Recent reviews by Valkerion™

The best campaign of any game so far, though I still hold AC5 close to my heart for its story depth and zero for its peaks, this one is it. And while I still think the Arsenal Bird shield drop of AC7 is still unmatched as a single peak moment of gameplay & music coming together, the AC8 campaign has overall vastly better missions and some of the last missions are the best they ever made hands down.

Sadly the online multiplayer is awful, which I was really hoping for more from. The rotation of maps is terrible, after playing 100 matches, the boss raid only showed up twice (and what fun when the lobby is full of players that don't know how to play it so you fail), there is constant terrible lag and unfair hitreg where you will watch enemy missiles straight up miss you or not exist on your screen and kill you anyways while your missiles go to sleep instead of doing anything. Top that off with more than 10% of matches failing to succeed because a player dropped or the server dropped, or you are even halfway through a match and it kicks everyone. Forcing a heavy grinding progression system onto this boring mess and after a few days you can already see the vastly dwindling online players. They need to do way better here. Luckily, for the campaign alone I very much enjoyed the game but sad to see they didn't even try to make a better online mode than infinity.

Nobody wants to play the terribly boring PvE mode of online or deal with the BS in the PvP mode for 15 hours for 1-2 chances to play the Emergency Sortie Raid.

This demo was quite fun for me and offers you a LOT of gameplay for an early peek at the game. That was enough for me to go ahead and back it on kickstarter and I look forward to what the devs do here.

The demo rightly is lacking in many QOL features since it is still in a pre-alpha state but what is here is really impressive. They have three full factions each with a fun feel to them and very reminiscent of the unique balance supreme commander's factions offered. I am glad to see some new blood coming into what has become a very barren subgenre of RTS, and the visual direction and stated plans for this game have me very interested.

Go ahead and give the demo a try yourself, there are a bunch of special scenarios to play, the first big campaign mission (which is very impressive already) and then you can play 20-wave defense missions as any of the three factions to your liking. A very good taste of what's to come I reckon.

Peak Cinema

Grind. Grind. Grind some more.

Not only is this a pure love letter to C&C Tiberian Sun, you've got amazing elements seen from Generals and Red Alert 3, all culminating in what (for a C&C fan) is probably the best modern RTS I've ever played.

Hello, Reader! Have you spoken to your discord representative and steam representative about why you should not allow intrusive bots messaging people to download and play your game? Because it's a scam! I can't wrap my head around why these devs thought it would be a good idea to spam people on discord millions of times a day to download a crappy mobile game!

For any who are tired of getting these messages, download the game, replace the Infinity Kingdom.exe with an .exe from another game of your choice (or program), and all of the files from said game/program, and rename that .exe to `Infinity Kingdom.exe` so you can launch this game and get some lovely playtime, allowing you to leave a wonderful review for why discord scams should not be allowed to be on the platform! Then make sure you show the bots your lovely negative review of this game afterwards, send in your nice reports to discord and steam, and pray you don't have to get any more messages from these buffoons again!

Good luck fellow travelers!

I am a massive fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise, having played every game and many mods such as the GAMMA modpack and of course, Misery, and jumped into this game at the mention of "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. co-op". Though it's a bit more nuanced than that. Currently, the gameplay has a very heavy focus on scavenging. Luckily, I enjoy that, even if it is at times just mindlessly growing a hoard of items at your bunker, I do the same in many other games like Abiotic Factor, and you have some decent free reign over customizing and expanding your bunker.

But a lot of the love for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for me comes from other things as well; gunplay, exploration, mutants, etc. While you can get lucky and find a gun early on here, you can just as easily never find one. If you are casually exploring, you will likely not find yourself becoming anything like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you are used to being. With guns relying on quite a lot of luck to obtain, and even then, ammo under the same circumstance (though you can spend your hard-earned cash on ammo at least) you're going to have a high chance of sticking to melee weapons and wanting to avoid fighting any mutants because you are simply too fragile to fight them in melee. This may be a dealbreaker for some, so I'd say if scavenging while avoiding combat isn't something you enjoy, give this game some time to cook or look elsewhere. Having also enjoyed The Forever Winter, this is not something I am a stranger to.

The exploration is decently rewarding currently, with a good amount of POIs with secrets to discover, and the gameplay revolving around exploring a constantly changing space every ~20 minutes, it will take some time/playthroughs before you've seen and found everything. But you may quickly see repeating pieces and not uncommon even to see repeating pieces right next to each other (two radars, two of the same apartment block, etc). The dev has mentioned they will be expanding on this anyways as it is the core game experience.

I look forward to seeing where this game goes.




Currently, there is not a password system or a single player system implemented. When you host your game/saved game, you enter a "CODE" that other players can filter by when searching games. Everyone launching their game with the default "CODE" in that field will be the games showing up immediately in the browser. Change your code accordingly if you don't want randoms potentially giving you a bad time. (Though in my looking around, most players have been on the friendly side.) You can also keep player count slider set to the number of players who will be playing, but can be annoying if someone leaves.

There is also no saving of client data, so your friends need to drop everything before they quit, lest the items be deleted. (The dev mentioned working on this asap.) While we haven't had any crashes, that could lead to some frustrations if a crash immediately results in your items being deleted. Hopefully we get some better client data systems soon.

Saving the game works fine, but there is no auto-save, so make sure you save your game when you can. The dev is also (or possibly already has) intending on adding a warning about this before hitting exit game, at least.



Get out of here, Stalker.

Decent casual anime mmo. Most important - it's very casual. It's not mobile tier of auto playing all missions for you, but you can auto battle through a lot of content, 1-2 hours of story (skipping everything) and you'll be max current level. If you have friends to hang out with in game, can be fun. For hardcore solo or small group play, not sure I'd recommend your time here. You can certainly push hard content (for what is currently accessible) and play without autobattle for a pretty good combat experience, but at its core the game remains casual.

You don't need to spend any money to enjoy the game. There is plenty of nice cosmetics you can get as free player, with bound orbs, and ignore the gacha mechanics entirely. It's not a gacha game where pulling is the main way to get characters or weapons that you need to play. You can simply grind like a normal mmo and obtain your gear and materials. Life skills are time gated with focus points as even hardcore games like black desert online are, nothing surprising there.

It is an actual mmo, which wins a lot of points for me. You don't choose a server and worry about not playing with your friends because they all picked different servers, everyone is here. Many games claim to be an mmo and are not even close, while most actual mmos still have server separation. But there are also plenty of channels in game to prevent being unable to find an area to fight or gather materials (over 400), and there is a constant stream of world bosses you can fight by checking world chats (you can type any number from 1-9999 to find another world chat as well).

The game has an interesting concept on "Survivors" in that you control a hero and build a tower defense style city simultaneously, but I found the current execution extremely shallow. The hero upgrades are all meaningless other than upgrading the axe, which does significantly more than the other items can as it has significantly more damage and speed scales off the wood you gather to make all turrets attack faster. The city is surely meant to defend itself with the turrets you add but it basically needs hand holding to stay alive because most turrets are flat out terrible.

The balance between different items was very striking to me. Fire dragons are by far the strongest turret that can be 10-50 times as much damage output as any other turret with the best range to boot. Meanwhile, most other turrets struggle to eliminate the weakest enemies and things like the frost dragon and frost aoe are totally useless. It is a frustrating experience to feel the need to hand hold your city because the turrets fail to defend it when as the hero you need to run around getting xp, gold, wood and stone for the city.

As for non offensive upgrades, you can simply spam farms (passive gold is very strong here) while forests (passive wood) are nearly useless and sheep giving passive xp at half the rate the other two give, when xp is a resource you get thousands of makes sheep totally useless. With plenty of gold income and some heal on reroll structures, you can easily top off your castles hp constantly with the cheap rerolls you can do every level-up or when purchasing at safe zones, let alone stacking them and rerolling multiple times.

Another huge oversight seems to be the "death wave" your city is fleeing from. Currently, it seems to do almost nothing in reality. Your city can get stuck on objects that require you to break to continue moving, but you can ignore these to collect items and xp without worrying about the wave reaching your city. Furthermore, there is a massive bonus to the player for NOT going into the safe zones when your city reaches them. You can instead remain outside farming the enemies (and your city helps if you have long range turrets placed at the top) for a minute or longer, racking up tons of xp you'd miss out on if you assume you have to rush inside the gates. The death wave will eventually push all the way down but the amount of time you get to sit outside the gate farming seems like an oversight, as some players won't even realize you should do so.

This comes back to how the gameplay feels the entire time -- you can hardly manage grabbing the bonuses as your city moves down the path while also dealing with all the enemies, in a constant frantic rush to these precious bonuses while not letting your city drive through a horde of enemies losing all its hp. I think the city needs to have a much better ability to defend itself as the hero becomes more focused on gathering, rather than the city feeling nearly helpless on its own.

The weakest point I saw was the meta progression, which is very important to the survivors genre. Here, the upgrades you get to pay for are pitiful 1%/3% upgrades that cap after 3 levels. One of which being 1% reroll discount which means nothing at all when rerolls cost ~5/15/25g and you'll rarely continue rerolling further. The second city you unlock (caravan) looks next ot unplayable with nearly no build space and the bonus being half of your upgrades become hero upgrades instead of city ones, which sounds like only downsides.

Many of these things may not be the way the game will release but one can only assume the purpose of the demo is to show how the game is going to be on release. Currently, it is a pretty disappointing game compared to any other survivors style game I have played. It does however have a unique style of gameplay that gives it something to build on if the devs put a lot more effort in, but if the game doesn't change drastically I don't think it's worthwhile.

Unfortunately the devs are cooked and ignore the actual playerbase every single update.

RIP Mechabreak, you led me to meeting hundreds of new friends, and many fun hours of play, but the ship has sailed.