August Assassination (In Progress) #4 (SG Win)

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Been thinking a lot about whether to give it a positive or negative rating, but at the end of the day, the lack of polish and the excess of unnecessary, unfun mechanics drag the game enough to go into the red territory. Seeing that the first trailer on the Steam page is a trailer with streamers should be the only red flag I needed to avoid it, but I decided to give it a chance anyway since the core mechanic looked fun, so the blame is entirely on me.

To be fair, the core mechanic is fun. Bouncing around giant beasts as a small critter uncovering and weakening cores should be fun enough to carry the game. And yet, despite that, the game isn't fun. The first thing you'll notice and you'll be unable to ignore is how unpolished the game is. Everything is 2D - so far so good, but the sprites are usually very low resolution, the poses are few and far in between, there's little animation to transition between poses, and the menus look like something made on MS Paint. I can respect a dev who knows that art is not their main strength, but I cannot respect a dev that knows that, and yet, decides to not hire or partner with an artist and instead, releases the game with Windows 95 UI. After a few minutes, everything starts to look static and samey, and within an hour I started regretting the money I spent on this.

The main good thing I can say about the music is that it can be turned off. It's generic and repetitive, and since there's no voice acting or important sound elements involved in the gameplay, you lose nothing by muting it.

Besides the titular beast battles, the game has a 'hub' like area where you interact with other characters VN-style. The characters are flat, unidimensional, and the dialogue is usually grating and long. The plot started out strong, but there are so many small missions and forced tutorial segments and introduction of new mechanics and items and effects and side-quests that you'll spend more time in menus and dialogues than you'll spend actually playing the game, and the game forces you to always try something new every time, to an extent every battle almost feels like the first since your kit will be completely different and will require a different strategy. I like when a game gives you a bunch of fighting styles and lets you pick the one you want, and rewards you for trying different combinations -- hell, look at what Supergiant did with Transistor, where using different skill combinations unlocked lore. It's brilliant! Here, the game forces you to switch constantly weapons like it or not, otherwise it artificially caps your progression. It's lazy. It's forced. It's not fun.

And this is what you are constantly bombarded with. Like fighting beasts with swords? Forget about it, let's force you to use a hammer. Don't have a hammer? Let's force you to grind for materials to craft one. Wants to grind for items? Well we'll make you do a stupid scouting minigame before EACH FIGHT. Sick of scouting? Well you should be, and we'll force you to read piles and piles of boring dialogue before you even get to that.

It's just a game that could be so fun with its core concept, but the presentation is so haphazard and unprofessional that the whole experience is diminished by it. Given how amateurish the whole package is, I wouldn't recommend it even for free. Buyer beware