Summoner Reviews

I have a lot more hours on it than Steam shows, I had to mess with it a fair bit and Steam stopped registering my hours, I'd say I'm on hour 20? 22? Ready for a word salad? If you're trying to get this game running for yourself, look down to see my testing of the various fixes. I've dumped a good amount of time in Summoner, I love it despite the jank and the weirdness. I honestly thought it was gunna be a fairly barebones RPG, but it kept surprising me with how it did things. Combat felt pretty good once you understood it. Characters had some surprising depth to them, even though some of it was quite predictable... there was just a lot to like. So why the negative review? I obviously liked it! Mostly... Well, it has one massive fatal flaw with it. I've seen many people try and guess the cause, but from my look at it, the game engine Summoner uses, simple... breaks? and once that happens, it is nearly unfixable. This bug is really strange, it basically increases game speed... without actually increasing it. Making the game run like normal, but with some bits running like it's uncapped, so instead of walking, you skate, and the cutscenes play at 100x speed, along with the combo chaining being nearly impossible. It doesn't stop you playing it but it's really uncomfortable, It's in that weird area of being both gamebreaking and just annoying, and the worst bit is, it can happen at any time! At the start or 3/4 through your playthough, I have no idea what triggers it aside from when it tries to boot a cutscene Can it be fixed however? Well... I've seen people report some success but I do believe a lot of these fixes you see floating around don't actually fix the issue, it just bandaids over it till it happens again. It's actually really easy to "fix" the animations... but they break again when a cutscene comes around. Here are the common fixes I've seen people say work but in my experience.... yeah...no... -Force Vsync: Seen a lot of people bring this up and frankly... it doesn't do shit. I think people saw the animations working again after resetting vsync and reloading the game and thought "Oh hey, it's fixed!"... But honestly reloading the game is what "fixes" the animations, or lets gets them working till another cutscene. The VSync might be the issue, but forcing it on my control panel, with a wrapper, doesn't do anything. -Used a wrapper: I used DgVoodoo for upping the resolution and some other attempts to get Summoner to behave, nope, didn't work. Like I said you can force Vsync on here too and, nah, nothing. Fully recommend using it for other reasons though. -Framelock: I honestly thought it was down to framerate being out of control, but the total ballkicker on it is... Summoner runs at 60FPS... and it's consistent. You can debug and turn on the framerate checker with Timeslips patch and you'll likely see 60FPS, least I do... But I did check and limit the framerate from 60 to 30 just to see, and nah... doesn't do anything either to fix the issue. -Timeslips Patch: I have no idea how people thought this fixes it, adjustments to gamespeed maybe though I've never seen anyone bring this up, just said "Oh it works!" great. Anyway, it's a useful patch but doesn't fix the issue. -Monitor Refresh Rate: One of the more hopeful fixes, putting the refresh rate down to 59 or 60 Hz, sadly doesn't do a thing. -Force Triple Buffering: Nope. Doesn't do anything to fix it. -Driver reinstall: Thought that might have some impact, but no. EDIT: Okay, I actually have some good news, it took 3 re-installs and I did this totally on a whim when I got a driver update, but on the 3rd go, it FIXED it. This might be one of the only ways to get around this painful bug. -Forced Windowmode: Nope, but good to know! (Alt + Enter) And my favourite, Fresh uninstall and Reinstall: You'd think this would fix it, a good ol tried and true method of a fresh reinstall. But guess what! It doesn't fix it! Even with a fresh save! At this point I'm losing my marbles, and it falls well out of my power to troubleshoot it. It's clearly a deeper issue and I wouldn't have a clue where to start with the code. I am pretty certain that it all starts with how the game boots cutscenes however. If anyone wants to try and solve it... I'd start there? Anyway, if you wanna play Summoner, you risk a gamble, play at your own risk or get comfy with watching cutscenes on YouTube. I can only pray that we somehow get a re release of this with a fix, but given how Volition died out.... that seems unlikely. It's a solid 7.5 / 10 game though!