liked the game and had fun with it. its not very hard nor easy the only thing I really had to question on the game was when I reached THE AFTERLANDS I couldn't complet any of the quests nor could I lvl past level 20 so just wondering if I just hit a glitch or if the game isn't complet I left and restarted a few times just thinking I timed out or something but no good I dislike playing this long into a game and trying to complet all quest just to find out its incomplete and im not sure if its the game or I just hit a snag. if the game isn't done please say so in the author comments next time it always screws with me when im trying for 100% only to find out that dosent exist
Reviews for "Primal Champions"
MonoFlauta responds:
Sorry about that. The cap level is 20 but the quest thing is a bug I had been trying to check how to fix it.
Anyway, thanks a lot for playing the game :)
I wish there was some way to preview what my abilities did without spending a half hour learning that I hate the character.
Movement is too slow, and there is a lack of information pretty much everywhere. How much does another level of Cooldown help me? How much damage does another point of attack give?
Fun game though
MonoFlauta responds:
We though it was a good decision to keep it as exploring your character limits game. Maybe it was a wrong decision but we still like that concept.
Other than that, thanks a lot for playing the game and having fun with it! :)
The game was fun. The music is awesome. I think the very first battle music from world 1 against those goblins reminded me of Sony 2 battle music. Pretty nostalgic. The voice actors are good too. The story is cool. The battle system is weird but easy to pick up really quick. The only problem i had was figuring out about those orb powers. I didnt know how to activate them until i saw your comment saying you use R & F. I didnt know that & the game doesnt tell you either or maybe i missed it? Anyways i think those orb powers is kinda lame because having to grind for all those orbs for each character & only get one use? Its such a drag. I would have loved it if you expanded the ability tree a bit more because 2 abilities? really? Thats not enough! you should have added some passive skills or perhaps newer skills rather than those special orbs. Also the rogue character, WHY does that poison ability does NOT poison their enemies!?!?! Rogues are known to poison enemies & watch them take damage from poison every second! why couldnt you do that!!!! The rogue is already squishy enough, maybe it would have been nice to give her those poison dps rather than just a simple hit damage! The pet system is really cool though I dislike the fact that they "randomly" perform an action. WHY random? Make it help you every 10 second or 20 seconds. & they are so weak too, that damaging pet was only hittin for likr 30 damage/40 i think thats too low lol. Also the last boss. Okay he challenging but everytime he change to Wolf form, why does my abilities reset cooldown again? thats bullcrap! you gotta nerf that, hes already difficult enough. Overall i like the concept & everything, just wished you expanded abilities, more abilities, specs perhaps? & passives or small little buffs.
MonoFlauta responds:
About the R & F keys, it tells you as soon you get level 12 and have 4 orbs in at least one character. Though maybe it was better to make that clearer in the screen with some big R & F like the rest of the skills.
About Nessys poison damage, it should make a small damage per second at early game but in late it makes a lot more. I guess it was our mistake to don't make that more visible but you can check the enemy bar go down.
For the pets, I guess that making it a fixed time would remove the "life" feeling. With a random time it gives you the feel that the pet auto attacks for it's own will. And about the damage, we didn't want to make it too strong but maybe a bit more of damage wasn't a bad idea.
About the boss, the reset cooldown is because if not you would have everything charged and that last part of the battle would be only press everything and done. It was difficult to balance it (and you can see is still a bit unbalanced, not impossible but he is too strong) but maybe making the cooldowns go 50% it would had been a good idea.
For last, about the last recommendantions, well about all the tips, I promise that we will keep everything in mind if we make another game like this :)
Thanks a lot for playing it!
Some Game Spoilers below? If you're the kind who doesn't want to know anything about the game, then definite spoilers below.
Two notes,
1) I have not completed the game. I wanted to, but fighting Larris ground me down. If the game instantly gets better after you beat him, well… I’m probably never going to. But any notes I have here reflect everything that’s possible to do up until the fight with him.
2) The party I chose was Tindra and Nesyss. So all the discussion points below might not apply to everyone:
Well, first off, this is probably one of my favourite Newground RPGs currently. The bad news is that, in all honesty, I don't love the rpgs which get popular on this website, though I do love rpgs in general. I have a few guesses as to why (mostly about how a lot of them over rely on genre awareness to derive humour, and combat, though I'll get that too) but that's neither here nor there.
I'll split this up into a few different areas:
Glitches (just so there's a comprehensive list since there are a couple)
Presentation (Controls, Graphics, and Voice Acting)
Combat
Story and Characters
Glitches/Bugs/Whatever you want to call them:
I, like others, have had the: Once I reach Level 20 I advance no more on quests, even if I actively do them. Also, (I haven't seen this mentioned earlier but it might have been): I began the game with having completed the 'Acquire the Warp Shard' quest (though I didn't actually receive it until the proper time in game), while conversely never been able to complete the Feast with Thalquin quest.
In the category of nonquest related glitches:
In two places, a set encounter is seemingly replaced with fight.
1) In trying to get meet Thalquin in the Afterlands for the free orbs he gives, I get attacked by a Bestial Servant. Thalquin's dialogue still runs though.
2) After I beat Hadrick Thatch in Swifthold Cliffs, I presume that I have to fight Blee, but instead I get into a fight with a Swifthold Brawler. Again, Blee's dialogue still runs.
The Warp Shard, also, seemingly caused my party to be separated if I warped to Kingsguard or Orchid Swamp. In Kingsguard, this meant I could only move one space before having to warp elsewhere: in Orchid Swamp, at least, eventually my party would catch up together. Though, if I warped to Orchid Swamp, then travelled to Kingsguard, the game worked fine.
Also, the fight against the Mountain Spirit (who might be tied to the quest the Mountain Empress? Didn't check before another boss fight so I don't know) Doesn't give XP and always respawns the same fight. Don't know if this is intentional or a glitch (it was the fact she didn't give XP that made me question this)
If you try to leave to leave the Afterlands by foot, the game doesn’t let you.
In the final against Larris, the game popped up that my party died, even though clearly there was still health left in one of my party members, and indeed I watched Larris finish the job. I think this might be specific to Nesyss, though, when she uses stealth, as the game does seem to in some way count the damage she takes.
That was all I found, so now to the next section:
PRESENTATION:
First off, graphics and voice acting, since this is quick. Both were fine, adequate. Didn't love the voice actors, didn't hate them. Again with the art and graphics: none of it felt overly amateurish, none of it was AAA material (obviously). It did it job. So this gets a passing grade.
Now, we come to the controls. I did see, below, how you admitted to wanting the players to figure out stuff on their own, which is fine and admirable, if done correctly. However, I still feel like basic concepts were not explained as well as they could have been. Which button is the select button? Q? That's weird. What are these special coloured dots that I can walk on? Oh, what are these orbs that I'm collecting? I forgot what button fires that special attack that they do, what was it again? Is XP and orb gathering random, since I can't figure out the correlation for who got how many orbs or what xp? Not all of these questions needed to be answered, but some of them would be nice.
This brings me to the movement controls on the overworld. Admittedly this might all be just me, but three things.
1) It was a bit weird to me, that when I go and try to get free orbs from Thalquin, that it would start up a battle sequence that never happens (though after a while, every time I did, one of my party would make a noise as if they were injured). I don’t know why it’s like that, but I’ll admit that it might have to be like that, for however you made the game.
2) The characters sometime move really fast, and sometime move really slowly. The only correlation I could find was that the further the next spot was, the quicker they moved, but I couldn't figure out why. Admittedly this might just be the engine you work on, and feel free to ignore this if it is.
3) I expected to be able to return to the last spot I was by clicking the opposite arrow to the one that I clicked to get where I was. For example: If I clicked right, I expected to return to the spot where I was by clicking left. This... wasn't the case. Much maneuvering was had, and honestly it was probably one of my least favourite parts of the game.
None of this is deal breakers, but it did take me out of the experience.
To end this section on a higher note. I enjoyed the music. Set the mood perfectly well. The only thing I can think to mention is that it has a nasty habit of turning off when a fight drags on a for a bit (like the fight with the Earth Elemental at the beginning). But beyond that, it worked for me.
Combat:
I will reveal my bias now. I am not a fan of this hybrid real time/turn based combat. Either let me plan it out, weighing up the best options, before seeing if I get my face based in, or at least give me an attack or two to bash constantly, while I wait for maybe some higher level skills to charge. This is one of my major complaints about a lot of RPGs that make it here on Newgrounds, and this is no exception. So the best I can honestly say is that this isn't the worst iteration of it: it works most of the time (sometimes the button clicks don't respond, but I'll allow that for user error) The difficulty of it wasn't too difficult; only a little bit of grinding, but again, I'll allow for user error and a badly optimized party. The RPG element was a bit limited, but again I can work with that (I tend to find that RPGs that go out of their way to have deep skill trees tend to revel in their fiddliness anyway). I wasn't a huge fan of the pressing q,w,e, and r as my only point of interaction, but I'll grant that that's ultimately the best/only way to implement the hybrid system.
I only have a couple of changes that I would ask, without asking for a whole overhaul of the combat system.
1) The ability to pause mid combat. An error message on my computer came up halfway through a fight once, and well, it was annoying to hear my people getting injured and I couldn't have them fight back.
2) Do something about the fight against Larris. The smallest thing I can think of is when he transforms, don’t reset my button timers: even if I get a rhythm going, that little feature destroys it, especially since he gets what amounts to 2 health wrecking attacks right off the bat. But beyond that he was a difficult fight for me, and after fighting him something along the lines of 15 times, I had no more grinding to do, so I just gave up.
End result: An average to good implementation of a system I don't like. I tried not to let it colour my opinion too badly, but it's still there.
Story and Characters:
There really seem to be none of either. While there’s a vague plot of: Bad Guy is doing Bad Things over there! And every boss we meet goes: Larris is the one who ordered us to do these evil evil things! There’s also some token world building: There are these Primal Champions which imitate animals, and there’s all these nations/regions to the world.
But there’s nothing really beyond that. Nothing comes of it. The characters are flat, only speaking expositionally. I don’t know who Tindra and Nesyss are, even though I spent several hours with them. I know how they’re supposed to be like. Tindra is honourable. Nesyss is prideful. But I don’t get that beyond the opening text. Nor do they interact. They converse, but only to pass along information. I wanted to know how Tindra and Nesyss feel about each other.
Same thing with the story: I’m told that Larris is a blight upon the land. But I don’t really see it. Kingsguard attacking me didn’t matter, because everyone was attacking me. The only reason that I would is because I (the player) know that Knights in shining armour tend to be good guys, while bandits and goblins and the such are bad guys. But there’s no reason in game why that’s the case.
This would be fine if the game didn’t pretend to have a story or anything. I mean, my favourite thing tends to be the story, but that’s just me ,and I can enjoy storyless games. But the fact that there’s a story presented, made it quite the disappointment.
The TL;DR:
The story and characters are nonexistent, mixed with combat that I didn’t like and a final boss that I couldn’t for the life of me beat. And while it presented nicely, bugs and glitches took me out of the experience somewhat.
So why 3/5, if I’m so critical? Because, it was fun enough that I wanted to finish it, even though I didn’t. Take that for what it’s worth.
Great game until a few things I noticed....
1) orbs and etc are not explained.. and when I got 4 orbs for each player automatically when talking to a miniboss twice on second map.. no difference was noticed...
2) The 3rd pet I chose from above encounter also, (some purple pig looking thing) was said to make small attacks for me... It does make the movement and noise of an attack randomly.. but NO DAMAGE is being made.... is this a bug or are the pets just some kind of dumb joke that do nothing for you? Please respond and let me know why my pet does no damage.. i've even sat for a minute hitting no buttons and no damage was done to enemy (not even 1%) after it "appeared to attack" many times in a row. No numbers show as it does it attack as well...
Perhaps I should have chosen the healing pet.. but who knows if that one works at all also?