About Phantom Forces:
Honestly I was a little torn between a positive and a negative review, I ended up going with a positive because ultimately my grievances with the game can be fixed. I believe this game has a lot of promise. The idea is great, it feels good to play, for the most part its a good time through and through. Having the different whips to provide new challenges and using them as a motivator to continue to go for lower floors in order to upgrade them was a nice way of adding hours to the average playtime of this game, and for the most part the game runs good (though there are some problems). Now for some bad stuff :/. Id say the first 5 hours of this game are like magic, it feels so good to run through a temple dodging traps, and guardians. But after that or maybe even sooner the magic quickly fades. By the time you reach the red floors each run is going to last a MINIMUM of 30 minutes. That’s if you’re running past every chest and blasting past traps and not getting hit. Realistically your average red floor run is going to last 45 min – 1 hour. This means you can spend potentially upwards of an hour on a run just to die by some cheap trap placement or unfortunate guardian spawns (I’m Looking at you Eye Of Agony, And Masked Defiler), and come out the other side with nothing to show for it, and an hour of your life lost to the void. This (at least for me) makes it really difficult to play for very long, not only because of the MASSIVE time investment for just 1 run, but also the amount of frustration that emerges from within me after an hour of work and nothing to show for it is enough to discourage me from continuing. Like I mentioned before when you die you temporarily lose the whip you were using and any keys you may have collected during the run. You can only get the keys back if someone else beats the temple, and you can buy the whip back with keys if you have some to spare, otherwise like the keys the whip will be returned to you upon completion of the temple by another player. To top it all off YOU CAN GET DUPLICATE RELICS. which i’m okay with especially when you take the whip upgrade system into account, but the problem is you can get duplicates right out the gate………..Like……Your third run. When your talking green dungeon relics its not that bad as an average green dungeon run will last 10-15 minutes. But by the time your at the red dungeon or god forbid the assumed upcoming yellow dungeon, you can spend upwards of an hour just to get a duplicate. In my opinion duplicates should only start happening after you’ve collected all the relics on that tier, though i suspect there will be many people on the other side of the fence defending it just as much as i’m criticizing it. Performance is another issue (at times). For the VAST majority of my time with this game it has run butter smooth, though sometimes for no apparent reason my fps will drop from 144 to ~25. I don’t think i have to explain why 25 fps in a fast paced parkour game is less than ideal. I’m not a game dev so i don’t know the best way to fix the problems I’ve mentioned. I could give suggestions but its probably best left to the professionals. It’s early access so things can be fixed, and that’s probably why despite the giant wall of text explaining the problems of this game i’m still giving it a positive review. I’m certain that with and vocal community and a receptive dev team, this game can become something special.
