Recent reviews by Erithom

If anything about "isometric hack-'n-slash roguelite" appeals to you, you should play this game.

- The controls are simple and responsive with only four different buttons you need in combat other than movement. Despite their simplicity, they make comboing and animation-canceling satisfying. The gameplay is fast-paced and provides a lot of room for skill expression.

- There's a wide variety of weapons which all bring something unique to the table; no two of them feel the same. Most of them feel good to use, too, with clean attack animations and clear hitboxes. The exception for me is Exagryph, which I think feels kind of clunky because of how long you're locked into the attack animation, and it lacks stagger on hit. It's still fun, though, and I can just avoid using it because you're never required to pick a certain weapon.

- There are plenty of different enemies, which all have their own strengths while feeling fair to fight. It's easy to tell most of the enemy types apart, other than a few that are palette-swaps.

- The powerup choices given to players during escape attempts are meaningful and diverse. The boon system is intuitive and pairs well with the weapons, and Daedalus hammers provide interesting playstyle changes. Some boons are clearly stronger than others (looking at you, deflect dash), but there's usually some situation or synergy that can make a boon worth taking.

- The metagame progression feels nice, too. Mirror upgrades and keepsakes are powerful and diverse (if you haven't noticed yet, the theme of this review is "options, options, options"), but you don't need to grind for all of them to escape the Underworld. I also like the dynamic difficulty settings from the Pact of Punishment.

- The sound design is excellent. The sound effects are distinct and make it easy to track what's happening, and the music pulls together the whole "Greek mythology with a touch of modern aesthetic" theme.

- The cast of characters is memorable, if a bit cliche, but that's par for the course with mythology. Yahtzee said in his Zero Punctuation review that the voice acting "sounds like it's all coming from very sexy people," which I think is dead-on--at first I found the soft and occasionally oddly sultry way that some of the characters speak to be a little weird, but it's definitely unique and contributes to the somewhat-moody, fire-lit atmosphere and charm. I'm still playing the game long after the credits have rolled to see what happens in the characters' subplots (even though I already learned in school how most of them go).

- decorating the house is fun and Cerberus needs all the toys I can buy don't @ me

Overall, this game is great and I only have a few gripes with it. Co-op is the only thing I feel is really missing, but with how tight the gameplay is, I can understand not wanting to compromise that with netcode. There's so much content in this game and all of it fits together into a cohesive and entertaining experience. I recommend this game.

It's a good idea and it's fun if you can get to the part where you actually play the game, but the learning curve is far too steep and failure is punished to a degree that simply isn't fun.

My big problem with this game is how the levels start: you have a minimal army and a completely open base, and you can barely see anything. You need to constantly patrol the borders of your base until you have enough spare resources for walls. If even a single zombie makes it to your houses, the attack snowballs to an unbeatable size within five to ten seconds because your buildings turn into zombie spawners when their first health bar is depleted. (Coincidentally, the first health bar is smaller than the second and the second doesn't appear to serve any purpose except give you a false impression of how much damage a building can take.) It's more punishing than missing a drop in Starcraft, but it's even easier to do because your base has nearly no vision range and zombies can walk up from any direction (or even several at once) before you've even gotten the chance to train more troops. If you don't know exactly how to play the earlygame, this is how every game will end for you, and it won't feel like you had any choice in the matter.

If you can make it through this downright-miserable portion of the game, you'll get to the play the game as advertised, which is fun. You'll get to kill off hoards of zombies while devising multi-layered defenses to keep them out. You'll have ample warning when zombies are knocking at your door once you've walled yourself in, and safely expanding those walls so you can build your colony becomes your primary focus.

However, it's simply too hard to get to this point. Between the constant vigilance and no small amount of luck required to survive the first few days, the seemingly-arbitrary restriction on saving the game, and the penalties for retrying levels built into the campaign, there's just too much in the way of the fun in this game. I was hoping that the official release of the game would smooth out the rougher parts of the learning curve, but it seems that the campaign has doubled down on them instead. This game has a lot of potential, but it desperately needs to ease up on the more frustrating aspects of its "difficulty"--and I say that as an XCOM player. Do not recommend.