There's the bones of a good ARPG here. The story is pretty standard, world overrun by evil and YOU get to save it, though with a vampire flavor. The gameplay itself feels pretty good as far as mechanics go, and it has a neat approach to builds. Each class of weapon has a specific skillset and they all feel unique and fun enough to play. The crux of your build comes from a tiered tarot card system, with each card having different effects. It's fun to play around with at first but I found it hard to really utilize in a playthrough because you have so few card slots and so few discipline points (you have a cap on these points, and each card costs so many) to really work with.
The game had two primary issues for me, one big, one small. To start with the small, there is so much CC throughout this game. Basically every fight I found myself getting annoyed because of constant knockbacks, stuns, or pulls, and slightly related is that there's a lot of enemies that will randomly turn invisible in a fight due to two affixes, hitting them in that state seemed like a complete coin flip, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.
The bigger issue, however, is the way scaling works. Scaling feels absolutely awful in this game, and it works in a way that you almost feel progressively weaker rather than stronger. The way the developer explained it is that enemies have set stats, but as you level, they are granted new affixes that make them stronger and those affixes have varying levels of difficulty themselves. I get the idea behind it, to have some modicum of challenge across the board, but it just really hampers gameplay and slows every fight to a crawl when combat just gets longer and longer as the game continues on.
I was so annoyed by it on my first character (who made it up to the final boss, but couldn't beat it) that I made a second one (to make use of the knowledge gained on my first playthrough) and ended up beating the game in nearly half the time by actively skipping content like challenges and farming and instead just rushing the final boss, and at five levels weaker. I can appreciate trying to take a unique approach, but it really just turned the game into a chore.
That said, it's a fun enough game. If you're a fan of ARPGs, I'd say it's worth a shot at the very least and it's generally pretty cheap during sales. Just be prepared for an odd difficulty curve.
The game had two primary issues for me, one big, one small. To start with the small, there is so much CC throughout this game. Basically every fight I found myself getting annoyed because of constant knockbacks, stuns, or pulls, and slightly related is that there's a lot of enemies that will randomly turn invisible in a fight due to two affixes, hitting them in that state seemed like a complete coin flip, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.
The bigger issue, however, is the way scaling works. Scaling feels absolutely awful in this game, and it works in a way that you almost feel progressively weaker rather than stronger. The way the developer explained it is that enemies have set stats, but as you level, they are granted new affixes that make them stronger and those affixes have varying levels of difficulty themselves. I get the idea behind it, to have some modicum of challenge across the board, but it just really hampers gameplay and slows every fight to a crawl when combat just gets longer and longer as the game continues on.
I was so annoyed by it on my first character (who made it up to the final boss, but couldn't beat it) that I made a second one (to make use of the knowledge gained on my first playthrough) and ended up beating the game in nearly half the time by actively skipping content like challenges and farming and instead just rushing the final boss, and at five levels weaker. I can appreciate trying to take a unique approach, but it really just turned the game into a chore.
That said, it's a fun enough game. If you're a fan of ARPGs, I'd say it's worth a shot at the very least and it's generally pretty cheap during sales. Just be prepared for an odd difficulty curve.