Loot Rascals Review

For as many games as I've played I've never actually played a true "roguelike." I really didn't know what this meant until I played Loot Rascals. What appears to be a simple game with procedurally generated levels where you loot cards and strategically move one space at a time in an attempt to gain an advantage over an enemy, is surprisingly difficult due to the all too real threat of permadeath, but also incredibly satisfying. 

At the start of every level, you have 250 turns to find the exit portal, which will take you to the next world. Each time you walk, loot a card, use an ability, or get into combat counts as a turn. Once you run out of the first 250 turns, extra enemies spawn after the next 50 turns until a monster spawns that pretty much causes instant death if he catches you. It's not too hard to find the portal once you have a firm grasp on Loot Rascals. 

Loot Rascals feature 7 different types of cards; attack, defense, passive, ability, unique, burst, and mysterious artifacts. Attack and defense cards increase your damage and determine how much damage you can withstand respectively. These cards can also come with bonuses that will increase the strength of themselves or the cards around them. Passive cards don't need to be equipped to enjoy their benefits but do require tokens which are received from "decompiling" extra cards. Ability cards feature different spells such as healing, fire and lightning attacks, teleportation, freezing enemies, and decoys that will distract enemies. Unique cards have to be equipped but can give you extra health, additional points to your attack and defense cards, and other things that affect the actual gameplay of the game such as taking away your "turns" and replacing it with a time limit. Burst cards (which may not be there official name) will combine all of the equipped attack or defense cards into one super strong card, however you will lose any bonus those cards have. I finished the game and I'm still not sure what the mysterious artifacts do, but I can tell you this, don't decompile them. 

Loot Rascals features a day/night cycle which changes every 5 turns and determines if you'll have an advantage or disadvantage over your enemies. The advantage that you want is the ability to attack first. Attacking first will not only damage the enemy first but it will also increase your chance of blocking. There are times where you find that no matter what you do you are in a situation where you're going to be attacked first, so in those instances just hope that you have a good amount of defense. 

One of my favorite parts of Loot Rascals is the community aspect. During your adventure you'll find cards that once belonged to other real life player's characters who have died. You can choose to send the card back and be rewarded with the chance of finding a helpful hologram who will fight and take damage on your behalf or you can choose to keep it, which will result in the chance that an angry hologram will show up and try to kill you. I found myself only keeping the cards that either came with an ability and had a really good bonus. When you die (which you will a lot) people can choose to send the card back to you where you can find them back at your base. If people are nice enough you can easily start a round with a pretty decent inventory. 

Loot Rascals also features one quest per level. Each quest is to kill a powerful named enemy and return the card to your base. If you do complete the quests you can receive additional health, a card that will reveal the entire map, 30 tokens, or 2 extra spaces for your inventory. Depending on how strong the enemy is and what your current attack/defense situation is you may find yourself passing on quests, but if you have the turns to spare and feel good about your situation, these quests are totally worth completing. 

Because Loot Rascals is procedurally generated, you may be dead on arrival. There were times where I started up a new round only to find an enemy that meant certain death. There are also other situations that you'll find yourself surrounded by enemies where your only option is to die. Some of these may be at the fault of the player, but other times they aren't. Luckily, if you die, you can quickly start a new round and try again. 

One of the other things that was frustrating for me was that Loot Rascals crashed on me way too many times. I understand that no game is free of bugs, but at one point I had found myself moments away from killing the final boss only for the game to crash. I had been playing the game for almost a week and had only reached the final boss about six times, only to have it taken away from me. This was probably an isolated event, but nonetheless, crashes are never a good thing. 

In all honesty, I absolutely love Loot Rascals. It's definitely a challenging game that takes a lot of patience, but in the end, it's totally worth your time. I'd love to give it a 4.75/5 but due to the crashes the highest score I feel that I can give it as a 4/5. There's no doubt in my mind you won't regret purchasing Loot Rascals. 

4 out of 5 stars. 

Thank you to Hollow Ponds for providing us with the code. 

DYING: Reborn PSVR Review

Publisher Oasis Games has been consistently releasing games on the PSVR since launch and after playing all of their PSVR titles I can say that DYING: Reborn is their best game yet. The main character, Mathew went out to search for his sister only to find himself locked in a room full of cockroaches, metal bars, and puzzles.

There are a total of three rooms that you have to escape from in the PSVR version compared to the six in the PS4 and PS Vita version. Because you are buying an abridged version, the price comes down to $9.99 instead of $19.99 making DYING: Reborn one of the cheapest PSVR games and not a bad deal.

Usually, when I play puzzle games I find myself overthinking and getting stuck. With DYING: Reborn overthinking is your friend. You have to examine everything in the room because the solution is rarely obvious. The best approach would be to play the game like a point-and-click adventure game where you find an item and interact with every object to see if they work. I did find myself getting stuck one time because of the graphics quality of the game. There's a part when you have to play a melody on a piano and for the longest time I couldn't figure out the hint. There's also a puzzle in final room that I was stuck on for easily over an hour because of no other reason than it was hard to figure out. It's tough for me to criticize the game because the solution was available, I just wasn't prepared for there to be such a difficult objective.

One thing that felt odd was that the game ended abruptly. I'm not sure if it's because it's the abridged version, but you don't really get closure. This, unfortunately, does make the experience feel rather incomplete. The entire game took me about three and half hours to finish and I did enjoy my time with it despite the conclusion and getting stuck on one puzzle for over an hour.

Overall, if you're looking for a PSVR game to play and you want to be challenged, then $9.99 is a low risk. While trophies never determine how I feel about a game, it is nice to know that completing DYING: Reborn PSVR will get you 100% of the trophies in one playthrough.

3.75 out of 5 stars

Thanks to Oasis Games for providing us with the code

Epistory - The Typing Chronicles Review

When you are first dropped into Epistory – The Typing Chronicles you can’t help but be impressed with the paper-look of the game. A path of pages opens up around you as you walk along it, opening up a rich environment of trees, grass, rocks, and flowers while holding on to the look and feel of paper. Before you know it, the soothing soundtrack mixed with crashing waves and the beautiful narration has fully immersed you into the story.

While discovering everything the land has to offer, you are of course met with obstacles. To get through these obstacles or defeat enemies you must press the spacebar and type the corresponding words. Whenever you revive the earth, destroy an enemy, or get through an obstacle you receive Inspiration Points. Inspiration points are used to buy upgrades and to unlock certain parts of the game. Gating certain parts of the game may sound annoying to some users, but Epistory does a great job keeping you moving, never making you feel like you have to grind out extra words just to advance. There is also a combo meter that allows you to receive more Inspiration Points the longer you string words together.

The upgrades for the game make a huge difference. You can upgrade your movement speed, combo time, knockback, but more importantly you can upgrade your unlockable skills. For example, your fire attack has a great feature that will add a unique twist on damage over time on an enemy letting you destroy them faster. You can upgrade the speed of this damage over time and get yourself out of some serious jams.

As I mentioned before, you have to press the spacebar to hunker down and then type your words. In fact everything in Epistory can be controlled with the keyboard. You move with W, A, S, D and you can just type in whatever commands you want in the menu. Not being a primary PC gamer, this took me a little bit to get used to, but any seasoned PC gamer should have no trouble at all.

One downside that I frequently ran into was when I unlocked the Fire and Ice skills. The further you get into Epistory you must switch your skills to kill enemies who are only vulnerable to that element. The problem arises when you’re using the Ice skill and you need to kill something that has an “F” as it’s first letter. Once you type that “F” Epistory will prioritize your skill selection and expect you to complete word “fire” rather than prioritize the enemy which is coming to kill you. Luckily, Epistory does two things to alleviate some of this pain. First off, when you die, it’s not the end of the world. You can easily pick up where you left off in a matter of minutes. Secondly, if you reach a point that you just can’t pass, Epistory will adjust and give you a little bit of an easier time. At times, I felt like this was necessary.

I type pretty fast and Epistory did a great job pumping up the difficulty with long difficult words (some I had never even heard of before) and increasing the speed and frequency of enemies. As great as this is, I still ran into the problem that my character and her fox weren’t able to shoot at enemies fast enough. There are times when these little flying enemies come out and they only require one letter to kill them. Well, when you queue say five at one time, the attacks don’t come fast enough, resulting in your death. Do this enough times, the game will make it easier for you and bada bing bada boom you’ve advanced.

Epistory also has a lot of puzzle elements. To receive your skills you must retrieve them from a dungeon. The most frequent puzzle is where you must light up blue tiles by stepping on them without stepping on the same one twice in a row or stepping on a red tile. It’s really not a terrible thing when you step on the same tile twice, but stepping on a red tile will result in the puzzle being completely reset. This makes it much more stressful when you have to do these tasks on ice.  With the nature of the game being a story, the puzzles don’t feel like they are to frustrate you. With a little trial and error and some critical thinking, you can get the puzzles fairly quick.

One element that I definitely feel needs improvement is the map. It sort of looks like a zoomed out Minecraft map. While the map does have some handy icons on it that will help you find treasures and gates, a little more interactivity would go a long way.

I don’t want to end on a sour note. Epistory – The Typing Chronicles is a solid game that is absolutely worth trying if you’re looking for something new to try. Combine this with a great story, beautiful music, phenomenal world building and an outstanding narration, you have yourself an adventure you won’t regret taking.

Final Score: 4.5/5

Thank you to Fishing Cactus for providing the code.