The first game I tried today was Next Jump: Shmup Tactics. It wasn't (and still isn't) terribly well known, but all the reviews were positive so I figured it might be good. I initially described it as a scrolling shooter, but that was incorrect. The background does indeed scroll, but each game board is stationary. Overall this game takes a lot of ideas from FTL. Namely the goal and travel methods are pretty much identical, the ship upgrades are very similar, and it has multiple ship types which can be unlocked in-game. But the gameplay is completely different.
And of course as is tradition here, I must reveal that the game was bad and proceed to list the reasons starting from the least significant ones. Combat lasts only three turns after which the battle is just abruptly cut short. You can extend this with specific combo attacks which shift from being unusable, to clearing the entire level in one turn, and back to being unusable as your ship gains upgrades, and then your enemies catch up. Also, once you run out of turns, you can just spam movement to get like one or even two more turns in before the game pulls you out of the combat screen, which is a huge bug.
Secondly, there is no indicator of what the enemies do. I've taken damage from one multiple times without even understanding in hindsight why that happened.
And thirdly and most importantly, this game is not grid-and-turn-based, only the movement is. Considering the previously listed very obvious and very huge bug, I'd chalk this up to just incompetent developers. While the game world is a 9x7 grid or something like that, bullets, pieces of scrap (currency), energy, and ship hitboxes are actual models in the game, not bound to the grid. So maybe you have a spinning piece of scrap? Wait until it spins closer to you to collect it. In a turn-based game this is unacceptable. Similarly it makes evading bullets, and collecting scrap and energy very unpredictable, as your ship's hitbox is not marked in-game, and you have to either learn where it is through trial and error and very carefully make sure that the hitboxes of your ship and other entities touch (or don't touch, in case of projectiles), or as a beginner, just hope that they do.
Furthermore this game is low on content and not well balanced, but those were the least of the issues.
I also started with Mages of Mystralia. I quite like the aesthetics of it and the music's pretty nice too, but the gameplay hasn't really been up to my standards. The spell crafting system is neat, but some of the modifications feel very specific and pointless or barely ever usable. The combat, the progression, the story, the puzzles - everything else feels kind of boring and just barely passable. It's not bad, which is why I played it for the 3 hours that I did. Heck, I'm not sure I can point out any concrete flaws in the game, but aside from the spell crafting, there is absolutely nothing noteworthy to be experienced here.
If you're looking for a good spell crafting game, even then (the original) Magicka has this beat. If you're looking for something else, you won't find it in this game.
I also started with Mages of Mystralia. I quite like the aesthetics of it and the music's pretty nice too, but the gameplay hasn't really been up to my standards. The spell crafting system is neat, but some of the modifications feel very specific and pointless or barely ever usable. The combat, the progression, the story, the puzzles - everything else feels kind of boring and just barely passable. It's not bad, which is why I played it for the 3 hours that I did. Heck, I'm not sure I can point out any concrete flaws in the game, but aside from the spell crafting, there is absolutely nothing noteworthy to be experienced here.
If you're looking for a good spell crafting game, even then (the original) Magicka has this beat. If you're looking for something else, you won't find it in this game.
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