Recent reviews by DELL337ed

It's a good, short game. Doesn't quite have the tight controls like Dead Cells which disappointed me, but the game wasn't too hard overall, just punishing like Celeste.

My experience is based on the Epic Games store version of the game.
First let me get some good things started with this.
The community heads on the CNE payroll for this game are fantastic and super friendly.
If you're a fan of the R.A. Salvatore books, this will definitely hit some memba-berries for you.
Character art is good. Sometimes the portrait art is a bit off, but the sprites, both character and monsters, are nice.

I can't recommend this game in it's current state though. I was looking forward to playing a new (to me) D&D game, but this one is soooo grindy and repetitive. As essentially a gacha game (think like FF Dissidia Opera Omnia), it really isn't beginner friendly at all. There are so many things I am gated out from the game even now just because I don't have enough heroes, so I am left with playing the rotating event over and over and OVER to try getting gear for the new characters I just unlocked. I'm a big fan of DragonQuest and FF, so I can handle grinding when it's smooth, but this makes me fall asleep in my chair. It's a bit overwhelming because I can't tell how long I'll have to keep doing this for. Maybe the free Time Gates will be good for me next week? Who knows...
While I love the character art, I don't like the animation at all. The characters look like some kind of marionettes and gives the game a cheap Flash game quality. The game UI is pretty bad as well. When your UI gets in the way of you playing the game, it's a problem. It's a nice little stimulation that they add in little bugs and creatures you can click on for a little gold bonus, but often times, they go behind menus and I can't click them. Instead I'll often accidentally click the sale advert, lag the game, and open the store page, completely missing the little bonus gold. Or I'll slide the mouse too close to a pop-out menu, blocking the screen even more. You can clear the upper half of UI, but then you have no information. It really need just a mini-version so you can see numbers at a glance, but not get in the way. Curious to how your Heroes' buffs are affecting the play field visually? Hope you can find that one correct pixel to point at with your mouse.
I know a free game has to make money somehow, but the monetization on this is predatory as heck. This makes Genshin Impact look affordable because often times the bundles are "on sale" so much that they should just be considered their regular price. The drop rate for gems is so pathetically low, that it's taken me a month of play just to get 10,000 gems and that's with keeping the game open in the background, which leads me to another problem. You should never be forced to keep an idle game open because the drop rates are better when you're online than off. CNE is just causing us to waste electricity. That "getting gated out" problem I mentioned earlier? Well, you can solve that for 9.99 per slot that you need! [bleh]
The power creep in this game is absolutely ridiculous. When you need scientific notation to keep track of your damage, you've gone too far. I'm not arguing that it has to be locked at something classically low like 9999 or even 999,999, but when using SCI, it gets really easy to lose the impact of the numbers. The same goes for the character levels too when your Heroes are getting into the thousands of levels. Could you imagine having a pen and paper Lvl. 1000 character in a D&D campaign? (lol) Nothing but numbers change for the heroes above a few hundred or so. The heroes might as well just have 4 skills unlocked right from the get-go once you've attained the skills once because there's no reason besides bigger numbers to push to the next level for that sense of fascination of unlocking new powers or mechanics. Same for the character unlocks; There's no reason to keep them hidden after I've unlocked them once. Let me see all of them once I've bought the 12th hero so I can plan my run better. The specializations are a nice touch, but there are times when I don't want to pick one right away because I don't know what I'm going to need for that dungeon. I can click out of the specialization choice, but can't level my hero anymore until I've picked one. For example, a hero that I've stuck around this long for, Dungeon Master, would be really nice if I didn't have to pick a specialization until later. I've noticed that there are skill reset potions recently, but these are so rare that I've been saving them like (Mega)Elixers in case I mis-click and ruin my run's setup.
I can pretty summarize the design of every 5 levels of every dungeon.
Lvl 1. Kill 25 enemies
Lvl 2. Collect 25 drops from the enemies because 'reason' or break 10 objects on scrolling dungeon
Lvl 3. Said reason was ineffective. Kill 25 more enemies.
Lvl 4. Kill 25 more enemies OR collect 25 more drops.
Lvl 5. Boss Fight
This pattern kills me, particularly the breaking 10 objects objective because sometimes your characters can easily tank the enemies, but can't scroll the screen even when using an ultimate attack to clear the field because for some reason, the ultimate attack animation locks the scrolling (this is dumb).

Overall, if you're looking for something to pass the time with a slow burn... this would make a better game for your phone to make it easier to come and go on dungeons and pass time in a waiting room, bus, etc. The fact that the game doesn't have multi-platform login support is absolutely ridiculous. If I may offer a few tips for the game...
1. Run dungeons as long as you can before resetting to get that exponentially increasing gold. It'll help a lot with your following runs. You don't have to stop once you've cleared the dungeon level goal.
2. Don't buy silver and gold chests until you have at least 2 or 3 familiars. Some heroes work really well when you have a familiar committed to their ultimate skill (w/o spoiling it... you'll see). If you can find enough Electrum chest codes (there's a lot of code collections) you don't even need to buy Silver chests. You can technically do everything that a familiar can yourself, but they just make the game a lot easier to micro-manage and saves your wrist from carpal-tunnel syndrome.
3. However, pay attention to your Electrum chest drops if you're trying to be more F2P. When you stop getting new gear, stop opening Electrum chests until you get a new hero. Don't worry, it'll help A LOT when you get to that next time gate). The 0.8% boost to gear is not worth it and you'll get plenty of items during that first surge of chest openings.
4. If the game is warning you about spending Favor for Blessings, you're probably about to spend too much. Hold off if you don't want to risk losing progress. Keeping your spent Favor under 15 percent of the total seems to work pretty well. (If you mess up, you can reset for a small Favor "surcharge").
5. Don't be shy to make use of those community heads. (You'll see in-game prompts soon enough) They're so friendly and patient, even if English isn't your first language. I wouldn't have made it this far in the game without them because there are a lot of things in the game that just aren't explained well at all or maybe you need things explained visually. They are the true Heroes.

Extremely hyped, but still entertaining.

Had to try this out after some friends were raving about it.
In short...

• Should you play it? Yes.
  
• Is it worth the price? Yes.
  
• Is it fun? Yes.
  
• Can I play with the Steam controller? Yes!

Pros

• The game itself is interesting since it's trying something different.
  
• Catchy soundtrack - The music sets each scene very well.
  
• Challenging and fun Boss fights
  
• Nostalgic throw-backs to other RPGs of the 16-bit era

Cons

• Premise of the game made the story a bit too predictable. I knew what I was supposed to do right from the get-go.
  
• While boss fights are fun, regular monster fights are repetitive & boring.
  
• The puzzles are pretty easy. Some can be solved accidentally pretty easily.
  
• In-game trolling? I think? If it wasn't intended, it got old real fast.

I power-sessioned through this in two days. I had fun with the story, but I'm probably not going to pick this one up again. I may buy that soundtrack though pretty soon.

A few things I think would have made the game a bit more entertaining for me.

1. Make the character walk a bit faster or put a sprint option in. You do a lot of walking back and forth between towns. 'Teleports' help out a lot, but it's still a bit much since a lot of the connecting rooms are kinda bland.
   
2. A better dialogue skip button. Some parts I just didn't care about and wanted to get to the next part faster.
   
3. Remove a certain game mechanic. (personal pref.) Anytime a game closes automatically without warning is a huge break from game immersion for me. At first I thought the game crashed and since I was kinda done with the story, I almost stopped playing. Not saying that a developer shouldn't do things like that as this entire game is about breaking the mold, but a gaming session should be interrupted unwillingly. Personally, I feel it should be hinted to the player at least from the first time.