Ardein.Fall Reviews

At this stage, the game is barely playable - weird camera movement and unclear shooting controls makes impossible to target enemies, so just shooting at random. Attack controls is too confusing - sometimes it's simple bullets, sometimes it's a beam with hard recoil... Melee attack range is not clear as well. Enemies are weird, no feedback on damage... A lot of issues, hope will be fixed with updates.

It's good! Picked it up during the Summer Sale. Reminds me of Furious Angels but with some Tower Defence thrown into the mix. Very casual, fun, and easy to pick up and play.

Pretty good for a solo-dev. Graphics and visuals are awesome. There are some things that bugged me, but hope Dev will emprove em.

Arcade shooter, kind of like Furious Angels but anime. Visuals are nice, clean, and decipherable (blue good, red bad though it seems hinted there's friendly fire). Nothing like getting chased down by a flurry of spinning swarm of missiles, and frantically trying to shoot them down! Each wave gets progressively harder, and part of that challenge involves picking up the shards before they disappear so you can upgrade your turrets to survive longer. There's no lull between waves, so don't put your guard down. When you die you get some amount of points, and you can use those points to unlock more turret options. Music is sharp, but no variety. I might stick on another playlist. My main gripe is there's not really any context or many cues for your turrets. All of the sudden you hear one is about to die, but I never notice the enemies attacking them. Does their health slowly degrade? Furthermore there's no option to repair, you either upgrade (expensive), or refund (you only get about 25% of your costs back). If your turret dies that whole ship section is useless. Dev seems active in the discussion, so I'm confident there's going to be improvements down the pipeline.

If you looking for interesting top down arcade shooter you definitely have to try this game (btw music 10/10).

The game has potential with some good ideas and is certainly playable. However, I can't recommend it due to my overall lack of enjoyment. The cinematic camera angle is an interesting choice, but it severely limits visibility, especially for threats from behind. The cluttered screen often leads to chaotic situations and deaths that feel unfair. Controls work best with a keyboard, but piloting a ship this way feels unnatural. The digital inputs make the ship's movements feel erratic and hard to control precisely. The game could benefit from providing more information to players. For instance, instructions on repairing the ship you're defending or explanations of how purchased turrets function would be helpful. I was unsure about the magnet turret's purpose - was it for collecting scrap or affecting enemy ships? Note it was to collect scrap. I don't mean to be overly critical. The developer should be proud of what they've accomplished with this release, and I don't regret my purchase. However, these issues significantly impacted my enjoyment of the game.

I enjoy shooters but this one I can't recommend. Not much time played, but time enough to know there isn't anything to strive for. No longing for that cool upgrade, or set of things to check that awesome synergy. This game just throws you out into a play field you just really really want to zoom in/out of. Zipping around with controls that feel spongy. There is no gradient to game play to even help you develop any strategy. Your turrets get smashed out ultra fast. I tried upgrading them all one by one. They are demolished. I tried saving up and going through a couple of upgrades in one go. They get demolished. It would seem you just can't even kill enough things to get enough scrap to make them helpful before the 'boss' things arrive and smash up everything. I don't begrudge the purchase - it is not expensive, and we all need to support devs. Really wish Steam reviews had a third recommend options like 'qualified yes'

[b]Ardein.Fall[/b] is a refreshing take on tower defense's, which tend to be a rather straight forward genre with not much room for innovation- but that's not the case for this one. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] A nice mixture between top down shooter and tower defense. You have to watch out for not only your health, but also your ships health. The ship is split into 7 segments, each with their own healthbars that you should keep a close eye on. Each segment can hold a single tower and building/upgrading towers can replenish the health of the segment. "Easy to control, hard to master"- just as the description claims. The game throws you in, and it's pretty basic enough to the point where you know what you're doing so long as you've played some other games. As you play more, more things will just naturally happen, and you'll start to discover new mechanics. One of my favorites of these mechanics is that you can aim the railgun weapon behind you, and you get extra momentum forwards; keep shooting and you get enough momentum to straight up run into enemies and kill them via ramming into them. There seems to be a good handful of these kinda "tricks" you learn along the way, and it helps keep the game fresh as you gain points and unlock new towers. The "Ever-Changing-War" is another thing to bring up. Every 24 hours, it seems the enemies change as well as the leaderboard, which is definitely going to be a big motivator for you to give it a shot every day. [h2]Graphics/Audio[/h2] The graphics are pretty to look at and gives a good atmospheric feel to the game. It describes itself as anime-inspired, which isn't wrong by any means. I'm not too big a fan of anime, but the graphics are pleasing to me nonetheless. The music and sound effects compliments game theme very well and once you start to understand the game and get into it you'll feel like a skilled pilot shooting down enemy ships. [h2]Issues[/h2] If there's one thing that bugs me, is that sometimes you're unsure of whether or not you hit an enemy, I think the game could benefit from adding some more feedback like that, or feedback for when you're low on health. Besides that, most of the game feels pretty polished, but feedback is important. If this gets added in an update, I'll update this review. This issue isn't enough to make it a "bad" experience though, so don't worry too much. [h2]Conclusion[/h2] All in all, [b]Ardein.Fall[/b] is a joy to play. The tower defense elements are well implemented and don't feel like "just another mechanic"; it feels like it actually adds something to the space shooter. I can tell that love was put into the development, and is well-priced. Give it a shot. By the by, it's difficult. Description does not lie.

It's, fine, i guess? There's no "end" to the game, its just an infinite high score game with a mostly dead leaderboard. You can unlock new towers to place down by spending the points you earn from each run, but all your unlocks get reset every day, probably for leaderboard balance, so you can't even have an interesting progression loop of unlocking new towers to experiment with. Only worth it if you REALLY want a high score focused game with this concept, and even then it's probably best to wait for it to be on sale for at least 5$ first.

Ardein is a good and fun mix of a top down shooter and tower defense. Daily leaderboards provide a major source of motivation and does not discourage untalented players and new arrivals as much as permanent boards. New enemy combo every day keeps the game fresh and brings unexpected surprises. You get 14 turrets for your needs of mass destruction. A single session lasts around 20 minutes max and fits right in the spot of "short and sweet". [h1]Gameplay[/h1] Likely a developer decision, Ardein doesn't have any bit of hand holding. Some stuff aren't communicated to the player at any point, nor did the game provide any hints on the so called "builds" most roguelikes seem to utilize. For those unaware: - WASD to move - Left mouse to shoot, stop shooting to charge a piercing railgun - Right mouse for a sword (the sword is not affected by jamming enemies) - Space triggers a dash - Dash within a short timeframe after getting hit for a short parry-doge effect, where your fire rate is temporarily increased (affects all 3 weapons - other than making the machine gun shoot faster, it increases the frequency the railgun and sword swing "ticks" the enemy) - Dash and immediately shoot railgun behind you to perform a warp dash (very helpful against swarms of basic enemy jets) - At 250 scraps and 500 scraps you get a drone, and using your scraps on turrets drops a drone if it goes below one of those values - Drones are not affected by the jamming enemy - rapidly tap your left mouse button to use the drones when you're being jammed Each day you get a new mission, where you face off select types of enemies from a larger pool, and 2 boss types (out of 5) to take care of. Your goal in Ardein is to protect the mothership, by installing, upgrading and scrapping the turrets, while also upgrading your 3 weapons on your jet, and fending off enemy attacks in a combined effort with the mothership to survive as long as you can until you lose all your hull points, or when the mothership loses all its segments. As a change of pace, a boss arrives every 2 minutes, and you can choose to leave them be or kill them asap (more on this later). Note that each time you install or upgrade a turret, it completely refills the segment health. [h1]Thoughts?[/h1] Ardein is not a game about synergy and builds. Personally, I find it a good thing that I don't need to memorize builds, there aren't that many potential builds around. Turrets don't interact with each other, which is a bit of a shame, but many do have interactions with the player. Your time in this game is mostly spent on just executing and refining your skills, instead of figuring out builds and synergies like in Nova Drift. To be honest, Nova Drift hurts my brain too much when it comes to figuring out builds, and it really isn’t that fun copying others’ builds, but your own builds will usually suck since the pros have long figured out the better build way ahead of you. Managing weapon upgrades might be one of the biggest challenges of the game. All 3 of your weapons are upgraded individually and require constantly killing enemies to meet the upgrade requirement of 1000 points per level, maxing out at the 5th upgrade. Another gimmick is that each time you kill a boss, enemies get more health. Eventually, a level 3 turret won't be able to deal with the madness of endgame enemies with a bloated health pool. Which brings us to the point - do you kill bosses asap to keep the mothership from being drained of its health, and get quick upgrades to face the tougher enemies, or do you leave them alive for longer to farm the more fragile enemies while risking your mothership? There's a problem though, among the 5 boss variants, some of them are extremely dangerous if left alive for just a tad longer, so you're forced to kill them earlier, toughening all enemies. Even if you choose to leave the bosses, your turrets will still kill them eventually, so you might end up scrapping your turrets immediately after installing them just to refill segment health and to drag on the fight, sticking with low level turrets at early to mid game, or only using very specific turrets in a very specific way. Balancing of the bosses is one of the "wonkier" elements of the game, making encounters so wildly different that you will start blaming your failed attempts entirely onto the boss selection. Same can be said about certain enemy types that will give you so much headache that you start to hate them. Coupled with the ever-toughening enemies, the variety of choice no longer seems to matter that much, since you will more or less die in the exact same way at endgame - unable to scratch even the most basic enemies, and suffering a slow death as the bosses pile up and wear out both you and the mothership. It's quite frustrating. In the end, the game is trying to do a lot at the same time, and it worked, just with some drawbacks, which makes progression (especially for score chasing purposes) feel gimmicky sometimes, and the arbitrary difficulty increases could be super frustrating. [h1]Overall enjoyment[/h1] For someone like me who really isn’t into brainstorming and experimenting too much with all the builds, Ardein is a bless. I jump in for the [i]action[/i], and the action [i]only[/i]. It did fairly well for what it offers! Even with the gimmicks, it was overall a lot of fun, and I would recommend it to anyone who needs a coffee break experience. [i][b]Obligatory FA posting[/b][/i] If you like this game, I also recommend checking out [u][b]Furious Angels[/b][/u]. They have quite a lot in common, but different pacing and gameplay loop. Neither of these two are about builds, but working with what you have. Ardein gives you more resources to work with, including actual turrets that defends the mothership, and more weapons to use at the same time, but also more enemy types to look out for. FA however, has everything laid out right in front of you, with a single designated upgrade path, no towers, and limited enemy types (7 counting the boss), but gameplay feels far more consistent and straightforward with almost no balancing or pacing concerns. It also does not have arbitrary difficulty spikes, so session lengths varies greatly depending on the mission and your skill level. As a bonus, you can have a laser tank ;]