Recent reviews by Baka-gaijin

Honestly one of the worst entries I've came across in this genre. Extremely boring and repetitive, no meta-progression of any kind. Slow and clunky controls/gameplay. This is like 1/3 of a game at best.

Controls are nightmarish levels of jank. The ball is covered in a layer of lube, and also gets randomly stuck on ledges.

You'll love this game if your entire personality is typing "skill issue" in online forums.

Mindlessly boring. No features. No progression system. Waste of time and space. Even the 1978 Space Invaders had more gameplay elements than this. WTF is this dev doing.

how do you use the bloody night vision goggles?!

Played the demo, then again the full game (so far). Absolutely loved it. Combines the best of old Quake series FPS and Warlock games spells and customization.

Some polish to be had, for sure.
1. Camera sometimes snap to a random angle while rotating
2. It's too easy to (accidentally) jump through walls and go out of bounds.
3. A minimap of sorts would be nice, or perhaps more distinct zone visuals. I'm getting very lost and accidentally backtracking a lot.
4. Blast 1 often blows me up if there is even pebble/a very short object at my feet, even when I'm aiming upwards. Should refine this collision check.
5. Love the secrets/puzzles in Level 1, wish there were more in Level 2.
6. Should make enemies easier to see, perhaps with a red outline or enemy contrast/brightness. Currently they camouflage too well into the background. Spend a lot of time running around in circles to bait out their glowing arrows to locate them.
7. Level 2 gets pretty confusing for where to go, what button to press, etc. Could be solved if the buttons were a lot more obvious.
8. The homing spell is buggy, most of the times all homing projectiles fly towards some corner of the zone, or into a specific spot in a specific wall, as if there were enemies inside them (maybe there are?). This logic should be changed to target the nearest enemy instead.
9. Our summoned skeleton frequently becomes hostile.

So far it's already extremely fun. Can't wait for new levels/content.

Pros:
1. Cute, novel theme

2. Free, so far.

Cons:
1. The "difficulty" of this game feels artificial, it comes largely from screen clutter. Huge amount of projectiles (both from the player and monsters), experience shards, monsters, all in somewhat the same color scheme, sometimes blinking/flashing. Player projectiles also generally do f*** all damage so the monsters really accumulate.

2. Lazy and bad implementation of "pixel art" style, related to Con 1.

3. Game is really inconsistent about amount of information provided. Most times it's extremely vague (e.g. "increase damage a little bit"), a few times it's specific and even gives you specific numbers.

4. It is really incredibly f***ing stupid that some player projectiles sometimes knock enemies "back"... except if the monster is between the player and where the projectile landed, it just pushes monster into you at the speed of light.

5. Many of the meta-progression skills are so dumb. 3% damage here 2% movement speed there. Are you serious? Is this a game or a job?

6. Music volume remains really loud (relative to other programs) even when set to almost 0. SFX can only be toggled on/off, no adjustable volume.

I was so excited to buy and play this game - looks like everything I was after.

But holy christ it cannot run on a high end PC. Everything constantly looks like your screen is smeared with 5cm of vaseline, and there's jarring hiccups every 2 seconds. Literally even Star Citizen runs better than this, and that's a meme.

I'm going to hit the refund on this, and maybe try again in 2028 with a RTX 6090 TI Super Duper.

Also signposting/information is terrible. You have to tab out every other minute to google WTF to do. It has the worst mix of directed and hands-off sandbox gameplay.

Updated review at ~25 hrs play time. Original review below.

As expected, the game is getting a lot more enjoyable. Builds are coming alive at this point (at least one class if you specialized in it or was nudged in by item RNG), and better knowledge on which blessings are good/bad enable more consistent "wins".

This is also showing why veterans are sometimes toxic - they have gotten to figure out what blessings/mechanics are OP and implicitly assume that everyone does as well. Anyone who doesn't abuse OP blessings must simply have "skill issues" so just go into trolling mode. Veterans can start a fresh save and start rolling straight away to dismiss concerns like mine, I can only say that they are confounding "new players" vs "new play throughs".

The disparity between blessings and gods are really quite large currently, but I'm sure the devs will balance things better in the long run. For example, in most cases, especially for new players, "Attack" and "Summon" blessings are mostly garbage. Maybe one or 2 points for the mechanical effects, but they will almost never do sufficiently high damage to replace casts, strikes, and power. In the very late game there are exceptions where OP builds scale Attack damage, and this sentence is purely to preempt toxicity from trolls who don't understand nuance of "for new players" which is, again, shockingly common here.

There's also a bit of inconsistent or straight up wrong wording popping up, but that's generally rare and not major issues especially for a EA game.

At this point I am mostly using 2 classes to farm gear for the other classes to let them more reliably farm skill points. Having a good relic with lots of rerolls and alterations to swap around characters really helps a lot. In my earlier review I projected maybe 10 hours of grinding per class, but really that's only the first 1-2 classes, the others should be much faster, perhaps ~2 hours.

I can appreciate that EA development goes in cycles - maybe the devs want to flesh out more of the late game content before revising the early game experience with more structure in place. That's fine, I'm just trying to provide a more comprehensive perspective for buyers to consider.

Conclusion? It's a decent game with great potential and well worth the current price, especially if on sale. Maybe limiting exposure to online communities can improve the enjoyment.

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(Original, updated 24/06/24: at ~10 hrs)

Mixed review, ever so borderline positive. The things this game does well are pretty clear to everyone, so I will only mention the negatives. Hope the devs don't just ignore all the positive reviews.

1. Early game (~first 10-20 hours!) are a complete nightmare slog. Many times I debated refunding the game, but the later game videos on youtube convinced me to stay. I am still slogging it. This is really the gist of the negatives, below I will highlight some specifics.

2 Classes:

2.1 The developers clearly have a vision for each class' late-game archetype(s), but early game they are just "melee" or "ranged". The classes have no unique identity until maybe 10+ hours of dedicated farming into each one. That's like at least 30-40 hours of grinding the same feeling melee classes before fun is allowed.

2.2. Besides melee classes playing the same, feeling the same, they get completely destroyed in Act 2. Too many big AOE big damage instant nukes. Very classic "Melee gets shafted, only ranged viable" ARPG stuff.

2.3 A lot of the skill tree is padded out by uselessly small generic increments, especially the early skills, further snuffing out the early game meta progression. The major skills that actually impact and differentiate game play are mostly hidden at the very end.

2.4 Devs should consider flipping the skill trees upside-down as a start, then re-optimizing it from there. This enables classes to quickly *begin* developing unique identities and some semblance of player agency and mapping out builds, and also introduces a lot more variety to reduce the early game slog. This leaves the incremental min-maxing stuff to the end.

3. Gear:

3.1 In the early game, gear drops are too rare, starving players of meta progression. Later game, gear drops a bit too much relative to the small inventory. Maybe this is intentional to make the player play make choices? This compounds with the next problem:

3.2 Affixes are almost comically granular, making it such that the vast majority of drops are useless. Don't need separate projectile count types for every single thing, or chances for every blessing tier, for example. Just roll them into a single, more intuitive stat, except maybe Uniques can have special exceptions. This compounds with the next problem (yes again):

4. Blessing choices each level up should increase beyond 3, very quickly. In the game's current state, it should at least be 5 by the time you unlock all characters. The game wants to enable many "different" builds, and thus allow many "different" blessings, but it's too much of a fight against RNG to actually make the builds. If gear were more versatile, playthroughs would feel less cucked by RNG.

5. I admit this is not completely within the dev's control, but also kinda is under their influence. That is community toxicity. Among various other high quality bullet heaven rogue lite style games, DMD's online spaces stand out for being unusually "git gud" spammy instead of being helpful to one another. This might be caused by the COMPLETE disconnect in how veterans see the game vs what a new player actually get presented. There is little middle ground for understanding each other. This is especially odd as the early access nature means little and frequently changing/outdated documentation, the veteran players seem to take pride in gatekeeping information. I hope the dev's could steer the community away from that, somehow. (I think someone gave me the clown award for this, which is ironic...)

Neat idea, but the execution looks very very rudimentary, to put things politely. It looks like 1 week of watching game creation youtubes, implementing half the functions of each idea, and hitting publish.

Discord is pretty much dead, dev appears to be done with this title and is moving on to the next. No ultrawide support nor is it planned.

I sincerely hope to be wrong and see more improvements.

UPDATE: Unfortunately I was right. Dead and abandoned in what is really an alpha state.