Kingdom of Atham: Crown of the Champions
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KoA CotC short for “Kingdom of Atham: Crown of the Champions” is a PVE/PVP Fantasy Survival Game with many “RPG” aspects.
In the “KoA CotC” world you start your journey as a Champion; a divine mortal, sculpted by the great Elder, to quell the corruption that has enveloped the land and its inhabitants. Different champions, also sculpted by the elder, have the same goal. Be aware, some might be friendly, some might be foes, you all have the same goal but even the strongest Champions can succumb to the darkness. An array of combat options will be available to your champion from melee, ranged and magic. Choose your “Faction” with care! Factions reside in specific villages around the CotC world and belong to different “realms”. Be warned champion! Your actions in these realms will follow you and might effect your destiny.
Your aspiration, since arriving in this world, was to cleanse the darkness and vanquish those responsible for it….the Fallen. These divine guardians, once beloved and cherished by all of Atham, unearthed the Crown of the Champion; an ancient divine artifact that balances the light and the darkness in all living things.
The conflict between the guardians originated over control of the crown and lead to a split in their ranks. One that wanted to preserve Atham as is; the other that wanted to dominate it. As the battle between the adversaries raged it enveloped the known world. Giant shadows were observed on the horizon, the echoed sounds of shattered mountains reverberated through the realms and violent tremors reduced civilizations to rubble. The final engagement between the two factions lead to the shattering of the crown and the apocalyptic release of energy that reforged the Guardians into calous power mongers. Blinded to their original belief of maintaining balance amongst all things they transformed into tyrannical desbots. Their malice, brutality, and oppression altered the very nature of Atham.
The moment the Crown shattered every creature experienced and was changed by it. This was followed by 5 mysterious objects that fell from the heavens and impacted the world with such force that it created fissures across the realms. Following the “Sundering” despair invaded the hearts and minds of the people as an unnatural propagation of twisted creatures ravaged the lands searching for those remnants of the Crown. Inevitably this lead to a new conflict, the Divine War, and it has raged on for almost 400 years.
Your goal, Champion is to find the remnants of the Crown and restore balance to Atham. Build your fortress, find allies and save the realms. Crafting and fighting your way to honor and glory. The Darkness is your worst enemy; the Light … a lost friend.
We plan to add these features in the full release many are already existing in game.
-Building (make a small house, village or town).
-Complex Crafting (farming and fishing included).
-Towns with merchants and guards (Faction based).
-Party & Guild system.
-Impressive enemies of all kinds.
-Special companion to follow you around the world.
-Combat: melee, ranged, magical and underwater combat scenarios.
-Reputation aspect where your choice will impact your game play.
-Dedicated servers for rent to make your own rules and world.
-Three different races with bonuses to specific classes.
Read More: Best Dark Fantasy Open World Games.
Return to Nangrim
Return to Nangrim is a dark first-person fantasy adventure with survival and RPG elements embedded in an epic dwarven lore. Craft, explore, and survive an abandoned and hostile world. So, grab your axe and shield and go on an epic journey that will take you and your animal companion into the ominous depths of an ancient mountain.
Cold winds howl through the abandoned caverns of Nangrim. This forsaken place holds nothing good for those who dare to pass. Now you must survive down in the depths of this ancient dwarven mountain city, and discover the fate of the Stonebeards in their last days.
MAIN FEATURES
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Explore epic locations and unveil their secrets. Collect, combine and craft items, and interact with the environment to progress.
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Find and forge weapons to defend against the dangers that lurk in the dark. Not all creatures have left the mountain fortress.
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Become a master blacksmith. Learn to forge like the dwarves of old.
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Brew legendary beers and cook delicious dwarven dishes in the tavern.
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Your torch is essential: it is not only a flame to light your way but also your primary weapon of defense; keep it close when the darkness closes in.
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Hammer or axe? Both are unmerciful tools against the evil forces. Forge and upgrade them to unlock their full potential.
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Use Hilduir, the runic language of the dwarves, to piece together the story, puzzles, and culture of this long-forgotten nation.
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Procedural elements guarantee a different gaming experience for every player.
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Experience deep and extensive fantasy lore with tons of side contents, collectibles, and hidden items.
Read More: Best Dark Fantasy First-Person Games.
Unferat
An amazing game, the village feels alive and everyone does there own thing. the magic system is complex and a little tough to master making you feel like your not just saying words, your saying arcane spells that are easy to mess or screw up. you are not a combat mage. you are a summoner, necromancer, alchemist, warlock. the entire strategy of the game is planning. knowing how and when to strike. do you gather an army of the dead and storm the town, slowly pick them off with poisons, make the forest and roads impassable with evil trees so they slowly starve. or make a portal to hell that there own deaths will fuel. its a wonderful game that allows for a bunch of different play styles. i am waiting for more from this wonderful dev
– Real player with 66.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Dark Fantasy Simulation Games.
IN A WORD: MAYBE
IN A NUTSHELL:
WHAT TO EXPECT: Dark arts simulator. Vengeance themed story. Tight game world. Focused, methodical gameplay. Plot and scheme. Repair and upgrade a remote lair as a base of operations. Gather resources to create reagents necessary for spells. Direct and indirect methods of attack. Different builds provide a little replayability. Singeplayer only.
ACHIEVEMENTS: LOOK SIMPLE w/ NO DESCRIPTIONS.
STATUS: COMPLETED. LIMITED SUPPORT.
– Real player with 18.7 hrs in game
Olden: Card Game
Olden: Card Game is designed in such a way that every battle will give a different and unique experience. A mix of overpowered and weak cards in your hand and deck will constantly test you and your opponent ability to adapt and make the best out of the current situation. In order to give players a form of individuality and theory crafting outside the match, the game offers unique talent systems per every avatar that will help the player with various perks.
In this battle of entities there is no deck building and no card collecting, so all you need to do in order to enter the match is to choose your avatar and hit the play button.
For now, there is: Entity of Light, Death, Chaos and Life.
Your entity will give your troops a unique bonus during the whole length of the game.
Basic rules
To win the game, the player needs to harvest 300 value points. Your entity receives value points whenever you sacrifice your own cards.
Once your turn begins, you receive 2 tokens: an action token and a draw token. Your options are to:
- Play a card and build your board presence
or
- Engage in combat by attacking one of your opponents’ cards
or
- sacrifice your own card, so you can harvest its current value.
Doing any one of these three things will consume your action token.
To consume your draw token, simply click on the main deck to draw a card, and that’s it.
For now, there are 3 card abilities, effect, passive and combat.
Effect is something that will happen only once, at the moment a card is played by the player. A card’s effect does not trigger in cases where you summon or resurrect it with other cards. Effects take place only if they are played directly from your hand.
A card’s passive ability will be present so long as the chosen card is on the board. Once the card with the passive ability is removed from the board, its passive ability will go away along with it.
Combat ability is something that will only trigger once that card engages in combat with an enemy card.
As mentioned, you can use your turn to perform an attack action and engage in combat. To perform an attack, simply place your card on the top of the opponent card. After one turn, your card value number will sink its value into the opposing card. If your card has enough value to destroy your opponent’s card, it will do so, and then it will return to your side of the board.
If your card does not have enough value to destroy an opponent’s card, it will do its damage after one turn, and then be destroyed.
You can engage in combat with cards that are already on the board, or with the cards from your hand.
One card can be attacked by multiple cards at the same time.
To win the game, a player needs to harvest 300 value points. Players can harvest value points by sacrificing their own cards that are not currently in combat. To perform a card sacrifice, select your card, and then click on its respective altar. Performing a card sacrifice will consume your action token.
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We thank you for having the time to check out our first game.
Thea 2: The Shattering
I played the first Thea and loved it so of course I had to grab this Thea. I also am loving it but being that it is in Early Access still it is not without its flaws and bugs and crashes. I will mostly talk about the issues I see currently because I think that is what people really want to see when they read a review BUT please understand there is a lot to also love about Thea 2 and it has a lot of heart. So while I talk about some of my issues, understand overall I love this game and how it is progressing.
– Real player with 478.4 hrs in game
Thea 2 is mixture of 4X, RPG, card game and rogue-like - it’s one of its kind no game is quite like it. If you like some or even all of those you should definitely check it out.
Thea 2 has amazing replayability - if I could only play one game for the rest of my life this would be it. It greatly improves and expands on the concepts of Thea 1.
For me it’s one of the best games I ever played - hence a happy 9/10
Quick gameplay summary
In Thea you start us with a small group of characters (determined by your choice of gods and which traits you choose) - you need to survive, battle monsters, face random events, gather resources to craft new things, research new materials and recipes or just not starve. You want to find out why the world has been shattered and restore the power of your god. To do this you roam the lands, eventually found a village and recruit more characters/make babies.
– Real player with 180.8 hrs in game
Artificer: Science of Magic
Don’t be fooled by the superficial similarities to Don’t Starve, this isn’t an open-ended base-building survival-crafting game; it’s a narrative puzzle-adventure with a mixing of interesting and innovative survival-crafting mechanics.
On release, a number of the puzzles were quite obscure and didn’t have particularly apparent clues - since then the game has been patched a number of times and the progression is a lot clearer than it was, but if you’re expecting it NOT to be a puzzler, you’re probably going to get frustrated still. You’re also likely to be disappointed that the game kinda just stops once you’ve “unlocked everything”, because it’s telling a story rather than being an open-ended “see how long you can last” type of game.
– Real player with 27.9 hrs in game
The game starts out quite fun. The art style is ok and you’ll be discovering recipes working mini games to research monster parts after you’ve killed them. It’s interesting.
It plays similar to “Don’t Starve” without the hunger aspects.
But like the “Don’t Starve” series the developers want to you to enjoy discovering the game and avoid hand holding as much as possible.
…this is where the issues being to show up.
You WILL…run into some pretty solid brick walls in progression of the game.
– Real player with 26.9 hrs in game
Dark Bestiary
Summary
Progression / Customization: 10/10
Combat: 8/10
Economy: 8/10
Difficulty: 7/10
Graphics, Story: N/A (Game isn’t about graphics and story)
New player tips
–—- Progression / Customization: 10/10 ——
Freedom to choose
Dark Bestiary’s best feature is that you are free to choose any combination of skills, talents, attributes, items, enchantments, gems, etc. to create any build you want. The selection at character creation only gives you a few initial abilities to work with and doesn’t matter long term.
– Real player with 195.7 hrs in game
It plays just like an ARPG, but turn based.
It has attributes and a lot of stats, unlockable skills, passives, talents, gear with random affixes, item sets, legendary items with special effects, it’s got it all.
There is a story but it’s short and irrelevant, you can continue playing after the story ends, in increasing difficulty “Nightmare” levels.
There are no puzzles, thankfully so. Although there is a minesweeper-like minigame you can do for treasure chests if you need a break from killing stuff, which is surprisingly fun too.
– Real player with 50.9 hrs in game
Dracula: A Gothic RPG
Dracula is back in this dark but cute RPG.
Collect souls for more powers, learn alchemy, and cast your dark magic in battle.
Black cats, werewolves, zombies; he’s buddies with all types of Halloween friendlies – and he’s going to go questing with them!
Story:
After thousands of years, Dracula has been summoned for a grand purpose by ghosts and dark magicians. They require his resurrection to fulfill the prophecy.
After he has awakened, he meets a quirky cast of characters that will get him in a lot of trouble and comical shenanigans.
Features:
👻 Party members include ghosts, zombies, and many types of Halloween friendlies.
🦠 Collect Souls to increase your power, or talk to the dead to learn their skills.
🎁 Collect items to decorate Dracula’s Mansion.
⚔️ Explore and adventure the world with some … rather unusual quests… as a dark hero.
📺 Classic role-playing style
Explore areas in classic JRPG style
~Victorian Forest~
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Future Updates:
⚗️ Craft items in the Underground Alchemy Lab.
📜 Randomized side-quests
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🍪 Come to the dark side. We have cookies.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1563670
Ruine
The potential of this game is incredibly strong. The art style, world and characters are making me eager to see more from this game. There’s a solid gameplay loop that’ll keep you experimenting with different builds throughout different playthroughs. Very good stuff!
Obviously, there’s a lot to improve and balance. Combat isn’t as in depth as I feel it could be. Ruins, while fun to progress through, are quite basic in level design and detail, and the game can be finished in under an hour if you know what you’re doing and/or lucky enough from the RNG loot.
– Real player with 37.3 hrs in game
Bias: I’ve playtested this game.
While my “hrs on record” do not reflect it, I’ve spent hours and hours playtesting this game - breaking it, finding bugs, dying over and over and over… and I love this game. The art, music, atmosphere, and humor all work together in creating this wonderful game world filled with intriguing NPCs and clever enemies. I am not particularly good at this type of game, but I enjoy the hell out of Ruine in spite of that. I highly recommend checking it out.
Edited to Add: The dev continues to update this game with new content - enemies, areas, treasures, equipment… Ruine just gets better and better.
– Real player with 14.3 hrs in game
Sands of Aura
Review written as of patch 0.01.02, 48 hours after EA release.
This is a relatively lengthy review, with significant details on many game mechanics and aspects, but I’ll stay as spoiler-free as possible.
First Impressions:
Having played 20 hours in this game, I’ve played through most, but not all of the content. In its current state, the game’s story Isn’t terribly long, maybe 5-6 hours, but there’s easily twice that much again in side content and extra areas to explore. Overall the game is very soulslike in gameplay, but with more than enough to set itself apart. Fun to play, fun to explore.
– Real player with 130.9 hrs in game
(This Review is based on 12 hours of gameplay during Early Access release patch + Patch 0.01.02, played on a custom controller, no experience on keyboard/mouse)
Sands of Aura is an isometric action RPG and does a great job at utilizing classic souls-like elements for its level and enemy design, combined with a sense of world- and island exploration akin to The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Let’s get more into some individual aspects, their current status in this Early Access, and how I personally would like to see them being improved upon.
– Real player with 33.2 hrs in game