Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess review

Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess
Developer: Dreamnauts Studio
Publisher: GRAVITY GAME ARISE Co, Ltd.
Platforms: Steam, XBOX
Release Date: 9/15/2022
MSRP: 19.99

I feel a little sorry for Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess. It’s a game that wears its influences clearly, from the anime and webcomic-inspired artwork to the bright colors and parallels to the deckbuilding/action/rhythm roguelike One Step From Eden. There was also clearly care and time taken with the premise and worldbuilding— the characters all look unique, there’s clearly some deeper mythology at play with the world and its various goddesses and champions, and that style even figures into some of the tactics and elemental mechanics at play in the game. It has a very impressive look to it, and that’s at least half the battle of any game right there.

Now if only it played as good as it looked.

Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess casts you as Donna, an amnesiac warrior tasked with fighting the goddesses known as Machinae to restore order to the world known as The Grid. In this task, you are assisted by a number of other characters, all with their own agendas and reasons to join Donna on her quest through the goddess’ realms as she fights to regain her memories, defeat the Machinae, and uncover her true purpose. But all of this has happened before, and it might just take more than resolve and Donna’s power to succeed for good this time and finally break the loop.

Grid Force’s main gameplay takes place, appropriately enough, on a grid of squares. You move around, attack dodge attacks, and try to reflect attacks back at the enemies. In this task, Donna is aided by up to three allies, all with their own attack patterns, defensive abilities, and specialties. As you progress through the game, you can choose to spare or kill the bosses you find yourself up against, adding to your roster at the end of each stage. As you progress, you also gain tokens from the various elements that can be used to level up, uncover new abilities, and make your characters into stronger, more specialized types. With the element system and ability to switch between characters with different roles, pretty soon this becomes a fast-paced tactical shooter, with you flipping between characters for defense or offense, staggering an enemy only to switch to DPS to wail on it. If a character loses all their health points, they’re benched and you’re forced to switch to another character. It’s an interesting design, certainly.

Which would be great if it worked. The problem with having great mechanics is that you have to have them very precise before you release. In the game, however, the further in I got, the more cracks started to show. The entirety of a projectile would intersect with my player character’s hitbox. I’d hit a “reflect” timing, which would register, but then get hit with the projectile anyway. Some attacks registered as a single projectile, but others registered as multiples, without much differentiation in how they looked. Furthermore, there’s next to no damage feedback on the player characters, which leads to situations where suddenly you thought you were dodging, only for the character you thought was at almost full health and doing well to be benched. It became especially egregious when one of the bosses could inflict a “charm” status, which meant I was losing characters rapidly as they popped up on her side of the grid and the screen was filling up with more visual information, something that led to a defeat seconds later.

The amount of visual information is another major issue. The screen can get incredibly busy with attacks, and as a number of attacks are unavoidable since the game relies on you to reflect, this can seriously mess up your timing and when and where to dodge. Especially when the attacks come as fast as they do, suddenly your side is wiped out and you have no idea what did it, just that you’re one step closer to losing. It’s an exhaustingly artificial level of difficulty that could have been handled much better by either fine-tuning the timing of projectiles onscreen, or simply not overwhelming the player by making them have to account for six different attacks, only half of which they could see (this is an exaggeration, but not by much). I once found myself stunlocked by something I thought I’d dodged from, only to then have my character charmed out from under me, leaving me completely disoriented.

If the mechanics weren’t so sloppy, there’d actually be an interesting game under all of it. The presentation is actually pretty good, with a unique art style and the kind of deep worldbuilding and stylized designs combined with narrative risk-taking that reminds me of better 2000s-era webcomics. Similarly, the music takes a while to get repetitive, with tracks as hyperkinetic as the battles taking place onscreen and perfectly matching the tone and mood. It’s a wonderful display, and the amount of creative talent onscreen kept me throwing myself against the brick wall of the gameplay time and again as I wanted to see more of this story, tell where this was all going.

But again, the actual in-game parts let the whole thing down. Characters are introduced with either too much exposition or not enough, making the story feel convoluted and exhausting. There’s the idea that you’ll come to care for these characters down the road, but the initial buy-in on the narrative is large enough that it doesn’t really inspire the interest it requires. And when the player has to fight through the mechanics of the game, it doesn’t really endear them to the plotline or finding out who these people are and why. It’s a shame, because again, the work put into the story, art, and style is actually very good, but having to fight the game just isn’t worth it.

Which is unfortunately where we leave this right now. Grid Force: Mask of the Goddess has some interesting ideas, and a plotline that, when you take enough time and care to push through the gameplay, seems fairly rewarding, with branching plotlines and alternate levels. But when the game is so fussy, frustrating, and the mechanics so undercooked, it just doesn’t feel worth the effort.

The Good:
- Excellent visual presentation and music
- Intricate worldbuilding and character/world design

The Bad:
- Shoddy mechanics
- Shallow gameplay with a lot of features but not much impact
- Too much visual information, even for a game that calls itself a “bullet hell”
- Wonky narrative pacing unbalances any investment in the story

Final Score:

Flashy visuals and a bumpin’ soundtrack unfortunately cannot distract from a game that’s simply not fun to play

Zombasite Review

A few months ago, I reviewed an ambitious early-access game known as Zombasite. I was quite impressed with it back then, a title with staggering depth and a very low learning curve, where you could participate however you liked. It had an interesting mechanic with warring clans and an impending zombie apocalypse, and it was a lot of fun. It also had a lot of problems, some serious UI issues, and a definite problem with being overwhelmingly huge. It also couldn't quite make up its mind as to what kind of game it wanted to be, instead deciding to be all of them at once. 

I am proud to report that some of these problems have been fixed. While the game itself has changed very little from the beginning to the final project, and some parts are just ridiculous (the huge game world size, for example, even on tiny), Zombasite is pretty much the same as it was back then, but with some major fixes. 

For those who didn't read the earlier review, however, allow me to explain a little about the game. Zombasite is a hybrid 4X, real-time, Action, and Roleplaying game. You lead your clan into battle against other clans on an isometric Diablo-style map, attempt diplomacy, and hope to rid the world of zombies by developing a cure or eradicating the parasite causing the dead to rise. You also have to balance relations between clan members, manage your clan's food supply, and build stronger defenses as you go. 

Further heightening the tension is the constantly ticking clock. There's always a chance that your archnemesis will open a portal to Hell, or that your clan members may inexplicably burn your settlement to the ground, or that the people you're trying to rescue so they join your clan will end up instead getting killed by wild animals, leaving you high and dry. 

I initially said that the game was too large, but for my first release playthrough, I instead decided to set the world to "tiny." While "tiny" is apparently still massive enough to contain tens of factions and subfactions and zombies, I found the reduced map a lot more manageable now that I didn't have to make the trek from Mount Doom and back every time I wanted to complete a quest. Also helping things, quests can now be completed from your questlog, also reducing backtracking.

However, some things are still glaring flaws. The help system will quickly swamp you with notifications, and since there is no tutorial, you are dependent solely on them to figure out exactly what in God's name is going on. The subsystems other than that are kind of byzantine, with no real concrete way to figure out how to advance your clan, war on other clans, or any of that. Durability and repairs are similarly arcane, requiring you to travel all over the place. And further complicating matters, finding a gate back before your clanmates kill each other kind of makes things unnecessarily complicated.

But in the end, Zombasite is a good game. One that will probably lost on most, one that's most fun when you're not trying to make sense of a bunch of things and instead go off to whack a bunch of zombies on the head, figure out how to make health potions cure infections, and recruit a blacksmith or two, but a good game nonetheless. It's weird in a very charming fashion. If you are patient with it, then it's one of the most rewarding titles (and definitely among the most rewarding indie titles) you will play this year. 

4/5

Reviewer received a free copy of this game in exchange for a review. 

Zombasite Preview

Zombasite, currently in beta from Soldak Entertainment, is the most fun you will have not knowing what it is you're doing. 

And before that sounds too much like faint praise, allow me to explain, it is a lot of fun. 

Zombasite is an isometric action RPG similar to Soldak's earlier game, Depths of Peril. In it, you control a clan in a small settlement. You and other clans are fighting for control of a world on the brink of total collapse, thanks to a twisted necrotic parasite known as the "Zombasite." While you attempt to keep control of your clan and stop the various members from killing each other whenever they get bored or angry enough, a bar at the bottom slowly rises, showing the growth and infection rate of the parasites.

And so, a desperate struggle emerges between you and the various forces. While clans will try to raid you and your enemies below and above ground will send gruesome monsters to attack you, you also have to protect your clan from zombies and research ways to slow down or stop the parasite. You will find yourself focusing on a billion different systems and subsystems in an attempt to keep your clan from collapsing. Even at the lower difficulty levels, I can tell you it is going to be an uphill battle to keep that from happening. I have put several hours into the game, and trying to do everything at once is going to leave you wandering the wasteland and wondering just how your illustrious clan wound up being two people in a fort with no doors. 

But that isn't to say the barrier of entry is all that high. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Zombasite provides its players with many more ways to win than to lose: simply killing all the opposing clans (military victory), having an alliance with the remaining clans left on the map (diplomacy), to completing all the quests on the map. The game also tracks your knowledge and lore about the parasite, making the zombies and infection more manageable as you discover more things about the world. Most enemies are fairly easy to kill early on provided you know what you're doing, while giving you a game experience with a very slow difficulty curve, to its benefit. 

The world is also dynamic and persistent. You can start a new game in an already-generated world, with all that would entail, and as you go along, the world will change. Sometimes people will kill your targets before you can get to them. Clans are constantly shifting in alliance and loyalty between each other, and will go out on raids. Your own clanmates have specific weapon and armor preferences, all of which impact how well they'll be able to fend off invasion and join you on raids. Clans may leave you alone, or they might rush full-on towards you, or spawn demon gates, or any number of things. When  you pop someone into a new instance of the world, they take up a new region, but use the same lore and other features of the older space.

But while the game is in good form currently, it still has a long way to go before it's out of early access. The systems are a little obtuse, and while the help system is helpful, it's also a row of icons along the bottom of the screen that are easy to miss and don't always contain the most useful of information. The sound design also sometimes borders on oppressive, especially in larger battles. When coupled with a skill system that's obtuse even at the best of times, this can make things incredibly frustrating as enemies skill upward. 

Overall, though, I'm looking forward to seeing what Zombasite gets with a full version. It's original, unique, and very complex in spite of its basic trappings, and with a few kinks worked out, should be a new classic. 

The Reviewer was given a copy of the game in exchange for this review. The game is still in early access and is subject to change.

Victor Vran Review

I previewed this game in my first article ever for the site. I played it, and it was full of promise and life and all kinds of exciting potential. In short, while it was definitely rough, at the same time, it was a lot of fun to play.

I don't know what the developers did, to take that game so full of potential, a game with a decent premise, and drop it off a cliff, but I intend to find out in great detail. Because this is not the game I previewed way back in the spring. This is a game that is significantly not that game, and it bothers me.

The plot, such as it is: Victor Vran, a renowned monster hunter, comes to the walled city of Zagoravia looking for a fellow hunter. Instead, he finds the entire city overrun by monsters and under attack from some kind of demonic force. Using the palace of Queen Katarina as his home base, Vran sets out to liberate the town and destroy the monsters bit by bit. 

All of this is kind of an excuse plot for a Diablo-like (or, since it's more Victorian gothic horror, a Van Helsing-like) where your demonically powered generic hunter, with the generic voice that sounds like he's been gargling two pounds of driveway gravel, battles his way through spiders, skeletons, and other baddies that one might find decorating a front door on Halloween. In addition to the usual isometric gameplay, Victor Vran adds another dimension to the mix: Height. 

Yes, in Victor Vran, you can actually leap on to high obstacles, wall jump, and in one area solve a maze by jumping over its walls. You can use these abilities to maneuver around the battlefield, keep from being overrun, or even gain the high ground over your opposition. In theory, anyway. In fact, I'll go one better, that is exactly what it was like in the preview and what made me like it so much.

Unfortunately, the released version of Victor Vran is somewhat hampered. Many of the areas I could previously jump to are now railed-- you can jump over the hedges in the maze in the first part of the game, but can no longer run along them shotgunning enemies to your heart's content. The weapon ranges are also changed-- no more shooting across gaps or nice area control situations any more. In fact, much of what has been changed is meant to get you into combat more, something which rubs against my play style. I never liked the "hordes of enemies" approach, and Vran lured me in with the premise of something fresh, only to show it kept it as a pretense, not the reality.

What's left is kind of bland. The environments are colorful, to be sure, but the gameplay is kind of samey. While challenges help mitigate the blandness a little and add some dimensions of play, your achievements shouldn't be doing all the heavy lifting, and what else there is of the game feels unsatisfying. Instead of a skill tree, you gain equippable cards that take the place of such things. Each level you gain unlocks new things: levels, abilities, extra weapon slots, and extra item slots. Instead of an overworld you can travel and explore, you get a map with level select and a rating of stars and secrets in terms of completion. 

I do like the streamlined level process out of all those things, but at times I wish it were more customizable. It's a game about hitting things, it makes that very obvious from the first step. It's not as interested in magic or area control or strategy, it's very much about combat. Head-to-head combat. It's also got a lot more rails than the pre-release version, forcing me to change my strategies but...not leaving me very much to change them to. 

Enough about what this version subtracts. What it adds are some very nice visuals and pieces of art, and full (unneeded) voice overs. This is especially egregious as the ultimate evil has some kind of taunting voice in the protagonist's head, but the writing staff didn't bother to make him particularly funny. There's also more of a story than previously, but the story isn't really the point here. 

So in the end, if you want a game that reaches for innovation with a ton of action, and some interesting choices in height, then this is definitely a game you should watch out for. But be warned, it doesn't really do anything out of the ordinary, and even the few charms it has aren't really worth the full price of admission. Wait for a sale. 

2/5

Full Disclosure: Reviewer received a review copy of the game.

Victor Vran Preview

    Victor Vran , the new game from Tropico developer Haemimont Games, is an ARPG like Diablo or The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. It's set in a crumbling castle somewhere in Europe, filled with all manner of creepy and crawly creatures.  While many people have noted similarities to other ARPGs out there, Victor Vran adds a new element to action-RPGs that most other games have ignored: Height. 

      What sets Victor Vran apart from the other games mentioned above is the ability to jump over walls, wall-bounce to hard-to-reach points, and otherwise navigate the battlefield in a wholly different way. It adds an element of platforming to the game, as well as a level of tactical control-- Why get swarmed by a horde of spiders when you can get to higher ground above them, or stand on a nearby hedge to avoid their attacks? Why not leap over your enemies and get the drop on them from another angle? 

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Victor faces down a horde of the undead.

        While the game is still in early access and so there's placeholder art and enemy variety is a little low, the game's combat system is completely functional at this point, and many of the levels are finished, so you can go tearing through castle gardens, crypts, and caves with a variety of swords, scythes, hammers, guns, and demonic powers. Adding some variety to things,  there are a series of challenges for each mission, urging players to consider exploring all of an area to hunt down secrets, chests, and bonus bosses to defeat. 

Two area of effect attacks clash

           I'm excited to see how Victor Vran develops into a full-fledged game, and while I know there's definitely some missing pieces right now, what they have already is reason enough to keep watching this.