I fully co-opped Hammerwatch before (their previous game), so I started this one with a smile. I picked a Rogue and... was immediately disappointed. Hitboxes are way too precise, and the aim marker, well, isn't. My mate played as a Witchhunter, and his bolts had a wobbly flight line that covered a wider angle, so he didn't have to aim as precisely as I did. Why? Nobody knows. I kinda liked playing the Thief, though the grappling hook not letting me bypass puzzles was straight-up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

It's buggy. Adding mods on top of that makes it a full-on roulette, e.g. I once became immortal for no apparent reason, and we had to restart the entire playthrough to get rid of it. Playing without mods, on the other hand, is a grind. Therefore, some quality-of-life ones are a must. For instance, when you die, you lose all your money and ore unless you find an elevator and send them to the town... but for whatever reason, the elevator takes a tax (which makes no sense other than to prolong your grind). Fortunately, there's a "No Tax" mod. Unfortunately, playing with mods blocks some achievements.

Save yourself a headache and play the native build. Running through Proton randomly crashes every 2-3 hours.

It's playable, but not visually optimized for the small screen. It does have amazing battery life (you can turn the TDP down to 5 Watts and downclock the GPU all the way to 400 MHz, and it'll still run at a smooth 90 fps), but playing on a 40" screen made a day-and-night difference. Suddenly, I could evade 99% of projectiles and notice secrets with ease. Controls were awesome on both the Steam Controller (2015) and the Deck, but on keyboard+mouse they required some tweaking (with defaults you e.g. can't charge up some abilities while walking a certain direction, etc).

Super fun!

I love the way the progression works, your town has a progression as well as each of your characters. That means that if you play your first character up to lvl 5 for example, and get some town unlocks, when you switch to a new character you're still in that same town with its unlocks.

You earn money by sending it to town as you traverse through the mines. If you die with all your money before sending any back, you get nothing from the run. When you find a spot to send money back, it tells you the percentage you'll be taxed, and this amount is random. This gives you reason to take the risk of running around with a lot of money if the spot you find has too high a tax rate.

No equipment or anything to deal with like a typical dungeon crawler. This is super nice for quick and easy gameplay, while having just enough depth with each character and their skills to provide interesting and engaging gameplay. Any items you find or buy have an effect that is applied the moment you pick it up, and most items are part of a set, which makes builds scale up nicely when you start piecing sets together.

Fun solo or with friends!

A great action rogue-like RPG that is even better with friends. Lots of types of classes to get, and a fun dungeon system where you can save your earnings, if there is a mining shaft. Highly recommended.