I figured the Humble Trove games I got wouldn’t all be winners, but I had four games in a row I gave up on. First, I found out that Knight Club is only competitive-multiplayer (there’s not even a single player campaign like Street Fighter or Tekken or…most fighting games, honestly). Then, I gave Starseed Pilgrim a chance, only to get stuck very early on because the seeds you get are randomized (on top of the green one’s path being randomized), and there doesn’t appear to be a way to save certain seeds for later. Even when I found the first key, I still could never quite reach it before running out of seeds and having to start over. Starward Rogue could have been a good game (first couple floors seem to have decent enemy variety without being unfair), but it sends you back to the first floor each time you die.
Next, I tried Spoolside, and to its credit, the gimmick of rotating the cube to align platforms in 2D space could work for a platformer. Problem is, this isn’t a platformer; it’s a trading-quest Adventure game. You’ve got the same four locations on each of the cube’s four sides (no top or bottom, as far as I could tell), and going around the cube sends you into the future (going right) or the past (going left); no matter how the future turns out, it’s the exact same platforming (same-size platforms in the same locations) each time, which gets tedious very quickly. More irritating, you can’t get certain trades “out of the way” because if you go even a single screen to the left, your actions in the screens to the right get undone. In other words, the core gameplay (which itself you have to discover via trial and error) is going back and forth through time to figure out which actions result in the best outcomes, then loop back once you have all the necessary items to make it happen–and remember, each loop is the exact same not-that-hard-but-not-that-simple tedious platforming. I don’t even know if this game can be “beaten” or if you’re just expected to experiment with the different timelines until you get bored (two different characters ask for a coin, but you can’t have two coins!).
So, after giving up on so many games, I decided to play one that I was sure would at least be tolerable enough for me to beat:
First, a correction on my post about the first game: you can send minions back into reserve (in both games) by locking-onto the appropriate hive and holding the charge-forward button (RT on Xbox controllers). Neither game mentions this, by the way. Besides that, controls and gameplay in this game are identical to what I wrote about the previous game.
As you might expect of a sequel, many issues from the first game have been addressed, but unfortunately, they each have drawbacks. For example, there’s a minimap (just the map, no enemy radar)…but there’s no way to see the full map. Also, any terrain-changes don’t get reflected on said minimap (notably, the earthquake right before you reach the red hive), which is especially irritating since this game isn’t as good as the first game at making walkable paths obvious (and the first game wasn’t perfect in that regard, either). There’s a line of dialogue letting you know to “destroy the igloos or you’ll be overrun,” which is more than what the first game told you about enemy spawners…but this is after you’ve already had to go past several non-igloo enemy spawners. Plus, since igloos can be destroyed from any angle (as opposed to all the other spawners only being destructible from inside), this could lead newcomers to believe that igloos are the only enemy spawner that can be destroyed. Forgeable items have differences right out of the gate instead of having to sacrifice massive numbers of minions for marginal gain…but the descriptions won’t tell you what most of those differences are. Are they more powerful? Are they faster? The most you’ll be told are any bonus effects they come with, like mana-drain or health-drain.
Enemies can’t be swarmed by your standard brown minions anymore…because there’s an arbitrary limit on how many melee minions can attack a single enemy, so you just swarm with red (ranged) minions instead. Some enemy mobs no longer just mindlessly rush you (others still do, though); there are defensive formations you either need to encircle, tediously break through, or attack the nearby commander to break them…but now there’s even less emphasis on different enemy types! There are the exterminators (who can suck up any minion type, so you have to attack from behind) and sentinels (who just sweep spotlights around that you need to avoid until you kill them)…but that’s basically it, and they don’t show up any more often than the differing enemy types in the first game (maybe even less).
You have free camera control by pushing the right stick horizontally instead of having to rely on LT to face the camera in the direction you’re facing…but now, camera controls and minion sweeping are botched. For one thing, to sweep, you have to push the right stick up first, which sends your minions forward, which you won’t always want to do immediately. For another thing, LT no longer locks onto the closest enemy in the direction you’re facing; I never quite figured out what it prioritized, as sometimes I’d lock onto a far away enemy that my character was facing (when there were plenty of enemies much closer), and sometimes, I’d re-lock-on to something the camera was already facing (something I turned my character away from in order to avoid locking onto it).
All that said, the worst drawback has to be the fact that there’s even less feedback for when you get attacked. The first game had a distinct, loud clank sound that stood out from the rest of the combat sound effects (which already isn’t much), but in this game, whatever sound used instead (if any) gets drowned out by the clanks of your minions attacking the enemies. The first two times I died, I didn’t even know I had taken damage, much less that I was low on health! It wasn’t until my third or fourth death where I happened to look up and see my health draining without any other visual or audio indication.
The gimmicks in this game are slightly more utilized than the gimmicks in the first game. The boat segments are mainly just holding RT to trudge forward, tapping the A button to spend stamina to go faster, stopping the three or four times your ship gets boarded (total, throughout the whole game), and finally trying to parallel-park next to docks so the button-prompt to park your ship appears. The trebuchet segments have you aim at roadblocks and slowly-approaching enemies, then holding RT to slowly pull back, releasing the button to throw the rock. It’s not intuitive exactly how far the rock will be thrown (only that it’s relative to how long you hold the button), so there’s some trial-and-error with the aiming. Also, these already-short-lived trebuchet segments only show up five times (with three of them bunched together at the end), so it’s not something you’ll have time to get used to. Lastly, there are three minion-possessing segments, two of which are just short treks to a switch, but the other one is an entire stealth segment where you have to avoid exterminators and sentinels. It gave me hope that the game would be more strategic than the first, but the rest of the game squandered that potential.
The final boss is handled better, though: you have to use a blue minion to clear away the blue goop, then use red and green to attack the boss’s weak spots. Meanwhile, the boss moves around and occasionally creates more goo or spawns enemies. It’s an improvement over the first game where the boss just sits there and lets the spawned enemies attack you.
Overall, despite the changes, this game isn’t much better than the first game (it’s even a bit worse in some regards). Not recommended.