As I have reached 50 hours of playtime, I think I am certified enough to leave a review on this game. As someone that does not do reviews quite often and only on games that touch my nerve or do a great job at entertaining me, take this with a grain of salt. For the past 5 days since the release, I have experimented with almost every item in the game, found multiple fun ways to break it, and experienced multiple good and bad things. I will list now some of my own opinions on this game, alongside a few notes towards all the negative reviews that have bombarded the game. The positive aspects of this game, compared to the previous one are as it follows: - Improved graphics. From vfx to monster designs, animations and what not, the game improved a lot on the visual aspect compared to the previous title. - More relics. The current build already offers the players around 30 extra relics, while the first one has 166. There are some more besides the approximately 30 extra ones, its just that the unlock requirement is either not accessible or bugged atm. - New characters. As of now we only have access to the well known Peasant, and the previous NPC, Black Rabbit, which is now playable. Each play differently and focus on a stat and game mechanic. Peasant has a personal kit which revolves around gold nodes, while Rabbit focuses on Chests and luck rolls. More characters to come might follow the same design pattern, revolving around a specific stat or feature, which could offer players a large variety of playstyles. - Modding support. With their new modding tool called Anvil, even non modders which do not have coding experience can create simple mods, as scripting can be done visually more or less similar to UE5 blueprints. Besides the fact that modding support by itself will allow the game's content to run for years even after the development stops, its also simplified to allow anyone to add what they want into the game. - Couch co-op. Although there are big issues with how remote play works on steam and its performance, shared screen co-op is still co-op. We do not know for sure if its fixed in stone that the multiplayer aspect of this game will remain like this instead of adding online co-op, so give it some time, we have no roadmap for the game yet so their plans are not clear. - Intricate stat system. Many complain about it being overly complicated and hard to grasp, yet its a very simple system. Items scale with certain stats, which based on the stat, will affect a certain aspect of the players or the relics. Basic stats like strength, dexterity, intelligence and ingenuity are just damage stats. Recklessness makes explosions and any items that have area of effect, bigger. Thats all. Charisma increases familiars damage and decreases prices in shops. Speed is speed. Luck increases chances for all kinds of stuff, for a chest to drop more resources, for your attacks to deal critical damage, for some relic effects to proc. Alacrity is attack speed. Reach is attack range. Caliber is projectile size. Pierce determines how many enemies a projectile goes through, Ricochet means how many walls it can bounce off, Bounce means how many enemies the projectile will jump between from one to the other, and fork how many projectile you shoot at one. All of these are very easily understandable and their explanations are accessible in the stats menu. Your confusion confuses me, all you need to do is hover over the stats themselves and you will be given a simple and clear description of what they do. I do understand one design which is confusing for many, Ricochet being for wall-bounces, and Bounce being for enemy-bounces, but thats all. These stats were already existent in the previous game, some were just hidden and used simply for calculations. Them giving us access to view them and see what items scale with what is a good thing, complaining about it is unreasonable. All of these are very positive points about what the game offers and the promises it holds, lets now talk about the negative aspect of the game, and the issues which players voice in their reviews: - The release came with lots of bugs, whether game crashing, soft locking or annoying and persistent ones. Yes we can all agree that its a bumpy release, but that does not mean the game is unplayable, nor that it will stay like this forever. People, it released 5 mere, little tiny bit days ago, can we cut them some slack? They are waiting for our feedback, gave us a bug reporting tool in options menu and have a discord server where we can just come and lay down all of our issues, we don't have to assault their frontpage with thumbs downs right off the bat. Early Access means it will have bugs, your game will break, things wont work as intended , and even more so at its release. No developer wants their game to have bugs and no player wants to experience them, so lets have some reasoning and give them time. - Salamander tail no longer cooks food!!!! Nooo... no, it actually does, but it procs based on the luck stat and just requires you to spam your ranged attack over the food, thats all. If it does not for some reason, then its a bug and you just have to reload the save and the floor, it will be fixed soon. - Items can sometimes fall off in a cliff when mining gold nodes, opening chests or killing enemies. Devs said that they are gonna work on the code for it. This is an intended mechanic but not supposed to be punishing. Items can fall in pits, but not spawn over them, many just get blocked by objects or walls when the game calculates their trajectory. Wait for the patch. - Expanding on the pits issues, we can tell that its easier to fall in them, whether this is due to the character's design or how far the edge safety extends, I can't tell, but yes it does seem like its a bit easier to fall in them. We don't have a clear answer from the devs regarding this yet. - Gold is scarce early on. This is a known issue and again, devs said that they will adjust the amount of gold players get or lower the shop prices in the beginning. - Meta currency, such as crown coins or thorium (the purple crystals), are restricted to boss chests and occasional thorium chests found randomly, and also a limited way through the donation box in the shop. They said that they will increase the amount you receive from them, alongside some other little changes "We have plans for other changes as well to improve the early game. Increasing gold and thorium drop rates, lowering the amount of traps that show up, and balancing some of the earlier enemies." - This comes to another issue, early game difficulty. In the previous game, the game's difficulty scaled based on your wins, early, mid, late, everything would have gotten tougher, but this was not a big issue as the personal upgrades allowed the players to adapt to these changes. In the second, the game becomes a bit harder, yet the upgrades do not help all that much. They said they will address this as well. - Some new game mechanics have a bit of unexplained deepness, and can be a bit hard to understand by yourself. Certain items can not only be found and bought, but also crafted at the forge using iron, which you can acquire using some relics, as a rare drop from chests, or by trading some basic items like keys, bombs, armor shards for it at the forge. The items you can craft at the forge are always the same, and just allows players to get an extra relic from time to time if you have enough of that resource. Iron does cap at 20, but its more than enough to get a few useful relics. Theres multiple issues at the moment, but this is to be expected, its Early Access, this is the whole point of it, gaining feedback, improving the game and adding more content.. All of these negative reviews are understandable but its too early to judge the game solely based on its release state. I recommend the game for what its going to be, not only what it is right now. Stay healthy, peace.
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