Dawn of the Ashen Queen

You don't have to reinvent the wheel to make an enjoyable game, and that's exactly what Shattered Moon Games has done with "Dawn of the Ashen Queen". If you've played any fairly modern grid-based dungeon crawler like Legend of Grimrock, The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, Vaporum, etc, you mostly know what's in store here. This isn't a deep RPG...you create one character and get a few different classes to choose from, and a fairly basic skill tree that you can expand upon when you level up. You meet the rest of your party throughout the adventure to make a total of four in your monster-slaying team. While the game does nothing new, the graphics and sound are top notch, and the writing is overall decent. It's your typical "kill the bad guy to save the world" troupe. The only thing slightly different here is the overall pace of the game is quicker. Your team moves around the grid more quickly, and so do the enemies. It's your typical "dance" combat maneuver, and you get one attack slot...

I purchased this when it came out, but didn't install it right away because I read on the forum that people reported tons of bugs, so I decided to wait and give the developer some time to fix things. I tried it at last, and it is unfortunately very amateurish. The interface has distorted sprites (proper 9-slicing is not hard); no padding around text in lots of places or inconsistent UI/UX design; and bugs - text not appearing, interface pop-ups remaining struck... Animation implementation is very poor, the first rat monster I saw "glided" around out of sync with its walk cycle. Writing is very average; visuals are inconsistent, it feels mostly like a patchwork of asset store packs (and possibly some undeclared AI, based on what many are saying in the forums). I am a solo dev myself, and totally understand the challenges, but in no way is this worth the price of a finished, properly polished and tested game like Grimrock or Vaporum which sell for the same amount. Or Amberland, which ...