I had a decent time with it on a lower difficulty, there's a lot about the gameplay loop that I enjoy. The core combat was fun, the controls are tight, and the class designs are good. Levels are laid out nice, exploring feels good, and the metroidvania mechanics are cool.
And that's about where the good ends.
OVERALL: 5/10
Combat Design: 5/10
World Design: 7/10
Narrative Design: 2/10
Story / Plot: 2/10
Aesthetic Visuals: 7/10
The game is going to be too hard for 90% of game players. It's brutally unforgiving, enemy and trap damage is massive, there are so few avenues to regaining health in a run, and what is there is either pitiful (the rune that gives 1% HP on enemy death is a joke) or insanely random and not within the player's control whatsoever. If you're having a rough time, you MUST break every box/lamp/etc for the hope of a health drop, which is NOT a fun play pattern at all (especially when even tiny book or candle props might sometimes have health hidden in them).
So, sure, they have difficulty options, that's great. The first thing I did was make it so enemy bodies don't hurt you, because, insanely, only one class has an ability that gives them iframes. There are certainly games where not giving the player iframes is rational, but this isn't one of them. Enemies move in crazy patterns and many of them fly, half the enemies shoot projectiles, of which there are many many types. With your limited mobility and complete lack of iframes, avoiding every enemy, hazard, and projectile is going to be impossible for anyone who isn't a gamer savant who probably streams on twitch semi-professionally. The screen is, at any moment, so full of damaging entities in random patterns that it's just ridiculous.
Next I lowered enemy health a bit (that's not bad at all, you do good damage to all normal enemies) and enemy damage by 20% and then 50% because it's honestly such a slog, you die so fast.
In spite of all of that, I was having fun! Until it came to beating the bosses. They are plainly just not fun. The game acts like you have more methods to avoid damage than you do, and the projectile patterns and some boss behaviors are just flat out sadistic to a degree that isn't even remotely fun. I got through three of them, but on the wizard in the library, he has a second phase that is perhaps one of the worst boss designs I've ever seen in a game? I decided I had no motivation to keep going once I got to that, it just felt like the designers didn't respect me as a player whatsoever.
My biggest criticism beyond how crazy it is to avoid damage is that, unlike other roguelites, this one does NOT have massive player power spikes in 90% of runs. The vast majority of "relics" are not only not powerful, many of them are just flat out strictly bad and offer little to no value to the majority of classes. What makes that worse is they made the baffling decision to hide what relics do until you use them for the first time. After 8 hours with the game, I just determined to look them up mid-run because that's bad game design when relics can offer literally ZERO benefit at least 50% of the time. Turns out even looking them up didn't offer much, it just showed me that, yeah, no, I don't want almost any of them.
The bad relic design is made even worse when the entire game is built around a system where you can only equip a couple of them per run, and if you go over a certain value of a meter that fills up, you start losing health! The idea of gating player power progression in a roguelite behind HEALTH when the powers aren't even good is just...absolutely insane? As a game designer, I struggle to think of a justification for going that path, it's just so anti-fun from top to bottom.
The only power spikes you get are "traits," which are assigned to you AT CHARACTER SELECTION and completely random. Also, most of the good ones make you take 2x damage, guaranteeing you always kind of feel like ♥♥♥♥ even when you're more powerful. Again, literally anti-fun design. I understand trade-offs, but they should've brainstormed literally any trade-offs other than "make the player die faster", because I can think of at least dozen potential ones within their design, and yet they seem to think the ONLY way to balance these things is by taking more health away from the player.
They have a huge skill tree to invest in over time, but after 10 hours, it's just grinding. You don't get meaningful power from the skill tree, you don't feel like you're actually getting stronger over time, and the lack of run-specific power spikes makes the lack of skill tree power spikes even more egregious. The tree nodes start costing SO MUCH GOLD that it feels like it was designed purely for the small audience of fans they have who are addicts of their game sinking in HUNDREDS of hours, which, sure, you should find ways to benefit them, but Hades did literally everything better in terms of run design and progression design, making the game accessible to all players instead of just pro gamers.
And that's about where the good ends.
OVERALL: 5/10
Combat Design: 5/10
World Design: 7/10
Narrative Design: 2/10
Story / Plot: 2/10
Aesthetic Visuals: 7/10
The game is going to be too hard for 90% of game players. It's brutally unforgiving, enemy and trap damage is massive, there are so few avenues to regaining health in a run, and what is there is either pitiful (the rune that gives 1% HP on enemy death is a joke) or insanely random and not within the player's control whatsoever. If you're having a rough time, you MUST break every box/lamp/etc for the hope of a health drop, which is NOT a fun play pattern at all (especially when even tiny book or candle props might sometimes have health hidden in them).
So, sure, they have difficulty options, that's great. The first thing I did was make it so enemy bodies don't hurt you, because, insanely, only one class has an ability that gives them iframes. There are certainly games where not giving the player iframes is rational, but this isn't one of them. Enemies move in crazy patterns and many of them fly, half the enemies shoot projectiles, of which there are many many types. With your limited mobility and complete lack of iframes, avoiding every enemy, hazard, and projectile is going to be impossible for anyone who isn't a gamer savant who probably streams on twitch semi-professionally. The screen is, at any moment, so full of damaging entities in random patterns that it's just ridiculous.
Next I lowered enemy health a bit (that's not bad at all, you do good damage to all normal enemies) and enemy damage by 20% and then 50% because it's honestly such a slog, you die so fast.
In spite of all of that, I was having fun! Until it came to beating the bosses. They are plainly just not fun. The game acts like you have more methods to avoid damage than you do, and the projectile patterns and some boss behaviors are just flat out sadistic to a degree that isn't even remotely fun. I got through three of them, but on the wizard in the library, he has a second phase that is perhaps one of the worst boss designs I've ever seen in a game? I decided I had no motivation to keep going once I got to that, it just felt like the designers didn't respect me as a player whatsoever.
My biggest criticism beyond how crazy it is to avoid damage is that, unlike other roguelites, this one does NOT have massive player power spikes in 90% of runs. The vast majority of "relics" are not only not powerful, many of them are just flat out strictly bad and offer little to no value to the majority of classes. What makes that worse is they made the baffling decision to hide what relics do until you use them for the first time. After 8 hours with the game, I just determined to look them up mid-run because that's bad game design when relics can offer literally ZERO benefit at least 50% of the time. Turns out even looking them up didn't offer much, it just showed me that, yeah, no, I don't want almost any of them.
The bad relic design is made even worse when the entire game is built around a system where you can only equip a couple of them per run, and if you go over a certain value of a meter that fills up, you start losing health! The idea of gating player power progression in a roguelite behind HEALTH when the powers aren't even good is just...absolutely insane? As a game designer, I struggle to think of a justification for going that path, it's just so anti-fun from top to bottom.
The only power spikes you get are "traits," which are assigned to you AT CHARACTER SELECTION and completely random. Also, most of the good ones make you take 2x damage, guaranteeing you always kind of feel like ♥♥♥♥ even when you're more powerful. Again, literally anti-fun design. I understand trade-offs, but they should've brainstormed literally any trade-offs other than "make the player die faster", because I can think of at least dozen potential ones within their design, and yet they seem to think the ONLY way to balance these things is by taking more health away from the player.
They have a huge skill tree to invest in over time, but after 10 hours, it's just grinding. You don't get meaningful power from the skill tree, you don't feel like you're actually getting stronger over time, and the lack of run-specific power spikes makes the lack of skill tree power spikes even more egregious. The tree nodes start costing SO MUCH GOLD that it feels like it was designed purely for the small audience of fans they have who are addicts of their game sinking in HUNDREDS of hours, which, sure, you should find ways to benefit them, but Hades did literally everything better in terms of run design and progression design, making the game accessible to all players instead of just pro gamers.