Recent reviews by zapspeed

I love the actual gameplay of this, but the UI is a bit too utilitarian for me. The HUD isn't well explained, and the game is pretty information dense but also doesn't explain itself well.
I cannot stress that the actual gameplay feels great! But I can't recommend it without some polishing of the UI.

I love detective games, they're one of my favourite genres and I've played a lot of them. This is the first game in the genre that I've disliked. I completed it, but there was very little that I enjoyed about this game.

Amazing game, I almost want to not recommend it though simply because having to wait for more of the story is painful.

I like a lot of the ideas in this game, but I feel like the execution of them is poor.

Ranged weapons have limited ammo, so you're encouraged to use melee attacks.
But a lot of the monsters have ranged attacks.

There's a dodge roll, but it doesn't move you further than just walking does, it's just i-frames. But dodging also doesn't animation cancel, making it hard to time those i-frames meaningfully.
But lets assume that you manage your ammo and just use the ranged weapons against the ranged opponents, shooting ranged weapons also reduces your movement speed making it hard to dodge attacks. (there's an item you can get to remove that slow-down, but very RNG to get it)
Ranged weapons also need to reload frequently... and that's also an animation that you can't cancel with the dodge roll.

None of this is insurmountable, it's not an impossible game by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes it feel bad to play, and makes a lot of deaths feel cheap because whoops I accidentally clicked one too many times to attack and now I'm locked into a long combo animation and can't avoid taking that hit.

Melee weapons have distances that they'll move you on attack, depending on the weapon + items and which attack you're on in the combo, but then you have the problem of either weapons leaving you (nearly) stationary and vulnerable to the many monsters that are ranged or have dash attacks, or they move you too far and leave you out of position and surrounded all the time or running into attacks.

Again, not insurmountable, but just another thing making me feel like I'm fighting against the game, rather than against the monsters.

I like the music in this game, but as a very minor nitpick I think the vocals for the level BGM are a bit much/distracting? You can change it, but only after you've beaten the levels...

I like the combat mechanics of this game, being able to turn to stone is neat!
I like the diegetic way of showing that you have charges for the counter mechanic, and when you can't counter an attack.
I like that there's an instrument that you can sit and play too.
I also like the idea of having different bodies for different play styles.

But I'm just put off by too many things to be able to recommend it.

For a start, it's just so damn dark, dull, and gloomy. I get that they're going for a theme with this, but that reason doesn't make me want to stare at it for long periods. From what I can see, this doesn't really improve much later in the game.

I hate it when games don't have a freely usable jump button, even if I probably won't use it most of the time. Just knowing that I don't have the option makes me feel like I'm glued to the ground.

For some reason the camera feels bad, and I'm not sure why. The way it keeps pulling the camera back towards the direction I'm running, I think?

The view distance for enemies is for some reason awful sometimes for some reason? Some enemies I can see fairly far back, but other times they'll just phase into existence not far in front of me for some reason? It's quite jarring, and frustrating.

Very promising demo! Annoying UI issue with HDR making it almost unreadable but it is apparently being worked on at least.
The environments and characters look great, combat feels good, and I like what I saw of the roguelike elements (at least, the ones that I could manage to read)

Didn't get to see the roguelite/metaprogression, that's apparently not in the demo (the currency is, but not spending it). Which is a shame, because that's a pretty important part of a roguelite... hopefully it's more interesting than just small incremental increases and doesn't just cap out mid-game.

The lock-on system is kind of awkward, I'd rather it be adjustable via mouse movement rather than HAVING to press buttons to cycle between targets, it's not like the mouse can do anything else while in that mode. By the end of the run I'd given up on using the lock-on system as it caused more problems than it helped due to not being able to swap targets intuitively.

Good roguelite game. Love the modernised PS1 style graphics, really like the story, and I like the gameplay.

It's decent! Painfully slow walking around the hub-area though...

The game clearly needs more work on it (it is still in Early Access), but I'm not going to recommend it for now.

I love the dodge rolling mechanic - it adds a lot more depth to the combat, and the ability to move around with keyboard while attacking with the mouse. The movement doesn't add quite as much as I was expecting due to the severe movement penalty while attacking, but keyboard movement DOES fix the issues that click routing usually has of getting confused about where you want to move, or not picking the best (or picking an unexpected) path.

My biggest problem with the game is one of two things, because fixing either would make it better I think.
I seriously dislike that maps reset on player death, wiping any dropped loot and making you fight through an entire map of monsters again. It makes dying an already frustrating experience even more frustrating. Reset bosses, fine, but when compounded with the next problem it's a serious problem with trash mobs... and that's that they've seriously slowed combat down compared to PoE1 and most ARPGs, every fight can be a slog now, each fight can be dangerous. So especially coupled with my first major problem just makes the game fatiguing to play, and specifically, not fun.

It's also massively RNG dependant. Getting a few good items can be the difference between face rolling through the game, and every group of trash mobs being a drawn out life and death battle.
This wouldn't be TOO much of an issue, except that good loot drops are pretty rare. I usually get 1 - 3 yellow name items from a completely cleared map, and there's a low chance of them being something that my character can even use, let alone having good stats.

I do miss the old style of skills. I like that it lets you pick what skill gem you want to unlock instead of being down to RNG as to whether you can even find a skill that you want. But I liked the linking system from PoE1 where a supporting gem could support two (or more) different skills, or where you could have 5 support gems on a single skill.
The new system feels a lot more restrictive... unless it opens up more after act 2.

Good game so far! Glad they removed the EGS login requirement!
I still wish they'd get rid of the stupid mechanic of needing to run around picking up the weapon/armour boxes, but I like the game enough to put up with it.