Armed Emeth (Android, Played on Odin Pro)
Apr. 25th, 2026 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn a post-apocalypse world where the environment has been ruined by “Black Edea”, a two-bit bounty hunter meets up with an autonomous golem and goes after a massive criminal organization for the bounty on their heads.
As has become a theme, Hit-Point gets more creative with their systems and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. In this case, they went for a more open-ended, mission/bounty-driven plot and a battle system based around customizable golem vehicles. So you have two sets of equipment (for humans and for golems, and your cyborg party member uses golem equipment) and two places to recover (Inns and recharge stations) and basically all of your special abilities are golem customization. Every golem has a primary weapon with a cooldown time and a weaker secondary weapon. Special abilities run on either cooldown times or consumable ammunition, and some can only be used if you have the correct type of weapons equipped. If your golem gets destroyed, you continue the battle on foot, with weaker weapons and no special abilities—basically, it’s only a last-resort option.
Among the problems: The customization is actually pretty limited, because you can tweak golem stats but it’s tradeoffs rather than upgrades and you lose them whenever you get an actual upgrade. You can only equip a few special abilities at a time and they all have cooldowns, so battles get repetitive quickly. (And grinding only gets you so far anyway, because the golems only improve from equipment upgrades.) So you end up with an assortment of choices that don’t matter so you can hit “attack” a lot.
And the open-world setup is an illusion. I managed to do the first set of quests out of order, as I got gung-ho about hunting down bounties and missed that I was supposed to do an escort quest at the same time, which meant I then had to do a lot of running back and forth. I found it interesting that I found a second golem randomly in a forest some time before I got a second human party member (via plot progression) to drive it. Early on, the difficulty isn’t bad and you end up with way more money than you need. (The fact that you start with regeneration and a stunning ability that works on bosses helps, too.) But the difficulty also randomly spikes as you progress, even if you’re doing things in the correct order, and there are actually far fewer “optional” bounties or side quests than you might hope for. They seem to have had trouble deciding whether this was going to be linear or open-world and managed to not do a good job at either.
The name particularly amuses me, especially because it’s elsewhere as “Armed Golem.” “Emeth” is a common romanization of the Hebrew word for truth (also written and actually pronounced “emet”), which in legend was written on a golem’s forehead to bring him to life. If you erase the aleph, the word becomes “met” (roughly “he is dead”) and the golem dies/is unmade. Entertainingly, there was a Batman comic where “emeth” was written in English letters on the golem, and Batman has to rub out the “e”. In the words of a friend of mine, “Which turns the word to ‘meth’, and everyone knows doing crystal meth will kill you, so the golem dies.”
Side note: It’s been about a year and a half since I last spent a lot of time on KEMCO games; in that time it seems like Hit-Point’s output has slowed significantly and a number of their older games haven’t been updated to the latest version of Android. Meanwhile, EXE-Create keeps churning out games with some regularity and new developer Vanguard has a couple of titles out. My list now has 118 KEMCO-published games that are or were available on Android. The prices have been creeping up to $10 for most of them, but they’re still rotating through monthly sales where you can pick up the “premium” ad-free versions for $1-3.
Overall: Decent start but it fizzled out; there isn’t quite enough direction but there isn’t enough openness either. I’ve vaguely interested in where the plot goes and what Lock’s deal is, but not enough to sit through endless boring battles while searching for plot triggers.
As has become a theme, Hit-Point gets more creative with their systems and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. In this case, they went for a more open-ended, mission/bounty-driven plot and a battle system based around customizable golem vehicles. So you have two sets of equipment (for humans and for golems, and your cyborg party member uses golem equipment) and two places to recover (Inns and recharge stations) and basically all of your special abilities are golem customization. Every golem has a primary weapon with a cooldown time and a weaker secondary weapon. Special abilities run on either cooldown times or consumable ammunition, and some can only be used if you have the correct type of weapons equipped. If your golem gets destroyed, you continue the battle on foot, with weaker weapons and no special abilities—basically, it’s only a last-resort option.
Among the problems: The customization is actually pretty limited, because you can tweak golem stats but it’s tradeoffs rather than upgrades and you lose them whenever you get an actual upgrade. You can only equip a few special abilities at a time and they all have cooldowns, so battles get repetitive quickly. (And grinding only gets you so far anyway, because the golems only improve from equipment upgrades.) So you end up with an assortment of choices that don’t matter so you can hit “attack” a lot.
And the open-world setup is an illusion. I managed to do the first set of quests out of order, as I got gung-ho about hunting down bounties and missed that I was supposed to do an escort quest at the same time, which meant I then had to do a lot of running back and forth. I found it interesting that I found a second golem randomly in a forest some time before I got a second human party member (via plot progression) to drive it. Early on, the difficulty isn’t bad and you end up with way more money than you need. (The fact that you start with regeneration and a stunning ability that works on bosses helps, too.) But the difficulty also randomly spikes as you progress, even if you’re doing things in the correct order, and there are actually far fewer “optional” bounties or side quests than you might hope for. They seem to have had trouble deciding whether this was going to be linear or open-world and managed to not do a good job at either.
The name particularly amuses me, especially because it’s elsewhere as “Armed Golem.” “Emeth” is a common romanization of the Hebrew word for truth (also written and actually pronounced “emet”), which in legend was written on a golem’s forehead to bring him to life. If you erase the aleph, the word becomes “met” (roughly “he is dead”) and the golem dies/is unmade. Entertainingly, there was a Batman comic where “emeth” was written in English letters on the golem, and Batman has to rub out the “e”. In the words of a friend of mine, “Which turns the word to ‘meth’, and everyone knows doing crystal meth will kill you, so the golem dies.”
Side note: It’s been about a year and a half since I last spent a lot of time on KEMCO games; in that time it seems like Hit-Point’s output has slowed significantly and a number of their older games haven’t been updated to the latest version of Android. Meanwhile, EXE-Create keeps churning out games with some regularity and new developer Vanguard has a couple of titles out. My list now has 118 KEMCO-published games that are or were available on Android. The prices have been creeping up to $10 for most of them, but they’re still rotating through monthly sales where you can pick up the “premium” ad-free versions for $1-3.
Overall: Decent start but it fizzled out; there isn’t quite enough direction but there isn’t enough openness either. I’ve vaguely interested in where the plot goes and what Lock’s deal is, but not enough to sit through endless boring battles while searching for plot triggers.
