I think the concept of this game is very cool, become a super weapon and stack synergies. For an auto battler it is woefully lacking. You become too strong too quickly, and the order of your skills hardly matters, once you stack 16 skills and have 1 tribe maxed (the auto execute one) the game plays itself, not in a good way. The items you can grab in addition to the skills are ok, they don't have exciting effects. I think worst of all is the battle space is massive but you're just one guy, and don't influence anything during battle, so its just watching this guy either merk everything or die for a minute every battle.

The dev's last game, astronarch, was infinitely replayable because there were like 18 classes with different passive and active effects that could receive upgrades. I don't see myself playing through all the acensions or replaying to figure out better synergies/skill orders. This game lacks impactful, interesting decisions to make your character uniquely powerful. hopefully the dev refines the gameplay to make it meaningfully difficult, and maybe add more characters to fight alongside you.

Wishlisted the game, then purchased when available. Upon first glance, combat looked fun.

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EDITED REVIEW: after beating game 2nd time on 2nd try (difficulty +1) w/ unlocked character. :/
Knowing the game better, I was able to steamroll through it (94 minutes), while leaving to do chores. Like i said, earlier, get rid of Origin skills asap. I NEVER rerolled skills a single time in either of my play throughs (dev remove this feature & give more crystals, instead).

On this playthrough, i avoided Jotun skills because the tribal bonus is functionally useless, & instead maxed Vitran (so every skill hits everything, then the lizard one [starts with an S] for reduced time). This recipe allowed me to murder everything with nothing coming close to hurting me. Once I got my 16 skills, I never lost a single HP and had about 50% shield at the end of every battle. Every skill unlocked except for x3, all characters unlocked: ZERO replayability. Game is fun, just unrealistically easy...like middle-schooler easy.

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Original Review:
...Game is...WONKY, to say the least. Tons of stuff to read, while I wasn't really sure what I was doing the entire run. I managed to beat the game my 1st playthrough (never a good sign), NEVER having used a single purple HP. My hardest battle was the tutorial one which said he believed I would lose (almost did).

Game is easy because you don't spend any crystals on skills, but instead load up on passive purchases from the merchant, while trying to remove your origin skills (don't tribal up). On my 1st playthrough, I unlocked 90% of every skills + an extra character. While having only x2 characters to earn, +90% of skills learned, gives this game almost ZERO replayability.

What *IS* interesting though, is that you create a super complicated 16-skill combo while trying to perfect the chain. I always managed to beat EVERY battle by the 11th skill, so I never got to see at least 4 of the skills in my line up (including the final boss).

Do I recommend this game? Heck no. There's not much to do, it's pretty confusing--even with a tutorial, and the stupid tutorial NEVER even explained energy--which is the most confusing part of the game. I will play the game ONE more time to unlock the last character, then uninstall it because there's ZERO replayability other than increasing difficulty. Increasing difficulty is pointless when there's nothing left to earn (to make one want to play a short game).

For $4.99 Vampire Survivors gives at least 100-hours of exciting play. For $3 more, this game's dev kicks you in the balls, rolls you down a hill, laughs at the cow dung on your shirt, then calls you a Puff because you paid premium for a hollow shell. If you still want to support the dev, tell him to stop making videogames.

Played the developers other roguelike Astronarch and found it fun. Both are easy recommends and worth the modest prices. Believe it's a solo developer and both have been impressive releases that lean into very specific identities.

Primarch takes longer to get in the groove and be able to play quickly compared to most roguelikes, but it's really good once it starts clicking and you're spending less time reading tooltips and more time intuitively making choices around the different synergies / what you want in your build / what you don't want. A lot of tooltip text to read, but some roguelikes are poor about providing detailed information about your skills/items/etc, so it's appreciated. Reading some other reviews this is a common point of criticism, I talk about the UI later.

More characters, spells being tied to each character so they actually feel unique, and more items as well as talents would go a long way in solidifying this as a must buy roguelike that you can get an endless amount of hours out of. I hope there will be continued support, I don't think the developers other game received a significant amount after the 1.0 release, but you still got plenty of hours out of it when considering the cost.

At the time of my review the game released into EA 18 days ago. Considering the early state of the game, the build variety is large, there can be talents or relics that really benefit from thinking on how to select synergistic spells. Energy is also this tug of war that you have to manage, generating and then spending similar to a rogue's combo points. Some builds can even focus on amassing energy and not spending at all.

I think the current selection of events is good, but sometimes it feels like the path I'm choosing is entirely dependent on the special events available and I don't want to strategically play around the type of tribe encounters or spell elements because the special events can be so strong. Balance feels kind of weird, low level corruptions (modifiers that increase difficulty each time you clear a run) feel hard to fail even if you don't make the best decisions as long as you have enough of an understanding to grasp the basic systems at play. High level corruptions require very good synergy across your relics / talents / spells (if you don't cheese) but sometimes it's hard to tell if your build is strong or not. You'll be doing fine then just start hard losing very quickly. The sweet spot I've found if you're not abusing the strategy of having an extremely low number of spells (believe this will be nerfed) is having 10 spells. Around the time the run is over (3 areas + a final boss) is when you'll have 2 fusions into each of your spells, with a healthy amount of aether spent at the shop to ensure good synergy or a ton of talents.

UI definitely needs some work. There's many different statuses / effects / etc. going on with your character but then enemies as well. Yes you can slow combat down and spend more active time monitoring the flow of combat, but I feel energy/hp/shield and buffs/debuffs applied to both yourself and enemies could be displayed better somehow so it's less working against the UI and more passively observing. I feel like most information comes from directly hovering/clicking tooltips, which doesn't feel great when some stages are over with very quickly. It contributes to it being tough to tell what's going on. It would also be nice if you can somehow make it clearer how specific effects would be enhanced by your relics / talents / spells when you're making selections, so identifying synergies is more intuitive.