Survivor Of The Journey Reviews

fantastic!

[h3]SNAPSHOT[/h3] A game that could be good if it had any semblance of balance whatsoever. [h3]OVERALL - 3 / 10[/h3] [h3]PROS[/h3] + overall a fun survivor-like [h3]CONS[/h3] - not balanced in any way whatsoever - scaled against the player in almost every way [h3]FULL REVIEW[/h3] Honestly the bullet points pretty much says it all - this game has the makings of a fun game but the lack of any semblance of balance or scaling kills the enjoyment completely. The game has seemingly made every possible design choice to make the game long and painful to play or progress - whatever you think the right choice is, the game does the opposite: - enemies have far too much HP, meaning you eventually just get overwhelmed because there's nowhere to go - most abilities do far too little damage, causing the player to wait for forever on insanely long cooldowns - meta progression is far too expensive for far too little gains, making improving enough to beat a level take dozens of playthroughs to even stand a chance Even beating a level on the EASY difficulty requires the player get EXTREMELY lucky with level upgrade choices to even stand a chance of winning. After almost 10 hours of play I'm still not even sure how players get gold (the meta progression currency) in any reasonable fashion - there are meta upgrades that give +1% bonuses to gold gain but in-game it's given at a rate that even 100% would be completely worthless. What amazes me is that the cost + potency of the meta upgrades are so insanely bad that I wonder why they're even in the game in the first place. On an average run I get ~1000g and, if I'm lucky, can complete a per-run quest for another 1000g. As an example, it costs 900g to add 1% to a specific damage type with a of max 30% total when you can get all of that from ~2 level up upgrades - meaning even if you DO max it, why bother? The rest of the stats are equally insane - the most egregious of which is 100,000g for a single level of rerolls. To put this in perspective it would either take roughly 500 runs to get enough for a single level of it. The worst part about all of this? Rerolls are absolutely worthless. 100,000g literally gets you 1 reroll for [i]the entire run[/i]. Not one per level up or one that recharges for any kind of criteria - just one, period, per run. To put this in perspective a full run will typically net you ~80 levels, so this game wants you to spend however many dozens and dozens of runs to get an absurd amount of meta currency that'll take just for the ability to reroll a SINGLE TIME in the 80+ set of upgrades you'll see in a full run. In comparison, 100,000g spent on meta upgrades would literally max out ~4 of the other categories. If you don't want to grind and hope to eke out enough gold for something useful, you could alternatively spend some of the one-time rewards for completing a given level + difficulty. Easy nets 20k, normal 30k, and hard 50k, however in my current playtime I have only managed to beat 3 levels on easy - so 60k in terms of rewards. Unfortunately, I have spent all of that on buying one of what appears to only be about 10 items from the "shop" which unlocks some seemingly better level up upgrades. One of the most bizarre features in this game is this mysterious "shop". What I still cannot fathom is why on earth there are 3 item slots in the shop to buy from, but 90% of the time 1-2 of them are just listed as "empty". On top of this there is a "reroll" button which can be used an infinite number of times at no cost - so why the hell would someone even DO this in the first place?? Why not just list all the things people can buy instead of putting this bizarre randomization mechanic? I think in retrospect it really tells players what they can expect from this game - a lot of things that are fun on paper but make absolutely no sense when implemented without a second thought. I wish I could say that this game has the potential for a happy ending, but looking at the lack of updates since 2022 and a "release" date of 2023 tells people all they should need to know. This game could have been something but has been abandoned and the dev isn't coming back - they have other games that have been "released" since this one so clearly this isn't going to get much more attention, if any. I think the worst part about all of this is that given a small set of tweaks, this game could be really good and a lot of fun. There's still a lot more I could cover here in terms of development needs (e.g. the distinct lack of upgrades for 2 of the 3 damage types or how absolutely terrible the "wakeup" mechanic actually is) but just like this game I think this review is as complete as it's going to get.