Reviews

• gamedeal user

  May 26, 2018

  UPDATED Review (January 28th, 2019): INTRODUCTION: After a couple of complaints from users about my outdated review, I've decided to revisit Dungeon Brewmaster. This is my experience. GRAPHICS: Again, upon entering the game, I am plunged into an atmospheric world of creatures--all three of them: An orc/troll hybrid, these goat creatures, and the goblin customers. I won't lie--when you start Act 1, it always wows me when the fireplace comes roaring to life. The game--visually--is quite polished, but unfortunately, that's where much of my praise ends. GAMEPLAY: This isn't Diner Duo, where you are on the clock, trying to complete multiple orders. This isn't the type of game that incentivizes your creativity, either. This game gives you the illusion of freedom by giving you the ability to transmute a variety of different ingredients together, either via the alchemy table or the frying pan--that is, when the combinations you choose don't give you poop instead. When given the chance between orders. I wanted to try my hand at some combinations, seeing as the developers claimed they've added "way more". A year later, and I am still getting poop. Is this my fault, that I just so happened to choose the "wrong combination?" Perhaps. But again, it's not like this game rewards you for being creative with your transmutations. But perhaps this game isn't about being creative. It's about completing orders. Very well, then we must dive further and look at what motivates a player to complete orders. After each order is placed on the counter, a sack of money materializes and a tentacle takes it away. In the story mode, which currently consists of Acts 1 and 2, the incentive for you to complete orders is to--primarily--further the 1 & 1/2 hour story. It's never about making money, as the tentacle animation would have you believe. During Act 1, a merchant appeared before me, offering 3 ingredients/tools of which I could only choose one. I was given a timer to choose one of the three, but I hadn't made enough money at that point to purchase any of them. Thus, I had to stand and wait until the timer ran out. Was it annoying? Yes. But maybe in the end, it would be worth it, I thought. The merchant would arrive a couple of more times throughout Acts 1 and 2, but again. What was the incentive for me to purchase these items? I purchased a different-looking grater, but that didn't send my old grater away. My old grater was hanging off the wall behind me, and now I had this new grater, which does the same thing. It didn't make my brewing more efficient, and it didn't change the attributes of my ingredients. It was just a different looking grater. I always made more money than I needed. So there goes that--if I don't need to be making that much money, and I can only ever buy one ingredient/tool at a time when the merchant arrives, the game turns into a little bit of a slog to play. Later on, I purchased a cactus plant--a new ingredient. But that would only expand the order variation by a tad. So here's what we have: If my motivation to complete orders isn't to gain money, be creative, or further the story (which does, in fact, end after Act 2), then what are my motivations? What is my motivation to play the freeplay mode? To get money to buy more stuff? I'm not certain as to the longevity of that formula, but I'm sure it wears out pretty quick. CONTROLS: Now here's where I'm going to address the controls: The controls as far as I can tell, have improved, but not by much. I've encountered a bug where I'd be able to grab the frog and toad creatures from an arms-length away and drag it around, as if performing some Blade & Sorcery telekinesis move. God forbid that you drop an ingredient on the floor, much less an ingredient that you just spent time crafting in the frying pan AND the alchemy table. If you were to drop your ingredient anywhere REMOTELY close to the monster chest below your table, you can bet that you won't be swift enough to retrieve it before the creature consumes your hard work. I've even grabbed my ingredient off the floor a couple of times, only to have the chest gobble it down from my hands. Collisions in this game are great, but they're annoying. Want to organize your workspace? I wouldn't. It's much easier to throw your ingredients/tools on the tavern floor than place them back where they belong. After all, why do that when they'll just respawn where they're supposed to be? Cutting and grating ingredients is sometimes satisfying, when your knife or grater isn't clipping through the ingredients. At the end of the day, your hands are just way too big for the ingredients you have to handle. Instead of standing for Act 2, I decided to downscale my tavern workspace to size "small" and sit in a chair. I found that grabbing objects at this scale was a much bigger improvement, though I had an immense amount of difficulty pulling the topper off of the unicorn-horned bottle. I actually recommend players play the game with the smaller worktable--not only does it decrease the chance of you grabbing the wrong ingredient, but it also prevents you from reaching beyond your VR boundary limits, if you have a small space. SOUND: The voice acting isn't great, but it's passable. The main thing about the sound that took me out of my immersion was that the voices and sounds weren't where they were supposed to be. Directional audio, if you're to play any other polished VR game, is a given. In Dungeon Brewmaster, a character would be standing in front of the table, but most of his voice could only be heard threw my left ear. This is improved in Act 2, though, where their voices are actually centered. But when characters are standing to my left or to my right, they still sound as if they're standing right in front of me. It's a bit of an issue. CONCLUSION: This was a long read. I know. But I've given it a lot of thought and I felt that I would be doing the game a disservice if I weren't to critique it honestly. Once again, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this game. There just isn't enough being offered at the table for $15. Sure, this game is in early access, and I understand that. But I think more could've been done with it given the 1-year time span I've spent away from it. Maybe it was meant to be a short experience, but it just didn't provide enough of the WOW factor and charm that comes with other short VR titles. There just isn't enough to do, and very little motivation to do any of it. I think that's what a cooking game needs. At the end of the day, if what you're going to be doing is following instructions to make these orders, you need a really good progression system to keep players engaged in what they're doing, otherwise, what they're doing will eventually become tedious. It's a shame that this is where I'm left standing with this game. Maybe I've expected too much from Dungeon Brewmaster, and maybe Dungeon Brewmaster can't give me what I want, simply because my vision isn't the developers' vision for this experience. Maybe. But here's the honest, TL;DR truth: I wanted to keep playing--but there was nothing left to see. If you want to be able to pour hours into this game, there needs to be an entire gameplay rework that rewards and incentivises play.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 5, 2018

  This game is adorable, and I want to love it. However, it is riddled with bugs. I played this for my stream, and there were game breaking problems. If you're ok with that, and want something that will be fun for an hour or two, go on and get it! It's cool!!! Otherwise, lets get through the bad, before I comment on the good. Bad Stuff: -I'm not sure what's going on graphically, but my computer chugs trying to run this game. I've played a lot of other, much prettier, heavier games and have had no problems streaming it. My viewers said it looked alright, but I was experiencing some serious jittering inside the helmet. -After every act, the book opens up to blank pages. I had to quit the game completely and restart it to make another selection. -Gameplay is lacking. While I love the story stuff, there's really no meat (har har) to the game. Even in free play. It's really boring to look at a customer, go read a book and follow it step by step, and serve the customer. A lot of other cooking games have some serious time management and simpler recipes to follow. This is far more fun than what you're given here. Plus, no one seems to be upset if they are served horribly slowly (Or wrong?) There's nothing to make you go faster, nothing to encourage you to explore. I'm quite ok with simple 15 dollar games, but it needs to have repeatable fun mechanics that challenge me physically/mentally to accomplish even if it's the same basic mechanics. Please look up some other cooking games to see what they do. -Again, for 15 dollars, I want something that's fun and repeatable even if it's simple. I can name 10 or 20 games in this price range that have me coming back to them because of extremely simple mechanics that challenge me. -There are numerous graphical glitches of things disappearing/reappearing during animations. -Your frying pan needs to be a bit bigger for some of the items i'm forced to put in there, or, the purple vial needs to allow for the top to be uncorked so you can poor its contents in. In fact, that was very... unintuitive what I was suppose to do there. The mushroom bottle you uncork and pour, but the pink one you can't? The Good -I absolutely adore the story bits! Like, seriously! I love them! They're cute and I want more!!! -The atmosphere is fantastic! And I can see that there are ways to upgrade the interior looks of my tavern! That's awesome. -The components/ingredients have logical/noticeable effects. When I see an image on a customer, I almost know exactly how to achieve it without looking at the book. This is very well done!!! -I love the upgrades to my little area. However I have ecxess gold and no way to spend it other than suffering the game to see what upgrades the little minion has for me. I love the game, I want to really love this game, but it just needs more... game... to it. Right now, it's a pretty broken demo of a cool setting and that's it.
• gamedeal user

  May 24, 2018

  Very nicely thought out mechanics and I'm definitely looking forward to playing it in the future when there's more content in the actual story.