Recent reviews by Prime_Evil

Sunk enough hours into this to feel worthy of giving it a review.
The game is 2 parts really, the original tabletop campaign and a new Guildmaster mode which is just a series of sandboxes that you can build a party up working through.
This is a game of two standards also, the campaign is exceptional, it is faithful to the tabletop and works really well, very few faults found so far with good art and only one minor bug found in 30+ hours, 9/10 from me.

Then you have the guildmaster mode which is .... bad. And I say that very sadly because it had a lot of potential, but all it is, really, is kill all enemies in a few rooms or suvive X turns in one room. It feels like an intern was given free reign to design these, and it is doubly sad because the mechanics behind unlocking features via achievements works really well, combined with some great art. IF they had put ANY effort at all into making the scenarios interesting then this would have been a great mode, as it stands it is a 3/10 at best.

The online mode is not something that I have played or intend to play, I play tabletop with friends, this was intended as a solo experience for me, I have read however that the multiplayer is average at best.

In the end I can recommend this easily if you just want the tabletop campaign in a digital format, its great! But do not expect anything at all from the other mode.

I cant recommend this yet, it just doesn't feel finished. It looks good, and some of the characters play quite well. The single player game works well and seems to be fairly bug free (single player), the down-side is this just doesn't have the long term character development of something like Hades, you level up long-term but only to unlock new trait options and skins, you never actually get more powerful in any noticeable permanent way, so it is very much a rogue-like and not a rogue-lite.

The amount of progression also makes no sense at all, i can start a map, do one grimoir and quit, maybe get 100 score in 3 minutes, or i can spend an hour completing the whole 3 maps and get only 400-500 score, it does not feel at all rewarding to progress.
There are also huge balance issues between classes and with some game systems, like mini-bosses are often much harder than end of level bosses which makes no sense.

The online experience is unplayable unless you have a pre-made team.
In public multiplayer.... IF the game actually starts, which it often doesn't, then you have to hope that someone doesn't disconnect because the whole team seems to be booted. There is no way to reconnect to a game, often the levels freeze up or enemies just disappear and the world becomes empty until you get booted or you just quit.
When selecting characters for multiplayer it just drops anyone into the game regardless of character chosen, so what ends up happening is people with duplicate characters (you cant have multiple of the same in a game) just leave instead of re-selecting, the system should only join you to a game that doesn't already have your chosen character.
The other issue is when someone joins and immediately presses ready to start the game when you want to wait for a full team which starts a 30 second timer, at the end of that 30 seconds if the team members have not all selected ready then the team just disbands and you have to go through it all again, you find yourself in this loop again and again trying to get a 4 player game.
What I am saying is, this multiplayer is only good for pre-made teams, anything random is just a waste of time 99% of the time.

It has promise, but it isn't ready yet despite being out of early release.

I played this from very early beta, I didn't put a lot of time in because it just didn't feel good then and they were ignoring mass feedback right from the get-go, so I knew the end result would be this, unsurprisingly it still doesn't feel good now. Roll on to EA release and really nothing feels like it has changed, all of the same gripes that people including myself had in the beta forums were left in such as the terrible mobile art-style and goofy fortnight style characters which just make the game a bit of a joke. There is no discernible writing for the story, animations are clunky and this makes play feel laggy, music is nothing to write home about but not terrible. Units are basically copied from other games and not well designed even despite that.
The 3p coop just isnt as fun as sc2's 2p coop, sadly, was worth a try but they were told early that it didn't feel great and stuck with it.
The hybrid wc3/sc2 style may work for some but for me, as a long time fan and player of both, the middle ground just doesn't work, It needed to be one or the other.
Tldr, they were told by just about everyone from the start that they were making mistakes but stubbornly stuck with the direction, now they have an unpolished, ugly mobile looking cartoon that is monetised to the hilt with content that is years from being ready.

I hope that they can turn it around but I think that at this point, there is almost no chance.

Pretty good, not as deep as some of the other horde games and lacking content compared to some but it has a level of polish that many don't.

Average game but not supported and never was, achievements are broken and rarely ever award. completed multiple times and eagle eye still never ever pops despite never skipping a ho. Nothing erks me more than achievements not working.

This is not torchlight in any way, shape or form. Port of a mobile game, plays like a freemium mobile game, looks like one. Stuffed with Micro-transactions. Avoid like the plague.

Great game, played the original when I was younger and this upscale holds up really well to this day, it looks great and the mapping controls have been transferred to mouse/keyboard really well. Leaving this review as I finish the final boss on expert and ding that last achievement. Hoping so much for them to release the other games in the series.

Caution: game crashes a LOT if you run duel monitors, disabling second monitor solves this mostly, although tabbing can just crash the game too. Apart from the frequent crashes and frequent loss of progress, the game holds up well after all these years, the narrative is good, the music is excellent, the animation of the main character is a bit jerky but overall the game looks great. Controls are iffy at times and do not always do what you expect but you get used to how they play and eventually end up compensating. I have had a good time with it, you can certainly feel how elements of this wound up in Hades.

Although I chose dislike over like, it is not a terrible game and will appeal to an audience looking for a very silly and simple game that holds your hand throughout, it is simply a big step backwards from the great first game with some very questionable design choices.

Overall the Visuals are better but the camera angle is something I dislike compared to the first game. Having a forced AI companion was not at any point enjoyable for me, I never felt the need to swap and truthfully it simply made me feel like half a character and intentionally under-powered in my main character by design with a bad ai that took no damage being in the way, being able to turn it off and just having the second character for story scenes would have been much better for me.
Adding ground spikes to dungeons was tediously implemented, all it ever did was force me to stop every time and wait, it was never a challenge that was at all fun and just felt like padding to slow players down.
Basic enemies now regularly shooting out un-telegraphed small projectiles made it so that any melee experience is taking damage that is all but unavoidable. This could have been avoided by simply putting out a visual telegraph before they fire.
Having wands in the game for ranged play is a great idea but doesn't really work, as the enemies chase you down with great speed regardless meaning you are only ever running away constantly firing pot-shots, with the roll/avoid command often rolling you in the opposite direction that you press, often directly into an enemy or its attack.

The story took the fun sillyness of the first game that embraced the cat puns but turned it up to not just the next level but 10x levels above, forcing in a cat or dog pun with almost every line of text, or at least it felt that way, it very quickly became annoying to the point where I ignored all text by about an hour in, I never felt that way in the first game.

About 7 hours in and I am struggling to bring myself to play anymore. I may revisit in the future but at present I would much rather revisit the first game which was superior in almost every way.

Looks pretty good, play is fluid, good amount of options and customisation, End game has some depth, really like how you have skill tree's for skills.
Very buggy even at "release", voice acting is bad, systems do not explain themselves well and you have to follow online guides to understand how to play the game systems when they should be better informed as part of the story, No game achievements, levels are bland... partly because the story is glossed over and poorly written, you just feel like you are going from one slightly different map to the next for the sake of getting to the endgame. BIG maps, but nothing exciting in them, so many dead ends, why are there not little events in some of these spaces, or at least far more quests to give people reason to explore space.

Bosses ..... I dont get it, its like they forced uber lilith into the game loop, on one hand you have a smooth power fantasy arpg where you feel strong and can kill thousands of elites, then you roll up into a boss that one hit kills you because you have to learn the mechanics .... its like a separate game that is nothing like the base game that you are forced to do, I didnt die once in 56 levels then I hit Lagon and died in one hit 10 times in a row. I pretty much didnt want to play again after that.

Lots of potential for improvement and certainly one of the better arpg's (bosses asside) out there but currently not really ready for full release, particularly with the huge number of bugs still in the game. Big problem for me is no achievements in the game so I wont be replaying.