I really wanted to like this game. I’m a sucker for the dungeon crawler genre. The “Doom“ aesthetics and the overall art of the game be it the friendly or unfriendly NPCs or the character you are playing. But sadly, this game has some glaring weaknesses.
The game opens with a very stylistic introduction to the world and its entities, very similar to the Dark Souls games. It is made decently well and even get’s you hyped up a bit for the experience before throwing you into a short tutorial where you are supposed to die. Even if you try your best, you won't be able to push very far.
After you die, you get to visit the hub and encounter your first NPC, but you are not able to get stronger yet. You still have to progress a bit further until you can "level up."
After you have died a few more times, you unlock the feature to raise the level of your base stats, as well as an NPC that can upgrade your skills. Upgrading your base stats or skills requires dark crystals, which you can get by defeating enemies and opening treasure chests. The limit you can carry is set by the dungeon you are in, and after you defeat the boss, your maximum amount changes.
The upgrading gets more expensive the more you invest, and it has some breakpoints where stats jump a lot, most of the time by the 10-level mark.
You can enhance your “Strength,” which improves your damage dealt with normal and charge attacks, as well as your critical damage. You can improve your “Agile” for attack speed and crit rate, and your “Stamina” for maximum stamina and life.
You need to improve your stats and grind a bit to be able to clear the dungeon you are currently in and prepare for the next dungeon. There are some systems in place that make grinding easier, but it will still take a considerable amount of time that is spent just repeating the same thing over and over again.
The game controls are not bad, although your attacks feel a bit sluggish before you get an attack speed increase. The dodge is very fast and doesn't cost much, and also has invincibility, but it is kind of useless in fights with a lot of enemies and in some boss battles because of their hitboxes. It serves first as a tool to traverse the world faster, and its secondary function is to dodge attacks.
You also have a block/parry, which is usable in the early game but will fall off very fast when the bosses and normal mobs will start spamming projectiles or when you are overwhelmed with numbers.
Skills are bad in general, which makes the randomness of them appearing even worse. If you value your time, ignore them, because you would have to upgrade most of them so they deal any damage at all when your alternative is to clear everything with auto attacks, which would require minimal farming. There might be a combination or a certain skill that is very broken, but I didn't engage with the mechanic enough to find it. But I wouldn't put it past the game to have balance or game-breaking skills, and by game-breaking I mean it in a literal sense.
The CGs are good, but there are also not a lot of them. You have two "game over" CGs per dungeon, which you will most likely get just by playing and dying. Dying in the dungeon or using the suicide option gets you the first, and if you die to the boss, you will get the second one. The last CG in the row occurs randomly when you leave the dungeon through either dying or completing it, which will also happen while farming. You can skip cutscenes by holding the left mouse button, so it doesn't get too annoying when you want to farm longer.
So, let's get to the really bad part.
First would be the boss battles themselves. They are often very annoying to dodge, and if you get hit by the later bosses, they will reduce your stamina to nearly nothing in a few seconds by debuffing the hell out of you, which will slow the game down dramatically because you can't really dodge anymore and will therefore kill your whole movement. They are also HP sponges and deal a lot of damage when you first encounter them, making them very difficult to beat. They can be outscaled, though, and very fast as well. What you can't outscale are the bugs, and oh boy, it has a lot of them.
The most game-breaking one I found would be softlocking yourself in a conversation with an NPC, namely the one that gets you the boss items. You would have to restart the game and load a save to continue playing. Don't trust the autosave; there is no autosave in this game. SAVE FREQUENTLY.
Mentioning the boss item NPC again: her whole mechanic of producing items is bugged. In my short time playing, I got scammed out of one weapon. The weapon explanation kept on overlapping, so it was really difficult to actually know what to do. This is also a small problem of menus in general not being translated well. I would advise you to just skip her entirely and play with the standard sword.
You can rarely get stuck on terrain and you have to use the menu and choose the suicide option to get out. Don't ever use the space bar finisher in the second dungeon, or you will play with inverted controls afterwards. I also found a very rare one: I never saved and trusted the autosave, but this one is really messed up, but can be avoided easily by just saving your game. I would advise you to not save your game, though, before you press either "New Game" or "Load Game" in the start menu to avoid this bug completely.
To sum it all up, the game had potential but was dragged down by a monotonous combat system, which had good ideas like the skill and dice system to shake things up but was not explored well enough or didn't have a lot of impact if you don't want to grind a few extra hours for them to actually matter. The lack of explanation in terms of debuffs and buffs, and the horrendous bugs and boss design, was the nail in the coffin for me. The CGs, while sparse, looked good, and it was easy to acquire them, but it is not enough to justify sitting through this.
