The Shrine

So I saw this on Steam and the graphics look ghetto, and I made the mistake of 'if it looks ghetto maybe the gameplay is good'. Well, actually I don't know what the gameplay is like, because I had a hard time figuring out how to select my units. This game is a failure in UI 101. Looking at the concepts it looks like it could be pretty good, except it took me 3 hours to figure out how to produce a unit from my city because the production icon is some kind of 10X10 icon in the middle of nowhere. There's a manual but it doesn't tell you anything useful, and an exercept from it reads like: "Attacking has a var385 chance of causing defense to panic which reduces their effectiveness by var391".

There is also no 'find next available unit', in a game where you can stack large amount of units in one city like the older civilization, so good luck remembering where all your units are. There are also no combat estimate, even though this game has a whole mess of units that are strong/weak against certain units in certain terrains, so I hope you memorized what every unit does. I mean, it's not absolutely crucial to have a combat estimator. Civ 1 & 2 were fine since attackers are always heavily favored as long as you're not attacking a city, and a game like ROTK 11 is fine because there are only 7 unit types and the finer nuances of attacking doesn't come into play until you run out of morale for your big moves so you technically don't have to know that unit which leaves lightning marks behind in its path with a strength of 25000 compared to your 8000 and has an attack/defense modifier of 150 versus your 80 is that strong, at least initially.

And then there's the graphics. Super Daisenryaku on the Sega Genesis has better graphics than does. So does Panzer General 1. The hexes and units are so small that usually I have no idea what units I actually have. I checked the review and it seems to be looking for suckers who thought 'ghetto graphics = good gameplay', though this kind of redefined what ghetto graphics can be. I'm sure the game is quite good conceptually, but I'm not going to play a strategy game where it's painful to select a unit to move or select a city to produce a unit.

Always look at the user reviews.

Except it's reviewed by guys who think it's totally okay to need 10 seconds to select a unit because the gameplay is deep, or something. I mean, the gameplay might indeed be deep, but I'm not playing a game where it takes 10 seconds to select a unit.

My God, this game may have the second worst trailers on Steam I've ever seen. The worst being some Eastern European/Russian game that was riddled with misspellings and horrible grammatical errors throughout (to make matters worse I THINK it was an early access game, so there were further paragraphs of further information that were also horribly written). There's next to no gameplay footage in these trailers. What little there is has horrible "Features" overlays masking most of it, but since there's only like 3-5 seconds of it before it cuts away that barely matters. I thought the second trailer would be better since it was a "Let's Play" video but even that one didn't have any real gameplay, mostly some guy sifting through game creation menus.

Sucks that you didn't like it, though. For some reason, even more than big games, when I get burned on a title from a indie/small budget developer, it makes me even more disappointed.

I made the mistake of thinking just because it looks ghetto must mean there's something good about it. The user reviews all sounded solid too. I doubt anyone was being paid off for this stuff, but the problem with niche game is that most reviewers seem to view the ability to embrace pain as a badge of honor. The graphics are ghetto and the icons are tiny so half of the time I have no idea what is actually on the hexes. You can stack what appears to be a very large number of units in one hex, but there is no 'next unit' command, so good luck trying to remember if you really issued a command for all 15 units in some key hex. For that matter, good luck remembering where some of your units are because again there's no 'next unit' command. From what little I played it seems like the game can be interesting but I'm not going to spend 10 minutes looking for my units each turn, and that was what prompted my review thread. I know professional reviewer are probably paid off and the individual guys are likely ranting and don't understand the game. That's fine. But if I read a single review that says "THERE IS NO NEXT UNIT COMMAND" I wouldn't have bought this game at all because there's literally no amount of gameplay that could possibly trump missing such a vital feature in a strategy game but this was never mentioned in any of the professional or user reviews on Steam. Heck, for all know, there might be such a command, but I never figured out what it is and I read the manual and ran through the tutorial too, so if I can't find it, that's the game's fault not mine.

FF14 had the same issue with reviewers. There's an input lag of 1 second on most action in the original version, and even ARR there's a built in 0.5s lag in virtually every action in the game. Even the reviews that trashed FF14 rarely mention this, and it's never mentioned for FF14:ARR. Even the user reviews usually will make it sound like it's just some kind of quirk. However if you look at the board threads you can tell a lot of people quit originally over the 1s input delay and a lot of people also quit over the 0.5s lag on everything in ARR, because none of that stuff can be considered remotely acceptable in a modern MMORPG. Yes, I know there are guys who don't care about that, and maybe it was catered to the original EQ1 crowd where you have to make a command every 10 seconds, but even then just because EQ1 plays at a super slow pace doesn't mean the game is purposely laggy. Everything still responded immediately, just that there was no reason to hit more than one button every 10 seconds in the original EQ. But as a reviewer, you are supposed to be responsible to let people know there are crippling issues with the game's design!

Yeah there are also a lot of people that will give a game a lot of slack just because it isn't from Ubisoft, Nintendo, or some other major gaming company. Also it scratches an itch that's very niche since big budget gaming companies don't really make games like this.