This game has several decent things going for it. The visuals and design are nice, there are some animation elements that are pretty impressive and interesting, and they clearly put forth a lot of effort making some unique biomes and areas that fit with the kind of creatures you'll find in those areas.
The gameplay is the weak point though and it kind of ruins everything else that feels good about the game. This is clearly an homage to Breeding Season, but rather than encouraging you to breed the creatures, it wants you to capture them. And unfortunately the capture mechanic and the traveling you have to do to get to some of the areas to make the capture is uninteresting and tedious.
If you've unlocked a portal to where you want to go the travel bit is a little bit less annoying, but once you get there you still need to capture the creature. Capturing consists of sitting under spawner while random creatures of that "race" spawn with random attributes and traits based on a player's level tied to that race. You then walk up to those spawned creatures to see their stats and see if you want to capture them. To do so you have to mate with them. Meanwhile some of the creatures are attempting to mate with you so you have to avoid them if they don't have the stats you want. The result is usually that you end up walking to the same creature multiple times because they are all running around shuffling positions so you don't know who you've scanned and who is new unless you see them spawn in. A tedious and uninteresting process to find the trait combination you want.
What really made this game's predecessor appealing was that if you did enough selective breeding with the right traits in your relatively weak starter pool of creatures, the offspring would mutate those traits into stronger versions making each generation you breed better than the last. By end game, your creatures will be so powerful that the majority of new offspring would have high trait level versions of every positive trait without inheriting any negative traits. This made the breeding very rewarding and seeing how each offspring turned out was like opening a present.
Breeders of the Nephelym is the opposite, if you try to breed two really powerful characters, the result is almost always an offspring that has fewer traits than either parent, and the trait levels tend to mutate weaker rather than stronger. The result is a breeding game that discourages you from actually breeding since the offspring are always worse than what you started with. They tried to offset this by making your level for each "race" tied to how much you've bred that race, which nets you better characters when you go under the spawner. But again, that makes the breeding mechanic just a level grind that in and of itself produces nothing of interest.
The gameplay is the weak point though and it kind of ruins everything else that feels good about the game. This is clearly an homage to Breeding Season, but rather than encouraging you to breed the creatures, it wants you to capture them. And unfortunately the capture mechanic and the traveling you have to do to get to some of the areas to make the capture is uninteresting and tedious.
If you've unlocked a portal to where you want to go the travel bit is a little bit less annoying, but once you get there you still need to capture the creature. Capturing consists of sitting under spawner while random creatures of that "race" spawn with random attributes and traits based on a player's level tied to that race. You then walk up to those spawned creatures to see their stats and see if you want to capture them. To do so you have to mate with them. Meanwhile some of the creatures are attempting to mate with you so you have to avoid them if they don't have the stats you want. The result is usually that you end up walking to the same creature multiple times because they are all running around shuffling positions so you don't know who you've scanned and who is new unless you see them spawn in. A tedious and uninteresting process to find the trait combination you want.
What really made this game's predecessor appealing was that if you did enough selective breeding with the right traits in your relatively weak starter pool of creatures, the offspring would mutate those traits into stronger versions making each generation you breed better than the last. By end game, your creatures will be so powerful that the majority of new offspring would have high trait level versions of every positive trait without inheriting any negative traits. This made the breeding very rewarding and seeing how each offspring turned out was like opening a present.
Breeders of the Nephelym is the opposite, if you try to breed two really powerful characters, the result is almost always an offspring that has fewer traits than either parent, and the trait levels tend to mutate weaker rather than stronger. The result is a breeding game that discourages you from actually breeding since the offspring are always worse than what you started with. They tried to offset this by making your level for each "race" tied to how much you've bred that race, which nets you better characters when you go under the spawner. But again, that makes the breeding mechanic just a level grind that in and of itself produces nothing of interest.
