I don't think I've ever played a game that has infuriated so much me with little things as much as this one. There are just SO FUCKING MANY little things that feel wrong that it really fucks up the experience.
I don't remember exactly when or where I got it, possibly a Fanatical bundle. Cheap game, good looking, "mixed" rating on Steam. "Can't be that bad". Indeed, it's not "that bad", but it's infuriating in the amount of little things that are kinda bad, that bad or really bad.
Now, the game is really good looking, the pixel art is a joy to see and the Castlevania SotN influence is extremely obvious, down to the double jump wing-flap and "ghosted" silhouette. Also, one of the characters, Allure, is like a cross of Alucard with Zero from Mega Man X. The control is great, though there is a big reliance on dashing for avoiding damage. In later dungeons, there's also a significant player skill requirement to get past some asshole-designed traps.
Some of my biggest gripes:
- Game has no pause, it acts like a permanent multiplayer server.
- There is zero in-game information for a LOT of important stuff. This is so bad that I only learned about certain features by reading the game description - like how raids are only supposed to happen every 7 days - and fucking patch notes, and even those can be stupidly unhelpful, like this absolute gem:
200% increased Floating Island. Buildings you can place on the town don't have a description, so other than the obvious mines, you're on your own to find out what each building produces or does. - I still have no clue what Spirit does. It's one of your stats and that's it. Doesn't increase your hp/mp regen, doesn't increase how much you heal with magic, doesn't increase damage.
- Missions are all over the place and sometimes make no fucking sense. Hell, one of the very first missions asks for 30 flowers and 30 spores. The problem is that you only get 1, maybe 2, when you harvest them, and there are NOT 30 of them in the forest maps. Whenever the mission asks for a specific monster to be killed, prepare to wait forever for respawns and RNG.
- RNG will ruin your day when it comes to finding certain monsters or items. Watermelons are a low chance drop off chopped trees in the jungle. Milk is another item that's hard to come by due to low drop rate and you'll need 20 for one of the missions. Clay and Sand only drop from specific monsters and, despite being somewhat common construction materials, there is no building that collects them automatically - but you can still get osbidian mines!
- Inventory auto sorting sucks, the only consistent thing is that it puts consumables first, crafting materials second, equipment third. Other than that, it's whatever wherever, like how wood will be stuck between Topaz and Sapphire, while Amethyst goes way below on the list. It doesn't even stack together the same item. If you have a 23 and a 4 stack of wood, auto sorting won't make it a single 27 stack.
- Maps are uninteresting and have nothing worth exploring, no secret anything anywhere. They're also an OPTIONAL, completely linear progression. You automatically unlock new portals by leveling up. Oh, you have to mentally learn where each portal takes you, nothing is labeled
- Relics. They're little things that will sometimes appear in specific places in certain maps (yes, even this is fucking RNG dependent). They give small, permanent bonuses to your stats. The problem is that you lose ALL of them on death. They can reappear, if RNGesus deems it funny to see you losing it again within a minute.
- Crafting interface is fucking awful. Want to make 99 iron ingots? Gotta click the + button 98 times, then click "Craft". You can't see any recipes that you cannot make at the exact moment you open the menu - if you're not near an anvil, you cannot see the list of armors and weapons, period. The only "sorting" here is by tier
- You get absolutely no heads up about incoming raids. A purple health bar just shows up in the top middle of the screen when one starts and that's it. If you're too busy doing a dungeon or fighting a boss, fuck you.
- It takes like 14 or 21 in game days to even get the first raid and, judging by the achievements, the vast majority of players never even bothered to go that far into the game.
- Dungeon traps are 1-hit kills and their collision boxes are slightly larger than their actual sprites. Enemies will often walk around spikes, harassing you while you are unable to deal with them unless you kill yourself trying to kill them
- Elevators. They're sooooooo fuuuuuuuuckiiiiiiiiiing sloooooooowwww. There aren't many, but the few that are there will annoy the hell out of anyone
- Balance gets worse as you level up. From level 35 and onwards, nothing makes sense anymore. Equipment affixes/suffixes become less and less useful, as many of them are static numbers, like +50 atk, when simply changing ONE item from tier 8 to tier 9 can give you a 100atk boost. Armor values are the only ones that seem to grow little by little as levels advance.
- Imagine Diablo 2 loot drops, but worse in just about everything - lower drop rates, unhelpful extra effects, less time .
- Most dungeons' mythic loot is no different from heroic loot and tier 8 instead of 9.
- The witch boss always spawns a pool in front of her, making it near impossible to beat her with melee characters. There are many other situations where melee characters get shafted by asshole design and almost none where they shine over the ranged characters.
The game was abandoned less than a week after the 1.0 release in May 2022. A 1.02 patch was promised in June but never delivered. During the early development, it was marketed as something inspired by Terraria. It seems that any Terraria influence outside collecting resources has all but evaporated.
I have more gripes, but the ones above are those that I think are the most annoying. Like I said, there are just so many "little things" that it builds up the annoyance into full frustration.
One thing that didn't make the list but is worth mentioning is the amount of translation errors in PTBR: there are lots of words that were left in english. I understand the economic reason for thinking in english first (selling in USD is 5x more profitable) but come the fuck on, the entire dev team is Brazilian.
