Legolas_Katarn tarafından yazılan son incelemeler

Horace is an interesting action platformer. A robot begins to settle into his life with a family and their employees but shuts down after the death of the old man that he was closest to. He awakens years after everyone has left and a large scale war has come and gone causing you to attempt to find them again, as well as his place in the world. You proceed to become involved in robberies, jail breaks, time travel, celebrity kidnapping, an Alice in Wonderland area, dish washing and brick making jobs, drumming hero minigames, basketball, space travel, hanging out with a guy that tells you of deserting the military when ordered to kill civilians but seems to love snapping the necks of random security guards, etc all with frequent dialogue, stage, or music remixes that reference classic games, movies, and TV which are three of the things the robot loves the most.

The game is mostly a platformer that has you making use of magnetic boots to climb up walls or stick to the ceiling but it includes a lot of varied stages and gameplay elements. One section might have you hiding in bushes and lockers to avoid searchlights, one part might have you growing to different sizes, elevator rides with a lot of rotating traps might be in one area, another area might be full of timed lasers to avoid. Many areas have bosses which are often large opponents you have to defeat by hitting or breaking off certain parts of them and the majority of areas have trash to pick up with a side goal being to clean 1,000,000 things as your creator had told you to do before his death. 

There is about four hours of cutscenes and both that and the animations have a lot of nice little details with frequent funny moments thrown in giving a bit more life to the characters, though it comes with a lot of darker moments as alluded to above. The large number of minigames mostly range from passable to actually being pretty good with you never really being forced to play any you wouldn't like for long, and some you don't need to try at all. There is typically nothing too interesting about the actual platforming mechanics and your character doesn't always control perfectly but the way the stages and locations change things up helps to keep things interesting. Though if you are looking for a platformer that mostly focuses on the action this will be a game where you find yourself constantly losing your rhythm as both short and long story segments will frequently be playing out. There is also nothing particularly fun about trying to reach your goal of trash cleaning and collecting.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1201026706431037442?s=20

Indivisible borrows some of its gameplay and exploration elements from Valkyrie Profile. You have four party members at a time that perform different actions when you push the button assigned to their location, they might do low attacks, juggle enemies, normal attacks, place traps, heal, buff, etc depending on who the character is and many of the characters have a special attack where you use a meter that charges as you do damage and block. Some combat elements are similar to the Mario RPG games, you push the button assigned to a character about to get hit to block and blocking right before being hit will block more damage, some characters have actions that are improved if you continue to push their button at the right times. When you explore you can wall jump, use your axe to pull yourself up walls or smash weakened floors, a bow can hit targets as well as creating paths by stunning enemies or turning spiked walls into vines, your spear can launch yourself up into the air or be used to bounce on and near the end of the game you can dash forward in the air.

The game starts out quite well, maybe going a bit too far into the jokey territory a lot of indie games do, but the combat is enjoyable, animations look great, and you quickly gain new characters with their own way of fighting while being introduced to very different areas and enemies. It is unable to keep up this momentum though as combat becomes extremely tedious, always being easy while often having enemies with large health bars that need to have their guard broken, making the fights take even longer. Your characters will never learn any new combat moves and variety will come from swapping party members with the game's fairly large cast, though many of them are going to obviously be weaker than others. Characters focused on healing will basically never be as useful as other characters because there is just no reason to have a healer in the party, even in the off chance you need one the main character is capable of healing and reviving everyone. There is no equipment, accessories, or items to find giving even less options for combat and making map exploration often quite dull. The only things worse looking for on the map are red jewels that can be traded in to increase your defense or to give everyone an extra attack option (starting with 2 and getting up to 4). These don't give any new attack options, typically just making the already easy game easier.

The exploration elements worked in a game like Valkyrie Profile because you were often seeing new areas, finding useful items, and training a mostly constantly changing cast of characters. Here most of your time will be traversing levels, often going back and forth to the same areas, and it all just feels like busywork. You won't be finding anything useful, it takes no real though to get to hidden areas, and it provides no platforming challenge. Near the end of the game you are climbing to face the final boss of the game and it just keeps going and going, and throwing more repeated simplistic rooms at you to the point I thought I would have had to have been almost done on three separate occasions. It long passed the point where I could have seen it as anything other than padding out the length of a pretty short game.

Many of the characters join you automatically and everyone is fairly likable as far as being at least mildly entertaining goes, but they never evolve beyond being anything but one note with the exception of the first character you get. The main story is focused on the personality of the main character rushing into battles focused on her ideas to try to help people that usually just make everything worse until she starts listening more to her companions and the people she is trying to help or fight against. It gets a lot of focus all throughout the game, it just isn't very interesting. The factions and story of each area are even less interesting as they just don't have much time devoted to them. Side characters you recruit will rarely ever say anything once they join you which is unfortunate.

At one point of the game it needlessly splits into three separate locations you can sail through which waste time by locking upgrades needed to pass certain islands onto other ones. Some of these upgrades are things you should have been able to do the entire time but you just don't think to do them or aren't told about them by characters until you get to a certain point, and there's no real reason to backtrack for hidden areas since all you might find are more of the red jewels. Being split into three areas also obviously comes with unbalanced enemies and bosses, in this case with them all being far too weak to pose any challenge. This portion makes up about half of the game's length.

I ended up having to turn the music down, the music is decent but some of the tracks are so short and repetitive that I started to get a headache from hearing it over and over while traveling through each area.

Some of the reviews seem to be saying that characters haven't been released yet, limited and uninteresting side quests aren't complete, and that the game is so easy because they didn't have time to playtest a lot of the later content, all that combined with the game just doing a very poor job of explaining some mechanics to you and not even telling you how to do some platforming moves at all, leads me to believe it.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1200228710630084608?s=20

Fallen Order has locations that can be enjoyable to travel through but combat that can't come close to the better games in the genre and rushed plot and character development. You are not going to be using the force in either powerful or interesting ways, the most interesting thing you will find in the entire second half of the game is some gloves that make you climb faster.

Your passive force power of sensing memories is a nice way to get history and cultural information, combined with your droid scans to tell you about tech or creatures. Fascism of Empire somewhat explored with disinterest in casualties, evictions/deportations, slaves, worker exploitation, stealing artifacts. It's pretty, all the AAA games are pretty, they are always pretty now, we've even made Gears of War pretty. It's typically well acted, even if you do have three pretty boring cliches as main characters. Your hair blows a lot in the wind and when fighting, he knows this, and sometimes fixes it after a fight or action. Planets and locations are varied enough or see enough change as you go through and climbing is never an overly lengthy undertaking making traversing the planets as you go through them the first time enjoyable.

The main character is a somewhat broody boring 20 something human white guy with a blue lightsaber that is more personable after he finds his droid buddy, then he is more broody after he is lied to, then gets over that and is friendlier again. His growth as a character is rushed through. He told the droid to prevent the sexy enemy Jedi with a voice I find soothing from hacking into his comm line to make threatening comments, cementing my dislike of him. He goes beyond being the most generic video game protagonist you can make, to also being the most generic Star Wars protagonist you can make. The droid beeps, he is small, he sometimes does amusing things, saves you with his droid tech abilities, you get the feeling he can be a bit of a smart ass, so he's a generic small Star Wars droid that teams up with a Jedi basically which by default makes him more easy to like than the others. Former Jedi character who is taking you on your journey was a Jedi but then cut herself off from the force to not be bad Jedi, cause the evil darkness and this ain't KOTOR 2, and she now waits in the ship for you to do everything. Short four armed alien character that is there to be a cowardly Han Solo tells me that he used to only care about himself before running into the rest of us changed him, I think we had only spoken about four times before that event where we exchanged no dialogue of any importance. I suppose we've become like a family through our long trips back and forth from planets over and over again, shame I can't see any of that actual development or moments of down time, going back to character development seeming rushed.

Character development aside the actual plot is that you are all idiots on a quest to do something that is obviously monumentally stupid and driven by their self loathing. In a galaxy with an order dedicated to hunting Jedi and able to almost immediately be where they are if they feel any use of the force, you all think it's great idea to gather a hidden nonsensical list of force sensitive children to force them all together under your training to overthrow the empire, self loathing of the main characters aside this seems like the worst possible thing you could do. An interview said they didn't want to make the main character an alien or woman because they wanted him to be relatable and some of the current movies already have women making up about 1/3 or a 1/4 of the main characters, so naturally the nightsister who joins you at the end is the only likable one that tells you that your objective seems like a terrible idea and the only one I would ever want to see again in another Star Wars property.I wouldn't think her personality or some of the things she says make sense for her backstory and being a nightsister but she is adorable and not an idiot so I don't care.

She asks you basic questions, that I've been thinking about the whole time, that no one else really has an answer to. Things like, "How will you protect the children?" "Do you know how to train people?" "Would the Empire know about this hidden list of force sensitive children if you didn't start looking for it in the first place?" "So you're going to force children to fight a war for you with the alternative being to be killed when discovered?" Questions that really highlight the problems the prequels caused where the Jedi are incompetent, weak willed, manipulative, basically evil child abducting weirdos and that any story about rebuilding the order is going to be as asinine and unrelatable as games like Homefront or movies like The Postman wanting to bring back America just as corrupt, unequal, and nuclear weapon happy as it was before. Let's tell all the children about being peaceful and how using your powers to kill things will turn you into the dark evilness and then let's get to killing. It's really odd that she took your word for it that the Jedi were peacekeepers and that you weren't the reason all her people were killed, because, you're clearly a bad person hiding behind your creepy religious order's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hypocritical teachings to justify forced conscription and a lot of killing of an organization that she admits to knowing nothing about.

The game is set up somewhat like a metroidvania, except it clearly has no real desire to be one. The only thing you will tend to find in out of the way areas is lore and mostly ugly cosmetic items you will have no use for. This is not anywhere near reason enough to have you traveling back and forth between planets and running back and forth to your ship because they didn't allow for fast travel. This seems like something you would do to say that your, perfectly acceptably lengthy, game is even longer to appeal to people not wanting to buy single player only games at full price. In general you will see and find nothing of value from backtracking, exploration tends to only be new and interesting as you are progressing through new areas. In wanting to be like Dark Souls they borrowed momentary loss of XP earned after your last checkpoint on death until you do damage to the enemy that killed you, I haven't seen this system so pointlessly and ineffectually implemented since Hollow Knight. Just like that game, this never caused me to lose me XP, and if it did it would have been nothing more than a strangely implemented annoyance you could easily grind to get back. Obvious shortcuts can see you falling through platforms to be told you fell off a cliff, even though the map is loaded and those are platforms you can and will stand on after taking the longer way to them.

I saw a lot of people saying to play this on the harder difficulties and people saying to put it on story mode. I should have put it on story mode. It's still very easy on hard, it's just boring as you awkwardly kill your enemies after a ridiculous number of hits. Fighting human opponents is passable, probably at its best when you are blocking a lot of enemy blaster fire. Combat in general is at its best when you find openings during or after enemy attacks to get a blow in when they can't block, even on hard some human enemies do die in one or two hits. When you have to wale on enemies to break their guard to get one blow in before their meter fully recharges it's monotonous. You want to take down the fascist empire, deflect blaster shots while running along walls and sliding down steep slopes, toss storm troopers off cliffs, and get into duels with enemies trained to kill you? Well, too bad, the game is unfortunately obsessed with you fighting bugs and small and large animals -

Full Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/138694/
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1198148422164856832?s=20

I am in a near dreamlike state where a mocking voice warns me of the condition I have left my body in. Ignoring the warnings and sudden intense pain, I awake to a terrible hangover with no memory of the past night or of any aspect of my life. After I slowly drag myself to the bathroom mirror and attempt to wipe the grime away I am again warned, this time hearing that I won't like the sight that will look back at me. "It can't be that bad," I think as I wipe the mirror, only become horrified at the sight of the swollen and ballooned face of a late stage alcoholic that I have no memory of, just staring back at me with a ridiculous grin. I fail to try to remember what events in my life would cause me to want to have my face frozen in such a ridiculous way, again I fail when I try try to stop it from happening, failure starting to seem a common theme in my life. After collecting my scattered clothes and leaving my room, with the sound of my jingling keys helping me to find them in my jacket pocket, a woman tells me that I'm a police officer that was supposed to be investigating a recent murder and describes the events she heard from my room last night that lead to my sorry state.

Downstairs I meet my new partner, telling him that it isn't time for names yet when I realize I can't even remember mine. Trying to remember causes me to consider the colors gold and orange for some reason. We go on to question the manager, the conversation leads me to declare my feminist agenda, the one that I suddenly remembered after becoming upset at his attempt to ask out one of employees and seeing it as a misuse of his power. This gives me a new idea that I choose to consider for the next few hours, my desire to undermine the tyrannical gender roles of society gives me a better understanding of the existing power structures of the society, of which I am still trying to fully remember. The manager is unimpressed and demands payment for my room stay, as well as payment for the window I smashed when I threw one of my shoes through it. A voice speaks up, a voice coming from the ugly tie around my neck, a voice that is both making a lot of sense at the moment and one I am willing to listen to, it tells me to sneak away to avoid paying my bill. Unfortunately, my gaudy shoes and pants have caused me to stand out a bit to much and I fail to make a clean escape. Realizing I have no chance of sneaking away I begin a mad dash, followed by a dive through the air while flipping the manager off with both hands. The voices in my head tell me to just savor the moment before the crash and enjoy that I showed the manger who was boss. Just look at the shock on his face, no idea how to react to my rejection of his authority. These thoughts come to me right before I crash into a woman in wheelchair. The resulting injury leads to a sudden pain in my left arm, followed by my chest, followed by all enveloping blackness as death takes me. Maybe I shouldn't have listened to my tie, maybe I should have taken better care of my body in my past life. The paper reports on a cop that suffered a fatal heart attack, I'm described as having been a heavy drinker that suffered from a broken heart long before a heart attack.

Existential, depressing, hilarious, political, cynical, hopeful, bleak, ugly, beautiful, and a police games that understands the role of the police. Disco Elysium does things that have been missing from the majority of RPGs. Set in a realistic setting that combines elements of different time periods and places to create a fairly grounded cast of characters and a story focused on the human condition and politics of the setting that mirrors real world elements, without a focus on being a chosen hero, forces of darkness, evil monster races, and what little combat there is governed through your skill checks. A focus on understanding, accepting, and letting go of the past to hopefully better yourself while finding hope in a depressing and cynical world.

You are staying in a now destroyed room in the city of Revachol, a broken down city that experienced both a plague and a communist revolution before it was put down and colonized by the rest of the world, you have drank so much and taken so many drugs that you have effectively destroyed your personality and have no recollection of your past, you are told you are a cop and that there has been a body hanging outside for the last week likely connected to the current labor strike.

You are given four stats intellect, psyche, physique, and motorics which each governing six sub skills ranging from your ability to identify with the people you meet and their feelings, your reaction speed for physical reactions as well as witty comebacks, your attunement with the city around you, your ability to picture a crime scene, your ability to have informed hunches and gut feelings, etc. Every skill you have talks to you when you are dealing with people or noticing things in the environment, they can help you make informed decisions, clue you into hidden details, or cause you to make poor and ridiculous decisions. Your Physical Instrument skill might give you impressive muscles and the ability to use them but it also demands that you showcase your masculinity and to let nothing threaten it, Inland Empire might help you correctly see what isn't visable to the naked eye but as shown above it can be less than helpful when your clothing starts offering strange advice to you. Saying certain things or finding out information about people can lead you to having new thoughts, choosing to focus on a thought will give you temporary bonuses and/or penalties and when you have mulled it over long enough the thought will be locked into place with a new description and bonuses and/or penalties fitting your new understanding of the idea and what concepts you want to be important to your character as you rebuild his forgotten personality.

In most games you are rewarded for playing a certain way or for playing in completely different ways as the situation calls for it, giving your character no personality as you game the system. Disco Elyrium's frequently lore expanding or amusing skill anecdotes, the different options for playing your character different ways, and probably most importantly, your skills giving you an actual reason to want or understand the desire to do something you normally wouldn't do makes you want to play the game again as a character with an entirely different stat and skill focus. It is one of the rare games that can make your failure as interesting as your success. Some of the most amusing moments come from failure, some failure just leads to new logical paths to your goal, some failures might change a goal, seemingly minor choices or clothing items might lead to unexpected tasks or responses. Failing to find the cause of death during an autopsy can lead to a side activity to find a freezer big enough to store the body, succeeding in a Suggestion role might give you a task but play into the hands of the person that was hoping you would come up with such a suggestion, failing a Conceptualization role might lead someone to lend you her art supplies out of pity while succeeding causes her to think that you don't have the talent to create your masterpiece and that if you did you would be competition for her, failing to make a cool catch with your Hand Eye Coordination skill might lead to a loss of health buy an apology in the form of pity money. Unlike almost any other RPG, be it just because of how much combat there is or because some skills just have little or no real use, in Disco Elysium there is no right or wrong way to build your character because there is no push to succeed at everything, to do everything, to fix everything, or to help and save everyone, yourself included.

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Full review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/138666/
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1184282384205697024?s=20

One of the few survival style games that really forces you into bad positions not just for yourself but for the game's other characters. You will be prevented from doing everything that you want and saving everyone you want to save, aligning with a game's story where your doctor isn't a savior or representative of a power fantasy but just another player in a town's story. Excellent atmosphere and aesthetic choices with conversation screens, the opening of the game and moments throughout presents the story as a play with the dialogue screen seeming to put the stage light and focus solely on the character you are speaking to. Well written dialogue and translation with an interesting story for the Haruspex character coming home after six years and his struggle between his roots with the native people and recent past pushing him away from those beliefs and discovering his murdered father's role in the town and if and how to succeed him. Makes failure, struggle, and choice meaningful. You won't be able to do everything each day and certain events can be important to the game's completion, only there to give you more details on the town and characters, they might get you useful supplies and items, they might be little more than an interesting distraction, and some side actives might even be harmful to the town or certain characters if completed.

Combat and stealth is poor, but easily exploitable, which makes it more bearable but also a bit ridiculous that some doctor can fight off multiple people often easily. Also a bit unusual that everyone knows it was you if you kill, autopsy, or loot people but that they like you more if you kill surrendering people as long as they attacked first. It can be hard to get into, but the addition of difficulty sliders that cover a lot of different areas can be used while you learn the game, to make aspects you don't enjoy or that the game doesn't handle well more enjoyable, or you could use it to make certain aspects even more difficult than in the base game. The limited amount of time, resources, and stamina you have can make certain aspects much more annoying than they would otherwise be, things like having to take long detours to reach areas in town because you can't just walk on or jump over small fences, rocks, or knee high boxes. With only one of the three playable characters available at this point (or possibly ever) you don't get the full story of the town and some of the supporting cast barely has a role at all in the Haruspex's story.

https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1182560943848378369?s=20

You play as one of the last few Uber style taxis operated by a real person in a near future somewhat cyberpunk setting. Very well written stories that play out with the game's passengers focusing on the gig economy, the main corporations increasing control of the city/police/traffic laws, and the dependence on and disillusionment with living in the current state of the city and the role a person has in it. A bracelet shows your emotional state changed by your dialogue options can effect conversations but rarely in a major way, though the bracelet itself and technology like it do play a more important role in the plot.

Money/ratings are almost mechanically pointless outside of showing how meager your earners are and how quickly your job can be damaged by impossible to please customers, which really doesn't narratively come up much with the story being so focused on the corporation and their AI operated vehicles risking putting you out of work.

This game does share some similarities with the other recently released Noir mystery taxi driver game Night Call. Different artistically, noir vs a cyberpunk aesthetic, both focused on the lives of the people you pick up. I wouldn't really recommend one over the other as they both have some great short stories from the passengers. The main difference being that this has a more linear style compared to all the random events of Night Call (still had never even seen some in multiple playthroughs of that game), less overall events, this has more impact with side character coming into play in the main story, and this lacks the very poor and repeated mystery segments of Night Call. This will give you a better main narrative, while Night Call will give you more events often with just as high of quality but you will also have to deal with a lot more randomness possibly preventing you from finishing stories you want to finish in a given playthrough or even from seeing them at all.

https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1180721222490841089?s=20

Follows a smuggler, assassin, and photographer by jump cutting between them at different times of their stories but out of order from one another. An unsettling looking visual style that looks graphically similar to what you might see on the original Playstation but with an often grimy looking filter, with the atmosphere further improved by the music and sound design. The narrative can be difficult to piece together, more so without finding some hidden or choice based interactions and things are left vague enough where you can only make assumptions about a plot involving (or possibly involving) aliens, hidden facilities, and effected VHS tapes turning people into monsters but everything is done in a way that you can learn and notice things that you missed on a first playthrough (I've both seen and played it outside of my Steam account).

A short interesting game and I hope the developers are able to return to the setting sometime.

Bloodstaind easily delivers as a successor to the metroidvania style Castlevania. The game takes many ideas from a variety of Castlevania titles giving a well made game for fans of that series; wide variety of weapons that can make use of special attacks, learning passive or offensive abilities from each enemy in the game, an ability to invert the environment, secret areas and items needed to get the true ending, characters with story nods that can resemble previous Castlevania characters, etc. The weapon, equipment, and magic variety gives you a lot of ways to play the game with gun focused builds that can be backed up by summoned monsters, shield magics to deflect attacks, weapons with techniques that can even offer you early ways to reach secret areas, craftable weapons with special properties often based off other franchises (like an obvious lightsaber style weapon that has a stun effect), and a wide variety of offensive magic abilities. Some items are even included that effect more than just your stats, such as giving you accessories that will cause the camera to remain zoomed in or out. The castle and outdoor environments are well designed with each section having their own feel to them and accompanying music track and giving you multiple paths to let you decide how to explore. There are some fun enemy designs, including things like mimic chairs that you can sit down on that will proceed to throw you into a pit of spikes or ones that are nods to other games like the Shovel Knights you find in the underground sections. The art and backgrounds received a large improvement in the final phase of the game's design, and while the 3D doesn't always look good it does allow for a couple of the more cinematic attacks some of the bosses can make use of.

Too much time is going to be spent farming enemies if you plan to make use of crafting, preparing food recipes (which is also needed for many side quests), or sometimes even just to see what ability you can eventually absorb from your enemies. As is the problem in all the Castlevania games in this style, you are almost always overpowered and typically massively overpowered if you know what you are doing, and it's more difficult to appreciate all the enemy and boss designs when you can kill some of them before they can typically even do anything or without even bothering to move in the case of some of the bosses. Most of the bosses just aren't that interesting to begin with, either having very limited move-sets or fighting in a very slow and predictable style.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1178092307293229057?s=20

A puzzle game that makes use of documents, applications, and other windows on your computer to solve some of the puzzles. You are initially introduced to a "real" cat like child named Niko as a god that has to help them put a light-bulb representing the world's sun in place to help revive a dying world while trying to send the child back to their home and world. A second playthrough changes the story, introduces new characters, and gives both you and Niko the real story of the world and your interactions with it. Does an excellent job creating the relationship between yourself and Niko.

https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1099933175764008960?s=20

Children of Morta is hack and slash game with that takes places throughout eight main stages and three smaller story focused areas with the central family of character attempting to fight back the corruption of the land stemming from an angry god. Beautiful artwork that can quickly go from horrific and eerie to warm and inviting. Six characters that are unique to play with runes to be found in dungeons that effect how their attacks perform, further separating them. Outside of story events the house/hub areas has a lot of character building moments from seeing what each member of the family is thinking, seeing them live their lives, and seeing the houses filled with the souvenirs of their adventures. They might gather to eat a meal or play a board game, train together, the largest son carries around the youngest on his shoulders, oldest daughter has her hair brushed by her mom or might be sitting on her bed playing her violin, character will comment on the side events that you can run into in the dungeons, etc. The base gameplay is enjoyable and fast paced with the different characters likely stopping you from replaying similar areas to gather more money and experience. Side events can be found in the randomly generated dungeons that have you meeting new characters, fighting with another family member, collecting scrolls to learn more of the games world, or possibly an events that will gain you future members of the households. While it is primarily going to be a single player game (two player local co-op is available, with no one to try that with I have no idea how that would be balanced) each character eventually unlocks an ability where they can briefly spawn in to help the controlled family member during certain situations (block fatal damage, knock back enemies when surrounded, etc) which was a nice way to feel like they are fighting together.

There is a fairly limited number of enemy types. Each of the eight main areas of the game has four floors to them, three larger sections followed by a boss room. The eight stages are broken up into three different areas of the world with some unique enemies and hazards but some are still reused, some are never present in the earlier stages, and even with all of them their just isn't much variety. Even the powered up enemies you occasionally run into just have the same bonuses of having more health, spawning enemies, or dropping AoE attacks from the sky to stun you. Each character has what will end up being an extremely linear skill tree, by the time I beat the fairly short game I hadn't even ♥♥♥♥♥♥ any of the six characters to reach their final two abilities by hitting level 20. The game makes for a poor roguelike even though it in many ways seems to be set up to be one and is descried as a roguelite. It prevents you from going any further than three floors and a boss, there is no penalty for death, you will find randomized buffs, runes, and abilities but some of these are so uninteresting or so poor for certain characters that you are able to do little more than hope you get what fits your character and playstyle with your run being over so quickly or you finding so many of them that it won't mean much, and the layout of the floors is randomized but will be populated by the same enemy and hazard types.

While the story and character moments in the game is often on the stronger side, the finale of the game gives you terrible reasoning for your antagonist's actions followed by a poor and very easy boss fight. The endgame is made worse by your character likely just being too powerful for any of the dungeons to really pose any challenge, and seeing as I had only hit level 17 with my strongest characters it could only get easier.

A fun and beautiful looking game while it lasts that ends on a fairly dull note and doesn't have much to get you to come back to it when a lot of similar styled games would give you reason to keep playing. Maybe this will be improved with future updates or if new content is added as the game seems to be selling quite well.

Edit: Has had some updates and free content since I last played, should only have made an already good game better.

https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1175627370620809218?s=20