Well that was a letdown.
I've been wanting to play this game for a while now and finally bought during the last Steam sale. I finished it in one sitting today.
The best thing about the game is the soundtrack, which somehow sounds even better in-game than on spotify. However the ones without lyrics didn't grab my attention as much as the ones with singing. The gameplay is generally simple, but the level design makes it challenging enough to make you put some work into mastering it.
The game is very short, in order for it to feel like a pop album. I don't have a problem with that (in fact I prefer shorter games), but instead of a "WOW" effect which I hoped for at the end, all I said to myself was "so that was it huh?". Generally speaking the game is an action arcade game. Unfortunately while I was hoping for more action, I got more arcade. After every bossfight level there is a so-called "heartbreak" one, which is a bit slower and is technically supposed to be a transition from one location to another. The thing is all of them are very similair, and they are generally kind of boring, with an almost filler-like feel. I think the game lost some steam because of them. The game also has a good number of achievements, but all of them are hidden under riddles, which you have to solve in order to know what to do. That is completely moronic, and if it wasn't for the World Wide Web I would have definitely just quit the game after the first playthrough.
I think I wouldn't mind an even shorter, but more concise experience. I feel like maybe I will up the score by half a star after I master all the levels, but generally the game didn't blow my socks off as I thought it would.

First let's get some cons out of the way:
- jump and double jump feel very shitty outside of combat
- the tutorial sequences are a bit lenghty
- Chai and Peppermint are very annoying near the start (same for the 'rockstar' thing)
- Macaron's ability feels very clunky and is especially ankward when you need to use it on bosses
- the story is extremely predictable and cheesy (though for the most part it fits with the cartoonish aesthetic of the game)
- a couple of minor glitches
- the inability to skip through dialogue without waiting for the voice actors to finish the lines made me actively not want to speak with NPCs (even though the dialogue itself is pretty well-written)

Other than that it's an extremely fun game. Once you master the controls the combat is buttery smooth - and even if you don't, the game doesn't really punish for it. I feel like you can completely fuck up a level, or just generally only spam light attack and still get a grade B or higher (at least on the normal difficulty). The art direction and graphics in general are beatiful to look at, both if it comes to the game and cutscenes (also the way they intertwine - absolute magic). I also liked the cast of characters - despite a few flaws I think everyone can find at least one character they like in the mixture - be it a villain or a good guy (for me it's Zanzo <3). There are also surprisingly many good jokes - I thoght I would be cringing quite a bit but the game actually squeezed out more laughs than... cringes (?) from me.

Overall it's a joy to play. If you can beat like the first three levels of geometry dash and don't hate rythm games you should check it out - especially if you have game pass.

This is generally such a lucklaster of a game. When you first boot it up you don't even get a tutorial. There are like what - 4 maps? One of which is dog shit (subway). There is no in-game chat. At some point I friended someone, and there is no private chat either. Cross-platform is also not configured Steam, so the guy wasn't added to my Steam friends but solely in-game (it's understandable if he was playing on console of course, but I somehow doubt it). I saw some other guy say there is no way to play 2v2 in a premade group - what the fuck is the friends feature even for then? And why the FUCK can't you invert the mouse scroll? Scrolling down should move cards to the right, not the other way around and you're psychotic if you think otherwise. This ultimately caused me to refund, because I found myself focusing more on this than the actual game.

The deckbuilding UI is shit, and so is the fact that you can only have 4 decks at once Like actually, what the fuck? This is a trading card based game and somehow it feels like they actually don't want the players to interact with it. The game should give you access to all the cards right away, or at least softlock only the legendary ones. It's so fucking infuriating to play against cards you don't have and would like to. But I guess it wouldn't make much difference, as I see completely zero potential to build a deck with like a gimmick or something. It's just annoying if you want to play with more weapons than debuffs or the other way, or generally the way you would like. Until you grind the cards out you're stuck with some shit-tier deck the devs decided would be good for the start (or in other words with the most boring stuff in the game).

What's also worth noting, fair matchmaking seems to be fucked (or to rather not existat all), as I got my ass kicked in about 75% of the matches I played. It's especially annoying given how little exp you get from losses. Exp is needed to level up and get money to buy cards, so essentially as you start with the most useless stuff in the game, you barely have a chance of getting better. If I'm playing one day after launch, and out of 20-something matches I played I get matched with a player on my level (totally green) only the quarter of the time then I'm sorry but this game is not gonna have a long lifespan. I don't know how you plan to keep your playerbase grow, but it's not going to if this is not fixed.

Given I've been seeing this game on my Twitter feed for fucking months now I would expect something more, but the fact that it premiered with 61 cards (many of which is shit like slow down/speed up or health up/health down) I don't see this game having a bright future. If it was free, it would be dead within a month, but since the entry barrier is $10 maybe people will actually feel like they need to get the value out and play for a little longer. It's worth checking out for the on-sale price, but I would never pay the full price for this (unless I actually had friends).

I also love how you can pay and additional $8 (or 36 PLN, idk how that translates) for a deluxe edition which adds literally nothing. Apparenty they will be adding microtransactions in the future, including stuff like "premium class expansions". Would love to tell you more about that but the description on steam is 3 sentences long. Shit seems shady.