Recent reviews by A Swarm of Savage Lefroms

Personally, I think it's too early to give this game a negative review but I also can't justify paying $16 for the small amount of joy you may get from it.

The game, by itself, is good. The art style is cute, the music is nice, the atmosphere is relaxing! The game is similar to Stardew Valley, as many have mentioned but like the kiddie pool version of it. There's no where near as much world and nowhere near as much to do, which can be expected from an early access game.

However for the most part, all you're going to be doing in this game is tickling a few creatures and whacking a few plants to get materials to make potions that either advance the story or get you coins. Day in, day out. You unlock a new area, in the story, you get a new ingredient, you make a new kind of potion that either advances the story line or can be made for daily quests for coin. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The only break from that, is that you have a few areas and 'secrets' that require certain potions to make to explore. Which returns you to that grind to get the parts to make it. It was fun for maybe the first hour or three but soon it becomes a daily chore that has no purpose. The easiest way to put it for you Stardew Players is, it's the game if you buy a Member Ship card and have to farm corn over and over to pay for the village upgrades. The monotony hits quick and the game instantly loses any appeal it had.

Another thing many players complain about is the dialogue, I personally had no problem with it as for awhile I was invested in the story but there is no skip option and there is a LOT of dialogue that you cannot avoid. I would recommend if the developers either A, added a skip option for the players who aren't interested or B, added a some of the dialogue in little gab windows that pop up near the top of the window so they can still move and play while the main character is yapping to her hat as 9/10 times, they're saying something that doesn't really NEED to be up in the players face.

TLDR; The game has potential, it's cute and fun but at the present it's lackluster and monotonous after a while with slow grindy progression and a very small amount of gameplay.

The game will probably improve drastically when it's finished and has more interesting content to take part in, but for $16 it's little more than a flash game where you interact with creatures and plants to make keys that advance the plot or give you money.

I've been pretty nervous of Early Access Games for awhile now after a few poor choices, but my best friend bought it for me and I forget this game is 'Early Access'. The graphics and art are amazing, the progression feels good, and building your expanding you castle and making it look as nice as you can feels akin to doing crack.

For the most part, it's a little like Conan Exiles where each area has gear and enemies to your level and you'll need to hang there before you can reliably progress to the next area. There is no 'Level' System, instead you raise your 'gear level' and gain new abilities by beating certain bosses. It also takes from Valheim in the sense that to reliably progress to advancement in gear you'd have to beat a boss. This turned me away at first, however there are so many bosses to fight that are fun, unique, and unlike Valheim, you don't need to gather the whole posse and a thousand magical pies to beat them.

Other mechanics that some players may not enjoy is how the Day and Night Cycle work. In V-Rising, Day is actually your Night in most survival games. At Daytime there are usually more people around the roads and, as a vampire, you don't absorb UV Rays as well as most people. When you're in broad daylight there's a small timer before you engulf into flames and take huge amounts of damage overtime. However, just touching a shadow for a milisecond resets this timer. And because of all the trees, rocks, or mountains on a trail you can rely on the fact you'll be touching a shadow often enough that you won't roast. It sounds tedious but believe me, the sun will ONLY be a threat to you if you're trying to whack something out in the open. Otherwise you'll be fine.

One thing that does bring the game down though that doesn't have a real easy work around, evolves around the aforementioned 'Areas and Progression'. Although advancing to a new area is fun as each place feels unique to be in. You'll have to choose between lugging all your loot back to your first castle, or building a second one. No problem, really, building a new castle feels nice. But you CANNOT have a third, you're limited to two castles and once you advance past THAT area you'll have to lug your loot farther now. You can elect to destroy one castle and build a new one but bringing your items back and forth IS tedious and like in Valheim, a lot of items cannot be teleported through the waygates. The easiest solution for this, is making a clan with friends and relying on their two castles to teleport between along with your own.

Another things is horses, early in the game you can shapeshift into a wolf that runs faster however a horse allows you to traverse the map so much faster. To get a horse though you'll need find a spot in the Farmlands, which is the second area, and jump on a horse. That's it. It's fairly simple, the horses have three stats 'Rotation Speed, Acceleration, and Top Speed. These stats are RANDOM though, and some horses are adherently better than others. Finding a good horse isn't TOO hard. But you'll have to keep your horse watered like a plant to keep it alive. Which is again, not really a chore. The real chore is not getting your ass knocked off the horse. While riding your horse if you aggro a patrol of nitwits on the road they'll begin attacking you. There's not chance on God's Green Earth they're going to melee hit you but if one of those guys nicks you with a crossbolt that you failed to dodge or walked into. You're knocked of your horse. Yes, you, a supernatural creature of the night of unmatched fortitude and speed...get knocked off by any a single piddly wink arrow. And there's a timer before you can get back on your horse that is magically the same amount of time it takes for the rest of the group to catch up to you. To which point you're forced into a fight.

TLDR; Games a ton of fun, progressing is fun and combat feels good! Progressions revolves around beating bosses and advancing to new areas. Getting knocked off your horse is no fun, and Being limited to two castles hurts later in the game.

Some people may not enjoy the twist V Rising gives to the Survival Craft genre, and a lot of people aren't a huge fan of isometric games and their combat. However, V Rising is a game with few flaws. However it's not a game to be playing alone either, it's possible...but having friends to fight bosses with and pooling resources makes the game a lot more enjoyable.

It's just good, for a $12 early access game I'd already pay twice as much. And they just keep making it better and better

Where to start. The concept is cool, the ONLY thing this game has going for it, is the fact you can FEEL cool while playing it. But maybe if it actually worked, that'd be swell. The game itself is very slow, starting off is a bit rocky too because it isn't uncommon for your sword to barely break even, and even when it does buying new materials for your sword is going to take all that money away, so good luck progressing at the start. Once you unlock the mine --yes you have to buy the ability to go into your sex dungeon and mine for ore, it's a little easier.

But every rock looks the same and the rocks have a chance to drop 1/3 of the ores you need to get an actual ingot (which you need to buy a smelter to even do that). And the mine is honestly not that big, it's a square area of straight dirt and once you mine to one edge you just have a hole that leads off the map, so if you knock anything down there just say goodbye to it.

The game FEELS incomplete, the animations feel like they were done in five minutes, The physics will send things flying, the music is the same 30 second loops, Tempering a sword works 25% of the time, and making DAMASCUS metal is just NO fun.

First you have to play a game of tetris but with more random luck thrown in, which the game will sometimes say you completed then lock you out of the next step of making damascus so you just wasted your money. If the latter doesn't happen, then you get to experience the joy of matching colours, which is also a guessing game because your guide has no relevance to what you actually need to do!

For a game that is simply just mini-games. it failed at all of them. I mean, I only spent five dollars on the game. Which I would happily spend if it was a free game with the promise of more updates. But there has barely been any serious updates to this game for about a year. So what's the point?

I will admit, it's dumb-fun. A bunch of time wasting mini-games that have nice visual effects. But there are a ton of bugs and a ton of aspects of the game that could benefit from the minimalist of polishing. And the game doesn't get any sort of real development. I really wish this game was more than what it is, it's such a wonderful concept that would benefit from a little more attention. But in it's current state I cannot recommend it.

It's just good yo, if you want to make your desktop look twice as cool and not impede your specs this does it. I thought it would affect my specs but it pauses and mutes whenever you're on another window and you can customize it in that way.

So if you want it to be animated in the background and play sound whenever you select your wallpaper but want it to stop whenever you're playing a graphically intensive game? Then say no more, you've come to the right places!

So many places to start...

As someone who enjoys writing, a simple Visual Novel Engine would be a nice way to spice up my writings. And as I had good experiences with Enterbrain/ASCII; putting about 350 hours into RPG Maker MV, and felt it was simple and fun enough. I figured that giving Visual Novel Maker a go would have been an even simpler and faster way to get down to writing.

And hoo-boy was I wrong, Visual Novel Maker is somehow more complicated than RPG Maker MV, which is amazing considering one is a 2-D JRPG maker and the other is simply pictures, words, and sound queues. And there are NO GUIDES about using Visual Novel Maker, sure it gives you a vague written guide that either...

A. Doesn't cover what you needed.
B. Doesn't cover enough of what you needed.

The official video tutorials stopped randomly and were never picked back; going on to two years now. Overall, it's just needlessly complicated and the little schooling tutorial they give you in RPG Maker MV helped immensely, and making one for Visual Novel Maker would've required the minimalist bit of effort. But fine, whatever. You win some you lose some you can attempt to learn the ropes on your own to the best of your ability.

But you're paying $40 for something you could achieve on UNITY or Ren'Py (which both are free). The Visual Novel Maker is not much simpler than programming with UNITY/Ren'Py, and most certainly not any less tedious. Inserting and naming every single expression for every single character could have easily been streamlined. I really have no clue where $40 is going to if it's not even remotely simplified.

And that is not even the worst of it, the worst part, absolute the worst part by far. Are the bugs. The fact there are this many bugs in an engine is downright unforgivable. I cannot express to you how many times I've had to delete and restart a project because something broke in an engine. Of course, possibly I'm just god awful at programming and broke the engine my lonesome dove. But don't even bother looking for help fixing your issues online, not nearly enough people have dabbled into the engine to help fix things like that. And believe me, you'll want to google everything as a programmer. And I want to blame myself for messing up the engine, but I could do something as simple as adding a background and the resolution on the "PRE-PACKAGED BACKGROUND" is shot and out of proportion. Nothing was altered between the engine and the background so there is no logical reason for anything like that to have happened.

And simple things such as "I want this character to move into the frame" only works with some characters??? I've punched just about every character into the same command and it doesn't work with ALL of the PRE-PACKAGED CHARACTERS? I haven't even begun to write my story with the amount of time it takes just to get it to work. I'm trying to be patient and trying understand what it is I did to break it, but I have never had anywhere near this trouble with any other Engine in the past. It boggles my mind as to why something as simple as a visual novel maker can bust itself so easily.



TL;DR - Buggy, Over-complicated, and Dysfunctional

I cannot recommend this engine to anybody...

If you're new to programming/want to streamline the process: Just use UNITY, Ren'Py or pay a fraction of the price and get TyranoBuilder, this is not much simpler and you'll get more help with bumping into problems.

Personally, I feel the game is well optimized, a game where I can fly into space, onto a massive planet, space again, and onto ANOTHER massive planet has no reason to be running as smoothly as it does. My computer is nearly five years old and it runs like a charm.

Lets start with what's good about the game. The game has wonderful atmosphere, it honestly makes you feel like there's a whole universe with endless exploration and possibilities. The language system, trading system, and the buildings you find on a planet just overall make you feel like you're a Galatic Traveler, I would say it's unrivaled in any game thus far.

The game itself is calm, almost zen like, gives you the same old relaxing feel as Minecraft. Base building on many different planets, going from place to place, and overall exploring is a perfect medium of relaxing and interesting without being dreadfully boring.

However, the game doesn't exactly give you a lot of hand holding when it comes to certain aspects that feel pretty important, yet the tutorial is fairly long for anybody's taste. Some things could've been streamlined, mentioned off-hand, or discovered by oneself. Anybody with 1/4th of a brain could've figured out how to find fly from a Planet to a Space Station if you already showed them how to fly to a Planet. But nobody is going to guess off-hand that pressing Q-E while trying to upgrade a Exosuit Inventory Slot will allow you to upgrade a Technology Slot which you can get by going to a terminal NEXT to the Merchant and not the Merchant Themself, or that you can only learn certain crafting Blueprints you need to progress from Abandoned Facilities you'll find random on planets.

Additionally, The game does feel incredibly slow, and having to get Oxygen to refill your Life-Support, Sodium for you Hazardous Environment Protections, Carbon for your Mining Beams, Di-hydrogen for your Launch Thrusters...blah blah blah. It's not really an engaging aspect, it's the equivalent of a Hunger or Thirst meter in any other Survival Game but it doesn't feel fun. It's just a second of my time wasted to open the menu and refill it. But it doesn't become a problem later on in the game as the resources you need come in abundance anyway.

And movement is also INCREDIBLY slow even when you can sprint AND you're given a jetpack, it still takes forever to get to Point A to Point B by foot. Luckily there's a trick where if you sprint, melee attack (Q) and then activate your jetpack it catapults you forward (a trick I just call thrusting) without that it'd be borderline unplayable as you move slower than a stick of butter up-hill.

Another aspect of the game many players can't stand are the sentinels, a bunch of floating robots that get nettled when you attempt to "alter the planet in anyway". It's a good story concept, but yeesh does it make me want to headbutt a beltsander sometimes. Imagine playing Minecraft but every once in awhile a GTA Cop will pass by and beat the crap out of you if you try and play the game.

If you trigger a sentinel you either have to high-tail it or kill it. Whatever, smash a robots face in, no biggie. But once you kill one, you get a star and wave after wave of sentinels come with progressively bigger and badder sentinels. And the spoiled cherry on top this egg-shelled filled cake is THEY DO NOT STOP. They continue on and on until you high tail out of there. It's just ludicrous and annoying to get pegged by a damn flying eyeball with a water-pistol and having to run from it just because you don't feel like wasting your time.

Despite those two aspects, the game overall grants a fair bit of enjoyment, I'd say it definitely gives it's money's worth for the amount of time you can suck into this game. If you enjoy survival and base-building games but don't feel like getting shot in the back of the head by a six year-old. I recommend this game, but if you like higher octane games, this may be too slow for you.

Not bad, functional. The DLC's are a little much and most of them are more than useless and situational, but the base program is functional.

Fun, cute, not pay to win, completely customizable. Think of it like if the nerds who made Trove made an MMORPG for kids that sweaty adults like you and me play instead. That's this game.

Yeah, alright, it so isn't worth the $80 dollars that some people wasted (like me). Yeah, the story mode is kinda meh and isn't all that spectacular. But it's not like the characters are incredibally unbalanced and the roster of characters are all unique and fun to play. If you like PVP, FPS, or MOBAS. You should definitely give this game a shot. Even though it says FREE TRIAL it's not limited you can play forever and you can unlock everything just by playing the game so other than it eating up a whole 25GB you really aren't losing anything by trying out the free game. I repeat FREE.