There are countless 2D roguelites, but there are few decent 3D roguelites. This game takes up unfilled niche and does what it does fairly well. I do hope that developers will continue on improving the game, because in many ways, it is still an amateurish mess.
Place of discussions and of full review:
Calicifer’s Reviews
The Tavern
You are sitting in the tavern as one of several characters, each modelled after an animal. Your goal is to stop Arthas Bear from destroying the space crystals. In your way you will be fighting bandits, possessed statues, wild animals and UFOs. As you can guess, it is a game which does not take itself seriously. Gameplay is king here. How it plays?
In this game, the greater importance is given to an individual skill. It is more of an old school shooter where your movement and ability to dodge enemy attacks are most important. In this rogue-lite, organic shooters skill is the king rather than items which you get. The opposite rogue-lite would be Risk of Rain 2 where it is more important to get good items rather than to play well. In a same way, items which you get in this game are mostly irrelevant.Empowering your character with new found talents
- Talents are also in a same boat. There isn’t much in terms of building your character. Each character has a fixed talent tree. At every stage you get one or two talent points. You can choose one out of free talents out of fairly big talent tree. There is no way to change or to re-roll choices you get. This results in a game where you do not have to think what you should take as options are very limited.
Never Ending Wheel of Improvement - There is a nice mastery tree in this game where you spend in game currency to unlock additional features and power in game. Tree does not get grindy and it allows you to improve something after every run. In addition, to unlock more power for your heroes. When you finish with your mastery tree, unspent currency is used in a special game mode where you can buy enchantments for that run which positively alters how game is played. I only wish that mastery tree would have more subtlety. Buying merchant upgrades are great, buying straight up power increase is terrible. It makes me feel like my skill at a game is less relevant than my character level.
Foes and Challenges which you shall face - Gameplay and bosses are fair. There isn’t any cheap enemy spawning behind you. There aren’t any impossible to dodge attacks. Bosses also are very tame and fair. Everything they throw at you can be learned to counter and when you do, bosses which previously had given you trouble become trivial. However, these easy bosses can quickly kill you if you become too cocky and start ignoring their mechanics.
What this game needs to do better
As good as this game is, it is down due to the base gameplay loop. Everything else is quite flawed and could be done better in so many ways. Talents
- There is nothing you can do to pivot your build towards one or other direction. Game has no system in place to reroll talents. This results in some runs being horrible build wise as game fails to deliver talents you want or talents you chose, resulting in second level being completed without any single talent being maxed out. Due to pure RNG nature, sometimes you feel helpless and can’t do nothing at all in making meaningful build options.
Occult scrolls - The issue with occult scrolls is that colour coding in them is completely pointless. Some white scrolls are better than legendary scrolls and vice versa. There is no power relation to colour. This creates an issue where systems where you cannot make a system where you could pick scroll rarity. If cursed chest gives you an option to pay more for better rarity scroll, that is barely meaningful, because there is no guarantee that you will get anything better even excluding occult specific downsides.
Obtuse information - This game does not give you any specifics. How much damage your weapon does? That is in game, but anything past is hidden. How many modifiers I have? When they activate? How much damage I can deal? How much damage my scrolls due when they activate?
Hitboxes, hitboxes and more hitboxes - Poor hitboxes seem to be a bane of poor teams who are developing 3D games. This is no exception there. Most weakpoints are fine, however others are so small and poorly placed that you are wondering if it is even possible to hit them reliably with skill. Some enemies like Giant Beetle has such small eyes that it is just pixel hunting. Others like Horse-heads have their weakspots at the back of their necks for some reason. Other times like during last boss fight, there are boss recharging stations. They have no weakspots which completely ruins pure sniper builds, because without a weakspot, you cannot destroy them in time.
Lost in Translation - This game is done by a Honk Kong team and it shows. They had translated game, but it is poorly translated. Some sentences do not quite make sense. Other times it is difficult to understand what they are talking about. They often choose unpopular words which native speaker would not use. Translation could be done better and hopefully team will get a professional translator for a possible sequel.
Pointless Weapon Upgrading - In this game you are supposed to replace your weapons per level as you go. However, game also has money system where you can exchange gold to upgrade your weapons. Why? To improve them? Yes, but you barely improve them. You can upgrade your favourite weapon through levels and be significantly higher level than what game drops you and it will still do underwhelming damage. Worse, it is not inscription faults. Each level drops inherently stronger weapon and your 15 lvl weapon will be significantly inferior to 10 lvl weapon.
In a same way, there isn’t enough opportunities to modify inscriptions on your weapons. You must rely on getting good inscriptions first and then think about upgrading your weapon. However, as we just established, even if you get good inscriptions, it still does not matter as later levels have vastly superior statistics to anything you could get early on.
Confusing Status Triggers - This game needs to do less with whacky and inconsistent status effects. Having overt 9000% chance to trigger status effect does not make me feel powerful. It makes me confused. I actually think about how something can have over 100% chance to happen. Please, don’t do that stupid Asian stuff with overblown and illogical statistics.
Graphics on a Budget - Game is quite ugly to look at. First level in particular as a lot seem to be a placeholder for an early access game. Later levels become more pretty, but still, a lot of enemies are just plain out plain. Horse-head is a best example, it barely appears to have its textures. Environment is similarly devoid of details and textures. This makes me all the more disappointed with the terrible optimisation this game has. It has nothing to render, but eats GPU resources like a champ!
Is it worth visiting this tavern?
I did enjoyed playing this game. Its mechanics are tight and it is enjoyable to play. However, inexperience of a development team shows. Lack of competition shows. This game needs a sequel which would be bigger and better in every way. It is a nice, simple and well made game which plays great, has its own charm and it is easy recommend to anyone.