Recent reviews by Vahn

I thought I had enough of Roguelites and felt like have played it all, but this one has been pretty amazing so far. Its from the developer of Dead Cells and even in early access it have the same nice snappy movement, interesting weapon choices and of course hella TOUGH difficulty. This game doesn't hold your hand and WILL drag your face through the mud.

If you like fast paced combat and dying (a lot) definitely give this a try.

I really want to recommend this game, I really do. But at the current stage and the fact that Galvanic is disbanding made this game not worth the price.

This game has great potential; the art, the gameplay loop, the soundtrack. Everything is amazing. But playing it only leave me feels unsatisfied and disappointed. The game feels unfinished. The main system works but there's barely any content at all. Once you get to unlock the cool stuff, there's nothing more to fight. The 4 bosses are cool though, but the "final" boss is just a boring bullet sponge and beating it only gives you a "To be Continued" screen.

This is a great game that sadly didnt mature enough to be worth playing. RIP Wizard.

Get an Umbrella because there's a Risk that the Rain will Return.

The game is pretty fun though I cant really recommend it right now during Early Access. Unless you enjoy games like Terraria and dont mind a little bit of grinding, you could skip this. My review is also based on solo play only.

EXPLORATION
The map is randomly generated and there are a few bosses that you need to beat to progress to the next biome. The biomes itself are pretty well made, though 80% of the time all you do is just dig through walls non stop. You see, the map is generated in pockets/rooms and between them there's rarely any path. Ores also only generate inside walls so you will be digging A LOT.

COMBAT
The combat is pretty basic. Your melee just swing right in front of you and you can shoot with range weapon. Most enemies have basic AI so they just run at you and swing. I don't know if the end-game weapon will change this (as of writing I'm still roughly 1/3 of the way) but so far its meh. Boss fights just end up depending if you have enough heals to tank some hit or cheese it with range.

PROGRESSION
The game have a skill tree but it can get really grindy to get some of them to high level. Some skills level up on their own (like Mining and Running because thats all you do in this game) while some needs some heavy commitment to grind (looking at you Fishing).

SANDBOX
You dont really play this kind of game without some cool base building involved. This game have a decent amount of blocks to decorate your base and its probably the strongest part of it. You also want to build some housing to have NPC vendors to move in. Though if you are lazy you can always just make a Lawn Base and drop all crafting bench and chest sprawling about, I wont judge.

Its good, its addicting, but it is can also be very very VERY frustrating to play. If you're a masochist and like torturing yourself, this is the game for you.

Starting out is hella difficult, you're still learning the mechanic and your stats are low (more on that later) so you will DIE. A LOT! The controls are a bit clunky and most movement tech are locked behind challenges. It plays fine using Keyboard but I recommend using a Controller for this game.

Of course this game have meta progression. And the meta progression have meta progression inside of them. It accounts for a ton of your power through this game. I don't think its possible to beat the game without any of it. So basically every run you either pick someone with a good trait and go far OR pick the character with the biggest drawback but it gains you more gold to buy more meta progression. Personally I do NOT enjoy this mechanic so much because using the bad character is so painful but you have to use them occasionally or you wont progress.

Once you get through all that hassle unlocking new characters, new weapons, and upgrading your stats, the game is pretty fun. Most of the classes play uniquely from each other, a lot of the alternate weapons are cool too. The bosses are well designed too. As long as you have the appropriate level by grinding and dying a lot, the game is very fun.

By far one of the best Survivor game out there. The visuals are good, the spells are varied, the mechanics are great and it have a banger soundtrack on top of it. It combines a lot of the good things from the Survivor genre while also adding the crazy end-game like Risk of Rain 2.

+> The spells and classes are really varied making every run feels different and fun. The classes give you the regular stat boost/reduction but also they limit the spells you can roll when you level up. Say one class can roll Fire Arcane and Ice spells while other can only get melee Swings and Thrust. Some class can even roll both melee and magic spells.
+> The visual is pretty good, from the charming low-poly 3D models (similar to Spellsworn) and the spell effects are all great. Though the spell effects can be a little distracting at very high level. Thankfully there is a slider in option that you can access anytime to reduce it. So you can play with full effect at the beginning and reduce it 20-30 minutes later.
+> The enemies have to actually hit you to deal damage. The small mobs have to swing to deal damage, some throws projectile and some slam their clubs to the ground. Well except this one enemy with the barrel on their back, they explode when you touch them. I HATE them so much and they keep tossing more of those little ♥♥♥♥ on higher difficulty.
+> The boss design are all great. Some are slow and throw projectiles at you, some are fast and chase you down trying to melee attack you. One even leave a trail of burning lava when he walks!
+> You can choose to level up manually is a minor thing that I really appreciate in this game. Keeps your momentum going instead of pausing every 20s to get a skill, you can delay it a couple minutes to focus during hectic moment and get 3-5 upgrades at the same time.

-> The endless mode is a bit too crazy and have some performance issue. When every single one of your spell hit the entire screen and apply 200 stacks of 7 different kinds of debuff the performance drops massively. They did have a day 2 patch that solve this a bit by reducing enemy spawn but making them stronger, but its still pretty bad.
-> They kinda lied when they said they have multiple maps because they all plays exactly the same. The only difference between the maps are the visual and the different colored materials they give. The have the exact same enemy, same boss pool, similar size and layout, and none have map specific hazard.

Looks very promising for an early access. Excited to see where this game goes next.

One of the best Survivor games out there. It differs slightly with other games of the same genre where instead of surviving for 20-30min long wave, you need to hold out for 1 min each wave and with a shop in between. There are a lot more cool things this game can offer;

-> There are A LOT of characters to choose from (like 30+ and they are adding more!). Some of them only give minor stat boost (like +dmg for specific weapons) while some other alter your game significantly (like way smaller map, only melee weapons, only tier 2+ weapons, lose hp per second but have lifesteal etc etc).
-> There are tons of weapons and different character will scale better with different weapons, so every run will feel unique.
-> There is no meta progression, which can be good or bad depends on how you look at it. Its good that you dont have to grind lower level to beat the highest level but its bad because if you're struggling, there's nothing helping you progress unless you get better yourself. And let me tell you that the difficulty of this game is really PUNISHING on the higher level.

There are a couple bad things I dislike;
-> The shop can feel a bit too RNG sometimes when you dont get any weapons early on. BUT they have a cool system where say you already bought a couple guns and ranged upgrades, it will offer you more of that and less of the other ones.
-> As I said before, the difficulty of this game is punishing, therefore picking characters that have huge negative modifier (like Loud or Pacifist) can feel like a nightmare to complete.

Really fun Survivor game. You need to play really careful as health is finite and heal is sparse. You also need to aim your weapon in this game unlike other Survivor games. There are a good number of characters to choose from and weapons to start with. The weapons play very differently from each other so every run will feel unique despite having the same enemy wave on screen.

The one small thing I dislike from this game is that when you reach the late game (like 7-5min left on the timer) every character with the same weapon will play the same. The character you choose doesnt define you as much as the weapon you picked at the start. A Shotgun Shana and a Shotgun Abby plays almost the same way.

Also there is meta progression which you really need to beat the later darkness levels. Not to grindy to unlock, but its still there.

The game is fine, but there's massive imbalance between being the Ghost and the Hunter. You almost always win as the Ghost because they are so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard to find and even harder to kill. I thought the investigation part where you look for the ghost would be fun but with only 5 minutes to find them AND kill them you end up just running around and shooting everything.

Another massive issue is the lack of Dedicated server. When you enter a lobby, the lobby leader will be assigned as the host and everyone is connecting to him. This leads to massive ping issue where sometimes their team have 40-50 ping because they play together while you and your friend have 500 ping and the 2 random dudes have 1000 ping.

The 2 new characters added from this DLC are really fun and play distinctly from the rest of the cast. Monkey plays like Rabbit where your skill enhance your guns but prefer heavy weapon compared to her while Fox finally makes those +skill dmg scrolls useful. Both are a great addition if you want more diversity in your playstyle.

But this DLC doesn't add new stage or new boss so if you are looking for that, this DLC is not for you.