Recent reviews by Falonefal

Sometimes you wanna turn your brain off and run around in circles blasting waves upon waves of bats, skeletons, skeleton balls, skeletons stuck in balls, reapers, the personification of divinity itself, robots, cute little caterpillars, flowers and many many more different types of creatures.

When it comes to that, why not play a game that has exactly these things and countless more, I finished all the achievements when I made this review, and while there are a decent bit of them I only really felt like I got into a 'grind' somewhere very close to the end of it.

The game has a LOT of unlockables, and a ton of various little gimmicks you can also gain access to, from ways to buff your character, ways to make your item pool more deterministic, to turning your map upside down and making everything harder(???) or having random events occur during your run.

The game takes a long time before it ceases to surprise, now, eventually you do get into a kind of pattern where you end up getting very similar builds if you modify your maps to be harder, but this is completely optional and rarely needed for unlocking something, so you can enjoy doing whatever you want with the pretty large amount of weapons you'll unlock along the way.

The game has more mystery to it than you'd expect, there's a lot of things to learn and figure out, and when you do you're usually eventually rewarded with a crazy lightshow where you continuously wipe the screen of pesky undead, undeadlike, non-undead, and everything beyond and between.

As always what pulls me in most in a game is its OST.

There are a LOT of soundtracks in this game, I am honestly surprised at how many, sometimes it depends on which character you play, sometimes it depends on what modifier you put on a map, and if I'm not mistaken sometimes it's a unique combination of both, I kept discovering new tracks 100+ hours in, and I am pretty sure I still haven't heard all of them, unfortunately not all the tracks are available in the soundtrack content, which is a little unfortunate, as there were some soundtracks I really wanted to listen to occasionally, and they're also not available anywhere else, needless to say I adore the OST, good job everyone who worked on it, it gave the game the necessary flair that it needed, and I think was pretty significant to the game's success.

As far as games of this genre go, purely on effort put into it by the devs, this one is hard to beat.

I am a bit on the fence about this game, on one hand it's got nice graphics, a sizeable enough selection of characters and plenty of upgrades to play around with, but after playing and 100%-ing the game I can say that my enjoyment of the game had dwindled somewhere by my 4th or 5th win.

While it has got a cute style, decent soundtrack and enough to play around with, I didn't really feel like I was doing something particularly different when playing the various characters, it feels like the selection of abilities characters have are not distinct enough for me to go back and say 'oh I think I liked that character the most', apart from literally one, or maybe two, you can guess which by looking at what character people have bested the highest difficulty on the most often in the achievements, seems like a lot of people share that opinion. And similarly, due to the nature of the powerups you get while leveling in the game, for a lot of the time it doesn't really feel like I'm doing something different if I go for one build or another.

The endgame looks pretty much exactly the same almost every single time, you're a bulletstorm wiping everything off the screen, no matter what you do this is what you'll be looking at, now credit where credit is due, some variations of bulletstorming were highly entertaining, that wasn't really enough to make me feel like I was thoroughly enjoying myself by the time I had finished all the achievements. And while this can be said for a lot of games in this genre, in a lot of them you at least get some sort of progression from your first game to some of your last ones, in this game, apart from the character and weapon unlocks, you will have seen most of the game in the first several rounds.

It's rough because I want to recommend this game, it's very cute, but it just wasn't that satisfying to play.

Surprisingly fun little arena wave roguelike game, what it lacks in *general* playstyle variety it makes up in individual character playstyle variety, while most of the time you'll be running around in circles, I've not once found myself bored while etching out all the achievements for all the item unlocks, since for each of those you had to approach the run slightly differently.

Considering all the wacky combos and scalings this game has it's surprisingly well balanced, even with an otherworldly combo, the combination of types of enemies and/or types of waves the game can throw at you can still end up taking you out to much personal disdain, and this manages to keep you engaged through each run.

After doing all the unlocks you're far from done with the game though, for challenge freaks you can beat the game on higher difficulties on each character, though there's no achievements associated with this, it gives the game some much welcome longevity past having completed your collection.

It's got a nice soundtrack that somehow has failed to become any sort of tiring after having played the game for 50+ hours in an almost consecutive manner,

Graphically it reminds me somewhat of Flash games I used to play as a kid, but while this might be a turn off for some, it tickled a sort of nostalgic fancy in me.

Game completely paid for itself and more, I'm excited for the future DLC and any kind of cool mods people might come up with.

A successful Roguelike to me is one that forces me to make the terrible decision to stay up through the night to play '1 more round' of it about 10 times in a row.

This is a successful Roguelike.

Definitely a very nice game, certainly up to Supergiant's standards when it comes to music, voiceover, artstyle, and I enjoyed the kind of puzzly strategy gameplay, completing 100% of the achievements within 18 hours.

However I feel like therein lies its small problem, if you're looking to get bang for your buck, perhaps you should consider only getting this on sale when it's around 4 bucks, I think I'd be okay with 10 as well, but at 20 for 18 hours of a completionist playthrough is somewhat steep, and a non-completionist playthrough is probably about half of that playtime at best.

I got it on sale so I ended up being completely satisfied, had a fairly unique gameplay experience, enjoyed the soundtrack and the challenges and didn't have too many problems with the game.

If you're worried you didn't entirely understand the story by the end of this game - don't, the creators eventually ended up releasing a whole booklet explaining a ton of things about the game, with the plot twist that they ended up contradicting themselves with varying explanations in that VERY SAME booklet, not to mention contradicting the game at various points.

So they didn't really know what the hell was going on either.

Still thoroughly enjoyed the game, the best part was the bossbattles, and how they made me feel like an idiot because I wasn't approaching them correctly most of the time.

My literally only complaint is that I wish this game had like 500 more characters so I could keep playing this until I died.

This game respects its player by trying to provide something for every kind of player who would pick up this game, if you just want to enjoy the mechanics and beat the game, you can do just that, but the devs have clearly put a lot of work into also making sure their own lore for the game is as expansive as possible, there is SO MUCH TO READ, I think that's what has really impressed me, it also isn't just a couple of random throwaway lines, like 'This is an ooze, it oozes', but actually a description done with effort.

Good job devs.

I started playing the game at 29th of December, as of writing this review I have 81 hours in the game.


Help.

This game has a MASSIVE learning curve, and I mean it.

I bought the game and within the first like, 20 minutes of playing the game, I started feeling like I wasted my money, seriously, I was in the middle of playing it and felt really bad.

Coupled with the fact that I forgot you can refund games within a specific time limit, I decided to play on to get my money's worth at least.

And then I started to SLOWLY get the hang of the game's mechanics.

The game's fun increases EXPO-FRIGGIN-NENTIALLY as you start being better at it, items and guns that you thought were useless before are now a handy part of the arsenal, clicking additional buttons isn't a chore anymore, using multiple weapons actually feels amazing, and suddenly you start understanding each class' strengths and how you can abuse them.

Now I actually can't believe I wanted to refund the game, I've played for several days straight from dusk till dawn, and still look forward to playing even more.

In short, if you want a quick, easy to jump into game like Risk of Rain, this is not it, you WILL have a BAD time when you start playing this game, but if you're looking for a game that truly rewards the player for playing well, pick this up, have a go at it, there's a free to play demo called 'Synthetik Arena' or something of the sort, one of the modes in it is a demo version of this game, check it out.