Honor Cry: Aftermath Reviews

This is not a game - finished it in 2.5hrs. Ignore it even if you get it for free.

I wouldn't recommend this game. Not my favorite genre to begin with to be fair, but combat felt tedious, grindy and repetitive. Enemies seemed to soak damage, it just took forever, felt poorly balanced especially for an initial experience. And combat triggered way too often, I couldn't even take two steps and back to the grind. No tutorials or course, but there were few options to use anyway so I could figure out what little was there I guess. Animations of the characters walking looked way off, sliding at a speed inconsistent with the steps they took. The art style felt inconsistent between the backgrounds and characters. On the plus side, I feel like quite some work went into the game, although that doesn't make it fun for me unfortunately.

I bought this game on sale and didn’t give it much initial credit. To my great surprise it turned out to be very enjoyable. It has a decent playtime/price ratio. I hope there will be a sequel. Pros: - Vintage, but not too much pixelated graphics - Immersive story - Quite challenging combat system - Condensed gameplay (no unnecessary backtracking and other time-consuming features) - Very low price Cons: - Very short, only about 2 hrs of gameplay - Only one path to complete the game

After just scrolling through pages of obscure rpgs on steam made by indie teams, I eventually came across this little gem. Before I spend the next couple paragraphs complaining, I should mention I actually enjoyed both hours of playtime the game had to offer. Despite the short length, it really felt like the developers were putting forth a bit of effort, rather than just slapping together mechanics and hoping they worked, as is the case with many other rpg maker games. That being said... [u]The Story[/u] Looking at it by the broad strokes, the story's actually pretty good. The pacing is fluid, allowing it to build up to the more engaging scenes while never feeling like it gets in the way of gameplay. Every piece of the story feels like its own distinct chapter, giving the game a wholesome feel. It's a rarity in indie games for me to even remember how a story began, since so many of them either skip a lot of buildup, or never deviate from a single plot point, making it nothing more than a blur in my memory. All that in mind, the writing itself feels mediocre at best, and choppy at worst. There were multiple times when the grammar was wrong, and characters would rarely display the emotions in text that they clearly should be experiencing. A wounded soldier, bleading to death, politely asks the player to please fetch some healing herbs in the same way that one asks for a glass of milk. A mother whose lost her child to an ogre acts with as much emotion as someone who lost their car keys. It all screams for need of an editor, or even just a second pair of eyes. [u]The Gameplay[/u] If there's one thing this game doesn't lack in its gameplay it's ambition. The team created dozens of spells, a special move for each character, and like 10 or so different stats that can be raised upon level up. What the game doesn't do well is actually make use of all these different abilities. There's very little instruction, instead the game just lets you dawdle around a while until you get to the first spell seller and then slaps a dozen different spells in your face. This makes the spell system come across as daunting, since they're all randomly arranged with no real order to them. this could've easily been fixed by more gradually introducing spells, or organizing them based on type (Offensive, Defensive, Healing, etc). The game also never explains the stat system. While I can figure out what things like dexterity do from playing other rpgs, I have no idea what "resolve" is supposed to do. I'd do a bit on music, art, and sound design but I don't know what's composed of free assets or not and I'm starting to wake up from my caffeine induced rambling state of mind, so I'm gonna just post this as is and go back to bed.