Archvale is fun, but at the same time it is a painfully average game that feels like the developpers just didn't care for it, because there are so many things that seem easy to fix or terrible design choices that could be avoided from the beginning. I have checked the development process of the game and it seems to be a sort of mess, especially now because the main developper acknowledged to not having funds to keep working on it consistently, even though they intended to release a major rebalance patch.
The game is essentially Enter the gungeon but without the roguelike aspect and a consistent world to explore instead. Unfortunately, all that there's to explore are squares upon squares of the same thing. There isn't a single secret on the map and it is procedurally generated every adventure apparently, it's just a succession of areas where you need to fight enemies to progress until a new checkpoint or an eventual point of interest. The dungeons provide a bit more but they are few of them.
The bullet hell part is a pain since the very beginning. There's just too many bullets all the time and the patterns are pretty terrible. In the first place, you can't even make such complex patterns with a dozen randomized enemy per arena and the bosses aren't any better. They hardly have openings and just spam insane attacks with a lot of annoying gimmicks every time. For example, one boss is a slime that will not only cover the area in so many bullets you can barely see yourself but it'll constantly go off screen, there's no way to distinguish between its jumping attack and the one with a jump animation but where it remains motionless, you can't get close to it safely because there's not a single tell that it'll just jump at you and not only does it have its standard bullets but it also has AoE earthquakes that chain together and shoots dozens of small balls the same color as the ground to chip away at your health. And the worst is that they're VERY tanky and take forever to kill.
Overall it's still fun to play but the biggest issue here is that you have no indication of where to go in the open world, EVEN THOUGH there's actually a very precise order with each area being a specific level. So it's easy to end in a high level area without even realising it, especially when you aren't aware that the game is actually super linear, and waste a lot of time being stuck there and get frustrated. The game was really fun when this didn't happen but I spent multiple hours like this, just trying to beat a boss or clear a very hard area before I realised that I would have actually not have trouble elswhere. The bullet or boss patterns aren't a big deal when you're in the right place, but if you're not then they're very painful to deal with and the game is obviously not made with the intent of being cleared on challenge runs (not that it can't be done, but doing a no hit for example would just be extremely painful and would involve a lot of RNG).
The build system is pretty poor but still offers fun choices. The game offers three types of weapons : melee, ranged and magic. Magic has a gimmick of picking up enemy drops that supposedly make you temporarily stronger but I couldn't even tell the difference. The game heavily discourages playing around by having specialised equipment that increases only one type of damage, requiring you to constantly change your gear if you want to change your weapon type. As for the weapon themselves, I found myself nearly always using the same ones and only occasionally picking something else and, once again, not using anything else. Why? Because the weapons are fixed and most of them are essentially a mix of damage type and a different way of firing. Unfortunately you can't mix your own weapons and since you'll usually like a particular type of gun, you'll stick to the one same thing you're comfortable with. It doesn't help that everything is so tanky, so you REALLY need the buff from specialising.
Not a big loss anyway, because damage types and debuffs are almost useless. Does slow even do something? And the damage of poison, bleed and burn is so ridiculously low that a single hit from my weapon would do much more than maybe 30 seconds of poison. Hell, even the pots you can find and throw on the map and the bombs feel so underpowered as if the devs didn't even bother to check them. After an hour of playing, you'll probably do way more damage than any pot throwing could hope to achieve.
The camera is also pretty terrible, especially in coop where the enemies will constantly be out of your screen. I think the zoom on the map is just too much and decreasing it (at least in coop when players distance themselves) would have helped a lot. In coop the other player is your biggest enemy because of the camera moves and my experience was that most of our deaths were because of the camera.
Overall this game is pretty frustrating, it can be fun and has potential but many of the flaws are so obvious that players were bound to criticise them, and they're not so fundamental that a quick patch wouldn't have helped. For example, if you teleport to another area, your checkpoint doesn't change until you use the teleportation statue again, or how the two players are so hard to distinguish themselves... ! There are a lot of bugs like that that are easy to fix and it's hard to figure out why the devs, that are apparently still involved with this game, haven't fixed them yet. So it is saddening to see how the game is just stuck in its mediocre state.
The game is essentially Enter the gungeon but without the roguelike aspect and a consistent world to explore instead. Unfortunately, all that there's to explore are squares upon squares of the same thing. There isn't a single secret on the map and it is procedurally generated every adventure apparently, it's just a succession of areas where you need to fight enemies to progress until a new checkpoint or an eventual point of interest. The dungeons provide a bit more but they are few of them.
The bullet hell part is a pain since the very beginning. There's just too many bullets all the time and the patterns are pretty terrible. In the first place, you can't even make such complex patterns with a dozen randomized enemy per arena and the bosses aren't any better. They hardly have openings and just spam insane attacks with a lot of annoying gimmicks every time. For example, one boss is a slime that will not only cover the area in so many bullets you can barely see yourself but it'll constantly go off screen, there's no way to distinguish between its jumping attack and the one with a jump animation but where it remains motionless, you can't get close to it safely because there's not a single tell that it'll just jump at you and not only does it have its standard bullets but it also has AoE earthquakes that chain together and shoots dozens of small balls the same color as the ground to chip away at your health. And the worst is that they're VERY tanky and take forever to kill.
Overall it's still fun to play but the biggest issue here is that you have no indication of where to go in the open world, EVEN THOUGH there's actually a very precise order with each area being a specific level. So it's easy to end in a high level area without even realising it, especially when you aren't aware that the game is actually super linear, and waste a lot of time being stuck there and get frustrated. The game was really fun when this didn't happen but I spent multiple hours like this, just trying to beat a boss or clear a very hard area before I realised that I would have actually not have trouble elswhere. The bullet or boss patterns aren't a big deal when you're in the right place, but if you're not then they're very painful to deal with and the game is obviously not made with the intent of being cleared on challenge runs (not that it can't be done, but doing a no hit for example would just be extremely painful and would involve a lot of RNG).
The build system is pretty poor but still offers fun choices. The game offers three types of weapons : melee, ranged and magic. Magic has a gimmick of picking up enemy drops that supposedly make you temporarily stronger but I couldn't even tell the difference. The game heavily discourages playing around by having specialised equipment that increases only one type of damage, requiring you to constantly change your gear if you want to change your weapon type. As for the weapon themselves, I found myself nearly always using the same ones and only occasionally picking something else and, once again, not using anything else. Why? Because the weapons are fixed and most of them are essentially a mix of damage type and a different way of firing. Unfortunately you can't mix your own weapons and since you'll usually like a particular type of gun, you'll stick to the one same thing you're comfortable with. It doesn't help that everything is so tanky, so you REALLY need the buff from specialising.
Not a big loss anyway, because damage types and debuffs are almost useless. Does slow even do something? And the damage of poison, bleed and burn is so ridiculously low that a single hit from my weapon would do much more than maybe 30 seconds of poison. Hell, even the pots you can find and throw on the map and the bombs feel so underpowered as if the devs didn't even bother to check them. After an hour of playing, you'll probably do way more damage than any pot throwing could hope to achieve.
The camera is also pretty terrible, especially in coop where the enemies will constantly be out of your screen. I think the zoom on the map is just too much and decreasing it (at least in coop when players distance themselves) would have helped a lot. In coop the other player is your biggest enemy because of the camera moves and my experience was that most of our deaths were because of the camera.
Overall this game is pretty frustrating, it can be fun and has potential but many of the flaws are so obvious that players were bound to criticise them, and they're not so fundamental that a quick patch wouldn't have helped. For example, if you teleport to another area, your checkpoint doesn't change until you use the teleportation statue again, or how the two players are so hard to distinguish themselves... ! There are a lot of bugs like that that are easy to fix and it's hard to figure out why the devs, that are apparently still involved with this game, haven't fixed them yet. So it is saddening to see how the game is just stuck in its mediocre state.