sustain on some characters
On some characters, they feel more RNG based due to not having consistent healing and/or shielding to keep up with the hoards of enemies the game sends your way on higher difficulties along with the chip damage (The fire world's enemies, the arrows in the Lotus world, etc)

This can cause them to get chipped down and punished hard, especially when Nightmare difficulty punishes any healing that they *do* get by cutting it in half. When playing as a team, getting Mass Protection is almost essential with how much it helps everyone to avoid taking too much chip damage.

Unfortunately, this also forces the player to prioritise certain memories. For example, as Mist, it's difficult to run the "Priorite" passive, as the default passive allows you to avoid so much chip damage with its shielding. If I wanted to run Priorite, I would have to plan out most of my build around it, taking Ice Shield, Frostbite, and so on to ensure that I could survive on Nightmare + modifiers, to the point where I would likely do more damage by just running the default passive.

- Certain areas too cramped
Certain zone maps are definitely too cramped, ensuring that it's very difficult to dodge enemy attacks with how many are piled up in one area. This is especially damning in the Lotus world and Naraka, where the tight corridors and single arenas almost ensure that you'll be taking some heavy hits. And when the Naraka mobs have heavy stuns and the Lotus world has heavy damage on their skillshots, it's extremely punishing in those areas, especially when the hunt is on with the meteors or the extra enemy modifier is on.

This forces the player to prioritise shields even further to avoid getting one-shot due to taking damage pretty much being mandatory, especially on the first loop where you won't have a full assortment of I-Frames.

Closing Comments:

Overall, Lizard Smoothie has done an excellent job in bringing League of Legends to the action roguelites genre, and I'll see myself playing this game for a long time, much longer than its competitors in Ravenswatch, Risk of Rain, Hades, etc. This is especially due to the Co-Op feature which allows me to introduce the game to all my friends.

While there are flaws like the hunter meteor still being overtuned and others that I have already mentioned, the core gameplay is just so compelling and addictive that I can't put it down, in all honesty.

I hope that the devs are able to fix these minor issues and add more difficulty to the game along with more memories, perks and essences to further encourage experimenting with builds. More content would also be appreciated, from an alternate final boss or alternate bosses like the one that you can get for activating all the altars in the Lotus world.

It's key that they don't go down the road of artificial difficulty. I would hate to see Shape of Dreams lose the charming skill-based gameplay that it has to be replaced with a "kill everything on the screen before it can kill you" simulator like some other Action Roguelites. The game is already pushing this barrier in the higher difficulties where damage and heavy shields are key over anything overly unique, and essences which can only proc every 10 seconds along with essences which rely on the enemy staying alive for more than a second are worse than the flat damage ones.

A button mash simulator isn't what Shape of Dreams should become in my opinion, especially when the demo was such a tight experience of exhilarating skill-based gameplay where I no-hit all of the bosses.

My curator group!

Game is good but too easy. More difficulty needs to be added to the game to make it more like difficulty based Elden Ring mods, Dark Souls 3 challenge mods, etc.

At the moment, even with randoms, getting a winrate of 70% and hitting level 15 is too easy, especially for a roguelike game. More boss variety should be added from previous DS bosses as well.
Some weapon types are near impossible to find in the game, like Scythes, etc, preventing me from doing a Sister Friede cosplay.

I hope the upcoming patch with enhanced bosses and two player co-op makes the game better and gives it more replayability.

Literally one of the best Gundam games made, with amazing skill expression, clear difference in skill between good pilots and bad ones, and good mechanics that are easy to pick up and hard to master.

Unfortunately, it's hampered by the netcode that solely favours people in Japan and nearby countries, giving them advantages in combat like being able to guard on reaction and tackle on reaction instead of having to do it predictively. It also opens up combo routes that only they can do, as the lag won't allow it to work for non-Japanese/Korean players.

Still an amazing game though, and I'd recommend it, especially if they can improve the servers to get more players flowing in.

The game is okay I guess, not too many hours on it though so don't trust my judgement.