Recent reviews by CritChanceZero

1/17/25:

TL;DR: Fun but has a lot of problems, Needs an insane amount of time in the oven. Most likely released too early, Very brutal early game, Laughably easy 'late' game, Small team could lead to very slow updates and balancing. The game will eventually be great, but perhaps it will be too late.

The game right now, is not even close to being ready for even an early access release. This sounds harsh but if you don't believe me, this EA didn't even launch with options to change most of the graphics settings. A hotfix addressed this not long after release but keep that in mind when reading this.

I don't doubt this game will eventually be great. But with the development team being as small as it is, there is an insane amount work ahead of them with how the game is now. The only real reasons I see to buy this game now is if you have faith in Heart Machine and don't mind supporting them very early, want an early start to exploit the insanely unbalanced stats to power farm for later content, you want hyper light drifter which is currently bundled with the game as of writing this, or if you just really like Roguelikes. Here are some major points, I'll keep it short.

- Loot durability. This is going to be very polarizing. Basically any time your time wipes, the gear you have on loses 'durability' pips. Once these pips lose all durability, the weapon or gear is gone for good. Personally I don't mind the idea too much as it adds stakes to the game. But you can already guess how that mechanic in an EA title can get iffy right now.

- The balancing is all over the place right now. There is currently NO difficulty scaling difference between multiplayer and solo gameplay. Noting that, the beginning of this game is very brutal and you can expect to die and lose gear very often starting off. Even with 2 allies. Very frustrating. Yet if you can power through and give it about 8 solid hours, level up your character, upgrade your shop, get medkits, you can be in a position to one-shot any boss with just a minor amount of build knowledge. It's ludicrous. Some of the gear your can get in this game can carry you on their own.

- lacking tutorial. There's a lot of fundamentals/important knowledge the game wont teach you or start you with. Things like your hoverboard negating all fall damage, you need an upgrade to be able to start converting plants to medkits, the fact that you can even convert plants to medkits, or that when reviving with medkits it fully heals your ally and also heals you a portion as well, the fact that you can revive at shrines, floating on water with your hoverboard, the cost to start a new cycle is a percentage of your current banked blood (money/currency), OR the fact that for whatever reason they decided to make Purple rarity rank higher than Orange rarity in this game. it goes on. There are good guides that are up now to help with this thankfully.

- iffy performance The game is somewhat unoptimized. It starts smooth on 3080ti but after about 2 runs I drop from 70+ to around 30-40. For me It's not usually very bad, but in a game where precise movements and timing are important, you will notice.

- comms are also lacking. There's no text or voice chat in this game yet. Pings aren't color coded to the player so you won't know who's pinging what in multiplayer. Map pings don't show up for other players. Pings on enemies don't 'stick' so it won't track their movements.

- Bugs. They're around and they can range from slightly annoying to run ending. There's a bug right now for the warrior subclass for Lapis where you can't fully upgrade her armor no matter how many cores you have. Annoying but not bad. But all the day one players will tell you the worst bug was when your primary weapon would get deleted after any run no matter the result, win or lose. Thankfully this was removed almost immediately. But that's the kind of range you should be weary of.

That's everything I can think of right now. I understand early access is here to help with the development process, I really understand that. But it's not crazy to speculate that financials have something to do with such an early release. Especially since this is one of the few games that are self published by Heart Machine.

Just know going in that this is almost pre-early access. But the gameplay has very good foundation so just let it cook.

We're so back.