Lairchitect Reviews

not enough control over minions; getting and minning obsidion is a pain and usually ends up where you don't want it, its so easy to just go water dungeon and spam tier 3 mobs

a lot of features, I like the minimal grafics but it needs balancing or a tutorial. Sorry I have to downgrade :/

Wow one of the best Sokpop Games they have released. I SERIOUSLY hope the expand on this one, but i'm not going to get my hopes up, but I honestly think with some tweaks and expansions this could become a hit! even more so than it is now (at least for a sokpop game)!

Very confusing to play. UI had some problems with bunched up letters that cut off a small portion of it so I couldn't read what it said, fire comes out of nowhere at random times, which is helpful because it deals a lot of damage, but because the minions were pretty weak I just had to hope enemies got killed by fire. despite getting a minion that had a description that said it could mine I was unable to mine anything. I didn't play for too long considering I had no idea how to even advance in the game so I just quit.

Could be interesting, but bad map gen and comically bad balancing keep it from working. Functionally the game wants you to separate out a dungeon into "biomes"; here's the plant biome, here's the water biome, here's the lava biome, etc. It's kind of a neat concept and one seen in other games I quite like, like What Did I Do To Deserve This. However, the strongest unit is a water biome unit, map generation makes three very straight paths directly to your crystal, and you can't really control where lava pops up until you can mine some obsidian, which requires lava and water interacting. So the most viable strategy is actually to just flood the central chamber and fill it with frogs and crabs and let them obliterate every enemy that shows up, supplementing them with skeletons from the heroes you kill. Boring. If you want a game in this vein, but with direct control over your units and a much more compelling way to design your dungeon, check out Wratch's Den.

You have no control over your own units and non-combat mechanics like building and mining do not appear to work properly. For example, units will sit next to gold not mining it and doors cannot be placed even with chests built.

Great ideas and visual style, but incompletely executed.

AI is exploitable. Can't control my units - they have a death wish. Nothing (plants, undead, demons, goblins, or aquatic life) synergizes at all. Frame rate plummets if at max speed. Building or digging out walls is a nightmare. Soundtrack was grating after a few hours. Very limited construction items. Tutorial sucks. First level is too hard. Last level is too easy. Endless mode is bland. Some grammar issues. But it was 3 bucks. It was a fun distraction.

Interesting idea, not well executed. You can trivially beat each level using almost none of the tools you’re given. Combine that with the horrible pathfinding and constantly stuck creatures and you get a clear "Don’t Buy".

Lairchitect could be a really good 'dungeon master' game if the creature AI and balancing were better, but SokPop being SokPop only made a solid foundation and kicked it out the door before it was fully polished. It's not that I don't like it, I am just disappointed that a game with so many fun mechanics has so many silly problems, hence the replay value is not very high. The complexity is actually very good, there is a lot of synergy between different creatures and traps, not to mention that you can even redirect liquids, like pushing lava into the tunnels. Your creature AI can be a pain in the butt, your workers can get aggroed across a very long distance which constantly wastes time and resources. If they just reduced the worker's vision I think it would be a lot more tolerable. Same goes for a lot of soldiers, even though the 'rat' can attack anyone, it does not prioritize the closest enemy which would be common sense. On a positive note, I really like the way the game generates creatures by giving you a different unit based on the floor tile. For example, the ground gives you a rat, but if you have a wooden floor, it will give you a slime, or piranha if you had water over - also applies to higher creature tiers, giving even more choices. Each unit has its place, everything from a hard worker to a tough fighter and everything in between. The problems arise when you realize that gave is heavily biased toward playing traps, and in many cases, those can do some friendly fire, creating huge dead zones where you can't place creatures. The game does not do a good job explaining some of the mechanics and there is a lot of hidden information going on in the background. There are only 4 "story" missions which could be completed around 1 hour, but you can also play the endless mode which is more or less the same, not a lot of visual variety. [h1] Pros: [/h1] + interesting tile-based unit generation, different tiles give unique units + decent mechanical depth, lots of synergy and positioning play + endless mode [h1] Feedback: [/h1] [u] Creature AI problems[/u] - Workers get distracted too easily, their vision range needs to be reduced, or you can have some kind of command to switch the priority from mining to combat. I think that creatures like 'rats' should attack the closest target, even if they attack anyone. When prioritising which walls to mine, I wish the units would do them in order instead of RNG which is what it feels like right now, sometimes my workers leave the walls to go build a road that was placed later, or perhaps they should just finish whatever is closest to them. [u] Needs some custom challenges [/u] - even though I like the core gameplay, there is not enough variety in the random landscapes so I end up using the same strategy. If developers maybe made like 10 custom challenges, maybe a map covered mostly in water or lava, it could change how I play, or maybe force the player to play with some limitations, and give achievements for it. Additionally to the endless mode, you could have those preset maps by developers and player would have to adapt a new strategy to complete them. I already 100% completed the game, and I feel like I could drop more hours if only there was something else to grind. [u] Balancing issues [/u] - you need a ton of traps to get far into the waves as the creatures do not scale that well, and having a ton of traps tends to create some negative synergy as most of the creatures also get hurt by traps (although there are a few exceptions). I wish the game had some kind of upgrade system for creatures just so you had a better progression and not just placing more traps. I know some monsters benefit from certain creatures and tiles, but it does not do anything when enemies have 20 times more health, so really you just placing like hundreds of traps that wipe everything in sight. I wish there were more immunities, I have to place electric traps near water to get far into the game, but then I don't get to play any water creatures. [u] Lack of information [/u] - I had to figure out a lot of things on my own as the game does not clearly explain stats and things that go on in the background. [b] Overall Thoughts: 6/10 [/b] I would only recommend this to the diehards of the genre, at best the game is mildly enjoyable. There are some really cool ideas with the tile-based creatures and environmental manipulation, but overall it still feels like it's held together with duct tape. Sadly, like many of SoKPop games it just makes me feel like this could have been a real gem given more development time. [code]Review By: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]