Looks like there has been a few mentions of this in other threads, but might be worth shining a light on Ratropolis here in this thread, as it’s a deck building, real time tower defense/action roguelike!
Anyone play this? The trailer has intrigued me, to say the least.
I was going to come back to Hades. I have it reinstalled and everything. Then I noticed that
-tomorrow Skul Hero Slayer is released.
-next week Dead Cells DLC releases.
-Very possibly the new hero for Gunfire Reborn also will be out next week.
-Deep Rock Galatic two new biomes will come out on Feb 3rd, so in two weeks.
So basically I have my gaming scheduled booked already!
I’ve played Ratropolis and really liked it. The only issues I had were it not allowing orders while paused and trying to track the various warnings/notifications that popup on the screen. It was also tough handling attacks on both flanks.
However, the different classes played pretty differently, which is great. The metaprogression felt rewarding. As a TBS-lover, I just needed to take a break from the real-time, but I’ll certainly return to it.
Jesus, put that one in the pun hall of fame.
Seconded. That’s a belter.
Lol. To be honest, I only read the summary and the score.
One of my favorite from last year. Glad it got mention here again.
Edit: I love this game btw. I got to Wave 200+ and max pollution. Let me know if you have any questions.
Man, somehow I thought this was gonna be a reference to Tibia Online
My first impression. Damn Skul is hard. Notably harder than for example Dead Cells. It has a least a ‘beginner mode’ where you receive 50% less damage, which seems to be my salvation.
The grind is tweaked towards the slow side, too. Once you pick the first dozen of ‘low hanging fruit’, the rest is increasingly expensive to gain, needing several runs to accrue enough currency.
Does Skul have an option to disable the screen shaking effects?
Wow, harder than Dead Cells? That’s a big statement and makes me afraid to play it lol.
Thank you.
Dead Cells now isn’t super hard, like when the game was released years ago, at least in ‘normal’ difficulty. It got a bit smoothed in the updates, the grind was also eased out a bit.
Let’s see how the difficulty compares in Skul:
Bosses are harder. The second boss is already pretty damn hard.
You recover less health than in Dead Cells. While from time to time you find little orbs that heal you a bit, there are scarce and as I say you only recover a few points.
You don’t have a “flask” to heal in combat, nor a ‘fountain’ where to refill the flask and heal you every few levels. You only have a shop between every level, where you can buy (it cost money!) a single consumable that heals 30-40% hp.
You have more health than in Dead Cells, but in exchange the enemies are more plentiful and they are 3-4 times more tanky.
You can only dash twice in a row (for most classes, there are exceptions) and the dash is smaller than in Dead Cells.
More impressions:
-The balance of the classes is problematic, I finally got a legendary one and it was several times better than a common one. Having something so important depending of pure RNG seems a bad idea. They should scale back the power scale between the tiers. In fact because a legendary skull can’t be upgraded, it means when the game presents you the two doors of where to go at the end of a stage, you can always choose treasure or money instead of wasting your time going for another skull, as you don’t need that to gain bones to upgrade it anymore, making you richer/gaining more items.
-The levels are… well, they barely can be called levels. They are divided in mini stages, each one equivalent to two, maybe three ‘screens’. They are just areas where to combat the enemies that spawn out from thin air. The most interesting thing I’ve seen in them in that the mushrooms that serve as jump pad can poison enemies. There is also a super stupid stage in world 2 where it’s full of jump pads put at different heights and there are spike traps on the ground, and you and the enemies jump like crazy.
-You can’t save & quit. Given a game that go for more than one hour, it’s an issue.
-I’m not 100% with the combat. It’s fairly solid, but…
-Sometimes it’s pretty fast and the screen is full of enemies, and I have problems seeing my own character in the middle of the chaos. They should put some color indicator in the base of the sprite, or a faint outline or some other trick like that.
-Most attack animations stop movement (and don’t let you resume it) for a bit more time than it should. I’m talking of maybe should be 0.15 seconds less. Which is just enough to be noticed and for the combat to not feel as smooth as it is in Hades or Dead Cells.
-The skill and class cooldowns are very important in this game, but there is no sound clue for them. At least there should be one indicating when you can swap classes.
-Here it’s the thing with metaprogression:
-You get more currency the further you advance. Dying in 3-2 vs dying in 2-2 doesn’t give you an average 50% more, but notably more than that.
-This is a bad idea because it means to unlock the stuff without needing to grind 100 tries, you need to not die in the first half of the game. Except… precisely the unlocks are the thing bad players like me need to reach the second half of the game! Maybe if I was good enough to reach the final boss I could get enough currency in a few dozens of runs, but it isn’t the case.
-You need around 43000 quartz to unlock everything. Or 100 games getting 430 quartz, I guess. edit: a average run (for me, 18 minutes) got me 215 quartz, to give an example. But a 34:35 run gave me 995.
-There are no ‘side grades’ to get. It’s all pure upgrades. 12 of them, the first six have ten tiers, the second six only two. But they are all boring. The first six are cheaper at first but it’s a very incremental ugprade, like +1% crit damage, or +5 health (up to +50, making you have a base of 150). The others are the good stuff like being resurrected once or having a 20% DR, but they are much more expensive, needing ~10 runs worth of quartz to unlock.
-You at least don’t lose currency when you die (/looks at Dead Cells).
-This mix of the unlocks being boring and grindy makes me think it’s okay to skip it with a trainer. It’s funny because if the metaprogression would have gameplay ‘content’ like unlocking new skulls or new items, even if they were sidegrades, I wouldn’t consider it doing it because it’s cheating, but with how it is, using a trainer to unlock everything means you play exactly the same game as before, except now you can see more advanced levels and bosses, so I don’t have an issue.
On the other hand when it isn’t busting your balls is fun to play, the class variety is good, and there are some interesting synergies with the items, passives and classes.
Thanks, that’s quite a summary.
I did stop playing playing Dead Cells a couple of years ago so that explains a few things. I remember the boss cells 1-4 being absolutely brutal.
Regarding your trainer thought. I absolutely agree. I don’t like it when games are balanced the meta progression.
I purchased skul but my controller doesn’t work in game. I’ve tried everything usual - tweaking the steam controller settings to no avail, and I get something in game about a controller config being loaded when it fires up but nothing. The keyboard controls are awful. I’m on the verge of returning it.
@Scotch_Lufkin I played Ratropolis. I have ultimately come down on the side of not liking it. Some interesting ideas, I suppose, but there’s just not a ton of variety in run outside of chosing which commander person to use before the run (and they do different from one and another by giving you different types of cards that can show up as well as an active power, but there is a base set of cards everyone gets). The game balance is super weird, and not helped by the fact that what variety does exist in a run can lead to you being totally incapable of handling the monsters at wave 21 (where you need some aoe and possibly some elite troops with huge hp totals to have shown up to make it all work, and it’s just possible none of this will have happened).
I think the problem is that class cards are gated behind the meta progression. As the class cards get unlocked you find what you mentioned isn’t the case.
Once you unlock all the cards, the commander dictates the game entirely. I don’t use units for Builders and Scientist wins and the game becomes more of a tower defense game.
Leader power management is essential for Shaman and Navigator and money management is essential for the Banker. Each Leader usually have 2-3 strategies to win so you can pivot when needed.
I agree that is a problem but unlocking them doesn’t really change enough for me. Waves and bosses are fixed for the most part. The in run events aren’t that varied. The advisors being mixed are nice. But I don’t find the card RNG dictaging my strategy (at times) changes up things enough to make things more interesting in the classes I have gone deep upgrading.
And then there’s the run itself. The goal is. . . just leveling whatever commander/class/whatever you are running? Hitting 30 the first time felt like fun but then the run can continue with a forced class change (slightly odd) and there’s nothing to be gained after, it seems, but the pleasure of making it as far as you can (you stop collecting class experience). The only real enemy variety comes from choosing which area to do the run in (some events can have a small impact here, but they are few and far between), but you still face the same waves over and over, as opposed to something being more varied. Or using a mechanic like you find in the Gemcraft series where you can do things to amp up difficulty in run for greater reward.
I wish some QoL features for Skul, like auto-attacking holding the button, instead of smashing it, or having two choices of skulls at the end of the level (of the same tier), instead of one, to be able to avoid one I don’t like.
Also, the same levels and same bosses are starting to get repetitive after the first dozen hours, but then again, it’s a 14€ game.
