Galaxy of Pen & Paper +1 Reviews

I tentatively give this game a positive review. It's a fun experience that had me playing it into the late hours of the night, though it lacks meaningful content in several regards. Chance encounters while travelling are disinteresting as they are harmless. Class building is interesting, but once you've found a winning solution (Which you generally will in the early portion of the mid-game) you have no reason to deviate from it. Every fight becomes the same series of motions with singular boss fights managing to be the most boring of them all, although it is fairly satisfying to CRUSH a boss in two to three turns. It's still great fun, especially if you enjoy a casual RPG experience (With a story that's passable, but nothing fascinating, and the humor can be very hit-or-miss), however, as a fan of games that take the more "screw you" approach to chance encounters, this game very much fails to deliver on that. For example, you roll a 1 while travelling from one node to the other, and you're just as likely to benefit from it as you would if a good event happened. In Darkest Dungeon, that would be one of your heroes stepping on a trap, or interacting with an object on their own and receiving a negative result. While it seems like you have no control over that, you do based upon your chosen classes and who has what character trait. In Galaxy of Pen and Paper, you're give four options, 3/4 of which should give you a purely positive benefit, and the last one is usually something like "-1 health, +10 credits" (At no point is 1 health significant). And the lack of a hard mode absolutely adds to the disappointment factor. With frequent level imbalances (Typically enemies are underleveled even if you weren't grinding on the side) you'll almost always be for lack of challenge. I'd often choose the route that causes fights over avoiding them because fights are far more rewarding than detrimental. So again, IF you like a game with challenge, the studio's previous game Chroma Squad is an overall better experience. I've listed a lot of negatives as a "buyer beware" sort of thing, but I STILL recommend giving the game a go if all that doesn't put you off.

Really disappointing. I enjoyed both of the other Pen & Paper games; they were really good fun and involved interesting tactics in figuring out what roles to combine and how to build up your characters. Galaxy removes all of that fun stuff. Levels no longer matter. You get no customization. The story is vague and the game suffers from being "open world", by which I mean the developers decided to only include one hour of main story and then let you do just kinda whatever. I bought it for 3 bucks, and I'm returning it.

This game LOOKS very cool and stylish but the plot is confusing, the gameplay is really tedious, and it's just . . . not a well thought out game. There's no leveling up of skills. You get points to allocate to a handful out of like 30 different skills, but none of them even sound that good. I'm at level 30 and many hours in, but every battle is still super tedious and takes forever. The missions aren't leveled at all so sometimes a side quest leads to almost no XP or gold because the randomized enemies are so weak. KOPP2 is such a really great game that I can't help but feel really disappointed. I'm still playing this one in the hope that I've missed where some of these major features went. You can't buy weapons or armor or enchant anything, not even the cyberpunk equivalent.

The game is good in terms of jokes and GEEK stuff. However, it's hard to play because of slow pace. And when I say slow, I mean SLOW. Each battle takes several minutes even if you are higher lvl than enemies.

FINALLY a gorgeous pixel game with lots of customization and combat! This time, unlike KoPP + 1, the game has an almost open world, with infinite possibilities of builds, classes, weapons, items, creation of customized quests, choice of stories ... You can explore planets and create your own path of stories / battles. Even the story is funny and captivating. Very cool for anyone who enjoys tabletop rpg. Furthermore, the combat system is very strategic. Anyone who 's into pokemon games, Star Wars, or even Final Fantasy, will fall in love. You define which type of player you want, which skillset you want and then combine it with the armor analysing the available classes and races. I have games from all kind of studios, but, impressively, this is better than all of them! Highly recommended.

After finishing Knights of Pen and Paper I decided to give this game a try, to check if the devs learnt something and made their next game better. So, did they improve? Surely. Did they improve enough to recommend the game? Welp, no. [list] [*] Horrible writing with overreliance on pop culture references. It is still here. It still sucks. [*] Exploration. Comes in two flavours now: space “exploration” that is basically an additional screen between the locations you visit, so don’t expect to find anything, and planet exploration. And this is just a good old node-based map with combat, shops and side activities, and most of those activities are just NPCs who give even more stupid one liners and pop references, so while you are trying to find optional quests you are punished by bad writing and wasted time. Oh, and in case you do find a weapon upgrade shop or a side quest - you’d better make a note, as the game will not tell you where to go and where you got the quest. At least you have tracking for your “user-generated” fetch/kill quests, but those are generic and uninspired ways to grind reputation, so who cares. [*] Space combat. Why is this mechanic even in the game if it is this basic? Yes, there are a few abilities, no, there is no point in using anything other than your attack and sometimes attack buff. This minigame is simply a “wait for a dice to roll and press the button”, no tactics, no thrill, no enjoyment. And why, you may ask, there is no thrill? Well, because you know if you will lose or win the moment you start the combat: the gap in power between enemy tiers is substantial, so if RNG gave you a bigger enemy - you are dead regardless of your actions, and if it is an enemy of your size or smaller - you can lose only if you do it intentionally. [*] RPG elements. On one hand - instead of 4 abilities you now have 4 slots and a set of abilities to choose from. In theory - this is a great addition, as now you can make your own builds, explore synergies and be smart about preparing for combat. In practice you will pick one of a few overperforming combos and never check the rest of the skills. To make things worse - for about half of your playthrough you will not even have all 4 slots unlocked so all of the team combos go straight out of the window - when you can’t even fit the most basic stuff into your loadout who would care about combos? Also there is a lot of overlap in skills, so all of those classes aren’t really that unique, race choice is a meme as humans have the best buffs, and level ups are no longer meaningful, as they just give a passive stat boost and give something worthy (ability slot unlock) only on a few levels. [*] Ground combat. Still imbalanced: there are enemies with unreasonably high HP and no damage, there are enemies with one-shot tier damage, easy enemies that give good rewards, hard enemies that give barely nothing. On one hand it is still better than the previous game, on the other hand - it still isn’t really fun, and considering that you will have to do A LOT of combat - well, it gets tedious really fast. [*] And yes, everything is still way too slow. Animations are too long, loadings are too numerous, at least add an option to skip animations if you are making a grindy game! [/list] Conclusion: the game is not worth your time.

This is a decent turn based rpg but there are some issues that will be listed at the end. game play is your basic rpg stuff with some ship fights where you just pick attack as if your in a 1v1 battle but plays out mostly as a normal fight. + lots of dialog choices and most story fights can be talked out of with the right party dialog option. + you can have 1 of every character type made and easily swapable. that's 13 in all though you can unlock 14 as 1 class has 2 types (4 active and 9 in cryostasis) though you can't make reserves until you unlock the 4th active slot. + newly made characters will be the same as the lowest level party members (cryo characters count) + some classes have some brutal synergy when used right. = you can pick 1 of 5 races but there is no reason not to use a human outside rpg reasons. why? the simion&green abilities don't proc often enough and the reptoid crit&mechan hp stat gains are far out matched by humans getting an extra gadget and humans will have 4 abilities by level 15 not 25 like the others. = side missions are not linked to any story or better outcome. just do what pays the best and these seem to be the easiest ones also don't worry about doing all variations as it will not matter and are repeatable. = scavenging is only linked to 1 quest (not a main story one) so the main reason for it is to trade 10 of said items found for cash/items to a npc they have no other use. the npc that wants a item will normally only want items from their planet. - BUG: i had the game lockup if i or even some enemies use an ability for the first attack in a fight. this happened on a few abilities (mostly multi hit ones) so i'm not sure what is doing it. - moving the main map is slow when you need to use multiple jump games then go down to a planet - weapon upgrades don't seem to do much (though the dev said they mainly added them cause people wanted upgrades) - weapon upgrades are scattered on 5 planets and are not easy to go to or remember where they are if you don't upgrade everyone when you find them. - normal attacks seem to have a 1/3 chance to miss but attack abilities seem to never miss. - stuns on your people can last 10+ turns but get cleared off enemies after about 1-3 - there is no manual save and i don't think you can copy a save game to another slot. - it's easy to out level content making the game to easy and some party combos are overly stronger than others.

Pretty much a joke if compared to any of the knights of pen and paper installments. Mechanically the game is uninteresting as you start out with a multitude of skills, 90% of which cannot be used alone but need another one of the same class, however you only have one skill slot until lvl 10. They managed to make this game even grindier, it is riddled with bugs( e.g. I have managed to softlock myself 4 times by now, by simply using the standard bountyhunter skill as the first attack in the first combat after starting up the game) and the enemy levelling is wonky, at best. You can generate quests for shipcombat which will spawn enemies that almost have 3x your hp and gain more energy per round which is why they can kill you in round two while you have full hp. I got this game for 65% less with a coupon and I think I am still gonna refund this, as its clunky, slow design, gigantic map, which is abused by making you traverse it violently for any kind of upgrade, the grind, the general lacking mechanics and much more is still not sufficient to call this game anything but a jokingly bad cashgrab that needs to be discouraged. TL;DR: even for 5 or less bucks this game is bad. Really bad. For the price they ask without coupon? Pure and unjustified greed. Edit: Gave it another chance over a year after original review since it was only 2,4€. It still horrible, slow, boringly uninteresting, mechanically r*tarded and a in every way worse than KoPP1/2. Avoid this BS.

Sometimes it's hard to pick a simple recommend/don't recommend. This is such a case. I'm not telling you GoP&P is bad, I'm warning you why I didn't like it. The problems all stem from the game's difficulty being completely uneven. If you aren't familiar with the "P&P" games, they have a novel concept where the difficulty is self-paced: the game is really only as hard or easy as you make it. Galaxy strays a bit here because it has forced fights you have no control over. This is made worse by the latest update because while the game's difficulty was built around skill synergy, the update starts you with only one skill. No synergy means the fights are far more difficult than they would be. Worse still, the game is stingy with XP and money, and punishes you for not upping the difficulty. So basically the game becomes a grind fest, not because you get anything for it, but because it's just required to get to the point where it would be fun. Supposedly the game was hard at launch and people complained about the skill unlocks, but this change makes it unenjoyable. I find that worse. Besides, a game doesn't have to be hard or easy to be fun: but it does need to be consistent. The difficulty here, however, is anything but. Overall the game functions, the art is nice, the tone is jovial, and the game is complete. Whether or not it's worth buying, however, will depend on whether or not the idea of grinding to get to a playable state is appealing to you. There are no other rewards for doing so, and the 'story' is mostly just puns and pop culture references. So, if you just want to play a challenging RPG you might get more mileage out of it than me, but I'd almost rather play Adventure Quest.

As a fan of both the original Knights of Pen and Paper and Chroma Squad, it really pains me to give this game a thumb down. There is a lot of elements to this game I do enjoy; the pixel art and retro 3D are delightful to look at and filled with a lot of detail and creativity, the space ship battles are simple but addictive, and the larger emphasis on creating your own missions and influencing the direction of the main story beats through character and GM decisions is a good one. And when a story mission is good, it is VERY GOOD, using its limited systems to explore neat ideas, characters, or concepts. However, there is a ton of stuff that holds this game back. The leveling and combat system is a huge step back from previous Pen and Paper games. For the majority of your characters, there are only a small handful of level ups that are actually interesting, and those are the ones where you unlock a new slot for an ability. Everything else is just all around stat boosts. This is a problem because early game, you only have two characters, limiting the amount of creative tactics you can do for some time. Even when you do get a full party though, it still takes until the mid to late game for you to unlock enough slots where you can actually afford using abilities that require a team effort. The actual combat system itself is also limited, with a character location system that is greatly under used. There were only a few battles that actually made me need to think and strategize, with the rest either being painfully easy or simple slogs to get through. The pacing of the game is also very flawed due to how the mission structure works. There is very little reason or incentive to go off of the main campaign and explore the galaxy, as there's not much to do other than scan for resources (which get you very little money and underwhelming rewards from the few people that actually want them), fight enemies yourself just to grind, and maybe find a weaponsmith to upgrade gear. There is no way to track the few side quests you can find in the world, which you can only found by checking every single map node with a dialogue option and hope you don't run into a random NPC who tells a joke and nothing else. This means if you do find a side quest, you better remember both the exact thing they wanted, the node they're on, the planet they are from and how to find that planet. Likewise, world exploration is so boring. You may run into a random encounter sometimes, but they are usually all positive and give minor rewards. I only got into a random battle once, and that was from my own dialogue choice. This is because the game wants you to make your own side missions, which reward money, experience, and reputation points (which can give you universal rewards as you gain them) and let you decide between a wide variety of activities, locations, and quest givers. The problem here is that the actual amount of points you get for doing these missions varies randomly, and it is far too easy to just create missions that give you the most reputation points the fastest and being done with it. There is very little reason to get creative and explore all the options available to you. The best part of the game by is the variety of character class missions, which have you going on mini-adventures to unlock new classes to play as that all connect to a larger narrative. It was when the game felt its best, giving you a compelling mystery to follow, choices to make, and interesting characters to meet. The problem here is that you will already be close to filling out your party limit by the time you get to these missions, so if you want to make use of these classes, you need to bench one of your characters and make a new player. For some people, that may not be an issue, but for a game where you are playing as kids trying to play a table top RPG, there is something very strange about kicking out one of your players when their character is already connected to the larger story at play in favor of a random new character who's class may not even be very good. It feels at odds with the tone and mood the game wants to set. I feel like calling this game "first edition" is good. It feels like a very rough proof of concept, and I honestly believe that with enough time this game could be remade as something truly great, truly matching the promise of creating your own adventure through a set of friends playing a game together. As it stands though, I would steer clear of this game for now, and buy one of their other products. Chroma Squad or one of the earlier, more mechanically fleshed out Knights of Pen and Paper games. EDIT: And only now do I realize that this game is actually a couple years old now. Something tells me there may not be a second edition coming out anytime soon.