Godlyvex

DISCLAIMER: THIS REVIEW IS FOR AN OUTDATED VERSION OF THE GAME. SEE DEVELOPER REPLY FOR INFORMATION ON CHANGES.

It's a very cool premise, but it barely delivers on what it promises. One of the main problems is that 1 hour is FAR too long. You get bonus time after each area, but it's a pitiful amount. I think the system would be much better if you started with a lower amount of time, and got more time after each area. This would keep the game more tense, and would feel more fair. As it stands, you can mess up a lot at the start, and not realize you've run out of time until much later, which feels terrible. If you make lots of mistakes, you should lose sooner rather than later.

The skill system is very shallow, and abilities vary wildly in power. Some abilities are nearly worthless, and some are alright. There's a purchaseable dash ability that you'd think is pretty good, but you already start with a dash that you can do while in the air over and over, giving you absurd lateral movement, even across empty space.

This game also has tons of binds, and many of the binds conflict right off the start, so getting that working is a pain.

The moment to moment gameplay isn't too bad. Fighting enemies is more fun than vanilla, though that isn't saying a lot. Your main way to progress is mining ores to get better ores. Basically it's normal minecraft progression, but scaled up to have more tiers, and you're on a time limit. Also you're mining upwards instead of downwards. I was hoping that there would be more to the progression than this, but it seems like that's all there is. It means that you're reliant on RNG to decide whether or not you find the ores in time to progress. And as previously mentioned, even if you take a long time to find the ores, you get way too much time at the start, so you won't know you've spent too long until way later.

The item system is also not very interesting. It advertises itself as sort of a roguelike, but me and my friends only ever found 2 or 3 special items, which is an absolutely pitiful amount. That isn't to say we only got 2 or 3 items, we found plenty, it's just that we kept getting the same 2 or 3 over and over again. They also seemed to just drop from random enemies, there was no fanfare or way to find them intentionally. I much preferred Muck's system for getting items, where there are designated objects that give items. I feel like that system would work well in trepidation, you could have little platforms floating out above lava in the nether, and you'd have to bridge out and get them, and maybe give up some amount of XP to unlock the chest. Of course, for this system to be meaningful, they'd need to add more special items in the first place.

To wrap the review up, the mod seems unfinished, and not very well designed. It looks pretty nice, and the premise is cool, but a game that is cool in theory does not always translate to good gameplay.

I'll preface this by saying I'm not very far in the modpack. This modpack apparently has bosses and a long progression path, but I have not faced a single boss yet. This review is only for the early game, and I can not comment on the balance or design decisions made further into progression.

The mod was quite good. It feels like RLcraft but actually designed around being a playable game. I was honestly surprised, considering this modpack creator's other modpack, trepidation, is a mess of bugs and strange design choices.

This modpack is similar to RLcraft in that you have the realistic crafting trees, with more enemies and items, but thankfully this modpack is much more fair than RLcraft. It doesn't have the stupid thirst mechanic, it doesn't have the dumb heat/cold mechanic, and it doesn't have the extremely frustrating enemies that instakill you from nowhere.

This modpack also has mechanical mods, which normally I hate, but it seems to have been done tastefully here. Other mods usually have super complex mechanical blocks right from the start, but this mod focuses more on primitive mechanics, like having a mill powered by a river, or using a campfire to heat a crucible. This is so much more reasonable and enjoyable.

There are also quality of life features, like the ability to track teammates on your HUD with a compass at the top of your screen (which for some reason required restarting the server for us after we joined a team, but oh well), the ability to sprint left and right, appleskin to track your hunger, JEI, et cetera.

More interestingly, this modpack gives enemies the ability to raid your home, break blocks, and tower up. This makes enemies much more of a threat, and makes minecraft combat feel, dare I say... dynamic? It still has issues, but it does fix minecraft's old problem of enemies being completely unthreatening if you use the ability to build/break blocks.

It has a lot of QOL features, but one thing I don't like is the bloat. It adds a ton of useless stone types that clog the inventory.

The final area is unfinished and you can not really complete this mod. Left performance rating empty because I don't know how good the performance is.