Recent reviews by Geodew ت

Very great, solid base game, but I have some complaints. One or two abilities don't match the description, leading to some confusion. There are also a few typos, and while the core game runs well, I encountered a lot of bugs in the post-game content (which is all I can say spoiler-free).

Game designer perspective time: I also feel like the game focuses too much on DPS for a game that's ostensibly supposed to be about healing. I felt like the only viable endgame builds focused mostly on DPS with one or two healing items to get the required HPS. Otherwise, fights would take 10+ minutes and you run out of Mana or make a fatal mistake. I feel like DPS and HPS need to be entirely separated, or at least mostly separated, so I can have fun optimizing both instead of having to choose, but that would probably require re-tuning almost every boss's HP and damage. It seems like that's what the weapon slots vs accessory slots are for at first, but then you start getting weapons that heal and (especially) accessories that improve damage, and that loses most of its meaning. Separating these would also allow tighter boss tuning since you would have a much better idea of how long the boss should take to kill vs amount of damage the boss should do. I think right now the former is too high and the latter is too low (the party would need more max HP too to take more damage, or else lower boss damage and healing together to have the same effect; endgame healing as Occultist or Paladin is already very spiky). This forces the player to focus on DPS over HPS almost entirely. That's why I feel like they need to be separated. They're fighting with each other too much, to the gameplay's detriment. Of note is that this also encouraged me to dual-spec into some Occultist for all 3 other healer classes, since that tree provides the most damage.

And of course, there's also the matter of the reportedly-brokenly-strong Rapture build, which intrinsically gets the best of both worlds (basically, Healing *is* Damage).

So while I would've designed it differently, it's clear it was almost to the finish line. It needs some polish for a 1.0 release, but I still had a great time. Replayed it with "maining" all 4 healer specs.

8.5/10

P.S. If the dev sees this: You have a bug where bosses will sometimes stop auto-attacking. It's very noticeable and frustrating when doing a Shield Bash build. It seems it can happen on a lot of different bosses, possibly all of them, but it seems to happen most often for bosses that cast a lot of spells. Casting another spell sometimes restarts auto-attacks. Good luck figuring it out!

I recommend playing the first Hades game if you haven't, before purchasing this one. But I feel like at this point, the Hades series needs no introduction. Having a lot of fun with it, anyway! It has enough new stuff to feel like a proper sequel, not just like, a big DLC or something.

- Crashed while compiling shaders on first boot. Literally had not even pressed a single button yet. Second boot worked.
- Several minutes of no-music menu-ing at the start, where it makes you configure, was a weird vibe.
- Really bad stuttering during tutorial area (prison), but improved over time. This was with the default settings that the game chose for my machine. No changes at all. People have been complaining about FPS, but it's not about the FPS counter, which measures a mean average. It's the inconsistency of it, which causes very-noticeable visual stuttering like once per second while the counter in the corner still reads "59." Bullcrap, lol.
- About half of the stuttering WAS during firefights, which is completely unacceptable for a shooter.
- Replaying the tutorial stage with another character led to less stuttering, so it must've been something to do with first-time loads.
- It seems to me they were relying on AI frame generation to hide their stuttering issues, but it's not enough because the optimization is so bad. I had lots of stuttering even with it enabled.
- I could not even run the game on low graphics without stuttering if I disable the AI frame generation.
- The game is not nearly visually-impressive enough to warrant the stuttering and poor graphic performance.
- This amount of stuttering makes me afraid to continue. I don't want to e.g. die because it came down to my machine stuttered and I couldn't pull off a kill while I was on my last legs already. That would be outstandingly frustrating.
- I may repurchase the game if they prove they can listen to customers and fix their stuttering issues.

Edit: Don't bother reading the canned dev response; it's not specific to my review at all. Look, I shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to play a $70 game. It runs like garbage on default settings, and I use a common video card. Enough said.

Not story-focused like Hades, but basically co-op Hades. Very similar gameplay, usually very fair telegraphs, good character kit designs.

I mean, just look at that trailer. The feature to automatically populate rooms with appropriate objects is very cool. Party unexpectedly going to a tavern next session? You could make a great looking tavern in 30 minutes. Want to create something bespoke? You can do that too. The Roll20 export script resizes the Roll20 page to the correct size, resizes the image to the right size, then adds lights, walls, doors, and windows to the lighting layer. This software has saved me so much time GMing making maps at least three times as good as I was doing before. Really looking forward to seeing what they do with the multiple-layers patch upcoming.

So, my biggest complaint is that the game is a bit too random, sometimes forcing you to have dud runs. Skill also can't mitigate the randomness very much. IMO the hallmark of a good roguelike is one where you can overcome the randomness with skill every time (See: Hades), but a few times, it felt like a run died and there was nothing I could do about it, which felt like a waste of my time because I made no meta-progress. Maybe not the best format for a puzzle game, but it's an innovative take on things, definitely.

On the bright side, it got way more content than it first appears. Give it a few runs to see what I mean. There are lots of well-thought-out puzzles of varying difficulty that will keep you, well, puzzling for hours. The puzzles get pretty intense in the post-credits, which might be good or bad for you, but you can always stop playing at the credits. It's good about leaving a satisfying ending at credits and then only if you do another run is it like "but wait, there's more!"

Overall, I'm having a fun time with it, but there were a couple runs where I almost stopped playing because the randomness can get frustrating and feel like a waste of time. I would only recommend this for people who are already fans of puzzle games. You'll also enjoy it more if you can muster a bit of patience, and I say this as someone who has patience in spades.

Decided to try this despite the mixed reviews at launch, and was very happy with my purchase.

People complained specifically about melee and how you "can't move while melee-ing anymore," and I wanted to see what the big deal was. Actually, melee-ing moves you towards the nearest enemy if they're relatively close, and it almost never locks onto an enemy I didn't mean to hit (playing as Kalos if that matters). My friend tried the other melee hero, Sophie, and had a similar experience. She can home in on enemies from even farther away. It's not as fluid as OMD3, but it's less fluid on purpose. It means you need to commit to entering the fray, and can't just kite enemies, swinging while backpedaling. I like it, personally. My friend and I ended up using Kalos and Sophie through the whole game. (We're going to play more and try more characters, but we've beaten all the bosses as of this review.) It made fliers challenging (though Sophie has throwing knives), but that was part of the challenge and fun for us. (Fliers fly low enough that Kalos can attack fliers; it's just a lot of running around.)

People were also complaining about barricades, but my experience with OMD3 was always that barricades were too expensive for Wave 1, and so Wave 1 always had really few enemies and was either boring or the hardest wave of the stage. Kinda anti-climactic. Now they give you a bunch of free barricades to start off each level, and post-launch added a special expensive barricade that buffs adjacent traps too. It makes the difficulty of each stage ramp up much more smoothly. So I liked this change too.

My only negative is that, the stages in Deathtrap are re-used in rogue-lite fashion, so they made them playable in multiple ways. The problem with so much space, though, is that it feels like a lot of space in these levels is impractical for most traps, because your starting barricades isn't that high, so a lot of the trap-placeable area goes unused in most maps. Without barricades to funnel enemies, there's no point in placing most traps out in the open like that. (I experimented with using the poison cloud flower in these areas, but it seems underpowered.)

Really though, "the stage design isn't perfect" is just a minor nitpick for how fun this game is. Definitely recommend. Just keep an open mind and don't expect it to be a clone of OMD3.

Was having such a good time in co-op that I made my own solo game and we/I beat both runs.

Reminds me of XCOM 2, but there's no randomness (complimentary) and no enemies jumping out of fog of war to ruin your tactics (which was also frustrating about XCOM 2 to me; the hardest difficulty wasn't even fun). If you haven't played XCOM 2, think tactics shooter RPG (cover system, abilities, etc.). On top of that, the dialogue in this game is excellent.

It's fun, but the crashes on modern machines are pretty frequent. At least it usually lets us finish the level and then crashes immediately after saving our progress... So we can progress through the story ok, but it's annoying lol