Adore Review (Briar)
Great idea with what feels like sloppy execution.
I made it most of the way through the game, keeping myself going on feeling like if I just stuck with it and I got powerful creatures, then maybe I'd enjoy it. The creatures themselves are very well designed and I think that really kept me on the hook, but it's just not really held up.
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Some gripes I've had with it:
1. Start with a fairly light one, translation/writing from a technical perspective. Has a decent amount of poor sentence structure and typos and not in a way that feels intentional for the tribal characters/setting.
2. Has a pretty significant pacing problem, on multiple fronts. The first and most glaring one is how tedious it is unlocking storage space for your creatures. It takes a rather notable amount of these shard items that you only get 1-2 of per map traversed. You also need these shards for other things, which doesn't feel as tedious (these upgrades are more powerful, so having to grind a bit doesn't feel too bad).
The second pacing issue is in some of the little mini-quests. For example, there's a common mission where you have to get 2 energy orbs from one spot to another. While doing so, enemies continuously spawn 1-2 at a time, and every time they get near the orb, it stops moving. These missions are not -difficult- in the slightest, just extremely tedious, forcing you to stop and fight easily dispatched enemies over and over at what feels like a snail-crawl pace, and you have to do it *twice* per mission. Another mission features just standing on buttons and waiting for them to charge.
3. Randomized nature of the trait system (effectively, your creature's skill tree) feels needless and annoying. Any one of them can get randomly assigned traits that are sometimes completely useless to the creature in question. Considering how luck-based acquiring your best creatures already is, it's annoying to have to go find another one when them popping up on the map at all is already a waiting game.
4. Balance issues. The combat feels like it distinctly favors certain types of creatures over others, favoring a hit-and-run strategy with speedy hard-hitters that you quickly recall after deploying. Healing is scarce enough that you really can't afford to let creatures stay out and take hits, and tanky creatures have virtually no way to sustain themselves unless they get lucky with the previously-mentioned very unreliable trait system.
In creature-collector games it's pretty normal to have some that are better than others, that's fine. But this is moreso an issue of "classes" feeling unbalanced. Tanks or otherwise slow hitters don't feel viable at all in my experience.
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What I liked:
1. The creature design. The vast majority of creatures in this game are very well designed imo. They have a decent variety to them but all of them have that "buddy" feel to some degree. From a gameplay perspective, they also do a decent job of making each of the creatures feel pretty distinct from each other.
2. Synergy system. A neat idea that I would've liked to see expanded on, you can effectively infuse the energy of some creatures into other creatures, and the infused creature will get bonuses if another creature that matches it's infused energy type in your party. Nice way to encourage seeking out a party that actually functions well with itself while giving the flexibility to make that happen outside their innate abilities.
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Overall, I wouldn't recommend it, but I'd maybe give another game by them a try in the future. This game had pretty strong "first project" vibes and maybe was just ambitious for the skill level of the developers.