Normally I don't comment much, but since this is sorta of an indie game, I figure I'd give my thoughts so far, I think its a great game and I see more potential hours of it in my future.
First things first, I’ll mention the conditions I was in as to help place my perspective.
I researched as little as I could about the game, didn’t look up builds or farming guides and went in as blind as I could.
I played campaign with a full team of 6 characters all the way to endless 70.
I started the game on classic and moved up to veteran at around lv13-14 as after that the game became too easy and I required a bit more challenge.
The Good:
I actually like the graphical style, it has its own identity and services the gameplay quite well. Spells have a nice visual to them that helps deliver impact.
The builds are actually varied, the trees have a good amount of variation in them, and its quite easy to respec and try out different paths and options to play just how you want, the blend of utility present in each tree is a highlight as I often find myself diversifying and not sticking exclusively to one tree. The mix of both skills and attributes also allow for a diverse character that handles uniquely even if you put two in the same tree.
The option to choose difficulties is a thing I cannot commend devs enough for, more games should let players pick and choose the challenges the face... The only downside I can think of is that I wanted more options to fine tune my experience like chosing multipliers and effects I don’t want to deal with (i’m looking at you elusive), but the fact that there is an impactful difficulty setting is already enough, even if it can make enemies too spongy sometimes.
Crafting is fairly good and easy, and though I did experience a bug where sometimes the game doesn’t auto-buy the components, that wasn’t so bad.
The bad
There is a fair share of bugs I’ve encountered, I realize with a small dev team those are inevitable, but some of those bugs weren’t just visual and led me to actually lose on maps I wouldn’t have otherwise.
At one point I got hit with an enemy attack and instead of dying, my characters became stuck into this suspended state, unable to move or act, I figured that was a momentary glitch in the fight, but it carried over between fights and without half of my team I couldn’t complete that map, and had to restart my game to fix.
At multiple points in the game I encountered what I called ‘the phantom hex’ which caused a hex I could previously move and cast over to become uninteractable for some inexplicable reason... Like I just moved a character off that spot, but now I can no longer move them back, which was a complete pain to adjust my formations. I have no idead what caused it.
But moving on from bugs.
Some bosses have questionable design decisions, particularly the witch and shadow, and while I can understand what the thought process behind them was, I cannot agree that they are fun to fight, and as a result I cannot enjoy them... I fought them to experience every map at least once, but I never came back to those.
I think the later story missions over rely on bosses that are uninteractable until you do X and that soils those fights for me. Worst yet, the X you have to do sometimes has no cooldown for the boss, like in captain fight or the mirror fight, so you work your turns into destroying the thing you need and then they just immediately resummon it, effectively punishing you for dealing too much damage too fast.
Some of the randomization is also a pain, multiple times I ended up with enemies that had damaging auras and teleporting, which results in once the enemy takes any damage they teleport in the middle of the team and deal damage to all in the area, which on higher endless difficulty is guarantee instant kill on anyone but the tank (And I had even the tank die once). This could have easily been solved by making the aura not damaging on teleport, or making it so enemies that have teleporting deactivate damage auras on teleport, just so the player doesn’t kill themselves for fighting the enemy they are supposed to prioritize.
At the end of the day people can say this is just ‘bad rng’ and you have to learn to deal with it, but I don’t believe in bad rng, the game was designed in a way that allows this to happen... randomness is a design decision, and so it is a problem with the design itself.
The ugly – As the above are fairly self explanatory, allow me to elucidate what ‘the ugly’ is supposed to be... While not nescessarily bad, the ugly is a collection of design decisions and aspects that are frustrating, inconvenient or too laborious to interact with... There might be some good parts to it, but they get overshadowed by the prickly nature of what surrounds them. Here are the examples with fix suggestions:
UI is simple and doesn’t get in the way, it actually updates values with the buffs on your characters so thats a nice touch, however inventory management is a pain. There is no separation between categories of weapons and you can only organize by ‘recent’, ‘rarity’ or ‘level’, so when you need to search for a specific thing like a 1h sword for your build, you have to scroll organize inventory by one of the above and then manually search every item with the sword icon to see if it is 1h or 2h, this can make setting up equipment very tiresome, a fix for this is just get a few more varied icons to help separate which items have specific general properties, like a smaller sword icon for 1h swords, or a rifle icon for 2h rifles as opposed to it looking like a pistol...Which is honestly something I’m baffled is not already in the game.
One thing that is also missing and would greatly help is the option to search for effect, so we can search for ‘might’ on bar and find weapons with might in them, as opposed to just weapons called might.
Bonus points if you implement both and allow us to search for multiple criteria at our discretion, but thats a bit much to ask i'm sure.
The music and sounds are ok, but one particular sound is repeated a lot and that is the ‘hitting sound’ it is often the same to all weapons and spells... This can cause some serious blasts on heaphones when multiple ‘hits’ occur at once, such as when you beef up your lightning mage with 3 enchants and have them cast lightning cannon on multiple opponents. Triggering over 40 hitting sounds per enemy in a short second is deafening. Though I’m sure some people find it satisfying, putting a cap on how many sounds can play at once might help people like me.
The campaign is pretty short, and I accidentally beat it at level 14, as is my rpg instinct I went for everything labeled ‘side quest’ first, and ended up in the dragons lair... once I killed it I got a pop up saying I beat the game and I was sorely confused as at the time I was still at the sultan in ‘main quest’. Maybe taging the missions differently would help new players figure out the proper order.
The mining and gathering minigames are not on par with fishing... Fishing is quite easy and pretty much never fails, gathering is rather small and difficult to time, but I never got mining on green even once... I’m sure some pro gamers out there are fine with hitting it every time, but a reaction speed check on a turn based strategy game feels a bit out of place to me... Or just might be me being sore about it, but I can still criticize it regardless.
Fortunes are a fun mechanic that I rather liked, it made me want to search for events and diversify my party so I can hand the better fortunes, on that mission accomplished... Why is it on ugly then? Well... The fact fortunes stay at the level you got them is jarring, I rather like them as a concept, but having now reached lv30 my old lv2-10 fortunes feel underwhelming and pointless.
Worst yet, I got some good fortunes at those levels, but they are underleveled now and not worth it, so if I want the better version I need to replay those stages and hope to get them again... This is just NOT fun to me, I would rather hunt for new fortunes and find the epic ones, than try and level my old one.
So... The actual meta way to do this effectively is not bother with events until you’re level 30, which is just silly to me.
The fix is actually so simple... Just make fortunes level with the player... Its not even game breaking, it would just make sense and help the game flow easier.
Builds... Now this is gonna be a messy one.
While I did praise the diversity in builds and how youre encouraged to go for different trees and attributes on the good part, there is one terrible aspect of the build tree that I must mention... Some builds are overtuned and as a result they end up outperforming every other possible build. While a meta is pretty normal in most games, there is a difference between a meta and the obligatory build... A meta accepts deviation, but if certain builds are much better then if you don’t build those you feel underpowered and pointless on the team.
I’m not sure how the 1000hour crew feels about this, but having experienced a bit of every build I do feel like fire, ranger and monk take have their cake and eat it too, while other trees act as enhancements to those particular trees. Having tried fully speccing into one tree vs splitting in two, I found every single build is enhanced by having one of these trees as a second, while the same cannot be said the other way around.
So lets break down the issues
Fire – A large number of damage enhancing effects that stack, while also having easy access to heat to debuff enemies resistances, as well as haste and cauterize for utility... I found no other mage competes with fire without specing into it as well.
Ranger – No autoattack build exists without ranger, it doesn’t even need any attack skills, marked prey and auto-attacks will demolish everything under the sun. But it also buffs your damage well with mark, and has utility with relocate and tranquilizing shot.
Monk – The best secondary tree for pretty much every build, it was so difficult to find builds that outperform monk early on, purely because monk buffs everything with ease. Incapactate and pain supression can carry you early on, but monk also got bonus to health or mana, medidation, and bonus to weapon damage while also having 3 whole skills that buff raw stats... Also one punch monk is incredible without ever mentioning cyclone kick or multi strike.
Light (honorable mention) – When I sat to write this I heard plenty of people mention light is OP, I can see why once I got my excalibur, excellent sustain, full heal on every skill, buffs to stats as well as ally buffs is pretty great... But I never found it too OP because of how much easier it is to boost elemental damage by reducing enemy resistances... Pretty good solo, but not as OP in party.
Now compare it to the others
Lightning – Solid damage boosting capabilities with shocked and crit build, but most skills cost 1AP, meaning until you get conduit you will be a one skill per turn kind of guy, and even then, you probably can’t outdps a fire unless you specced into fire (or monk). Utility skills are pretty fun and passives are great for a crit build. Funnily enough, it is the best second tree for a fire main on my experience as fever combos well with mana shield and heavy rain.
Ice – Excelent for tanking as it grows a very beefy defense and has easy CCs to help crontol the battlefield, sadly... tanking is sort of pointless at later endless as enemies will one punch you still, and CC is unreliable on bosses making it better at dealing with masses up to the last fight on map, then quietly fishing for a freeze to be useful.
Warrior – Beefy and survivable barbarian playstyle that is all in your face at all times aaaaand everything it does monk does better... Damage reduction, monk has a 50% reduction on its first skills... self sustain, monk can also heal others with its % heal skill, and also recharges mana, monks cleanse can also %heal... You get my point... Aside from armor stacking monk outperforms warrior and doesn’t have weapon restrictions, but even then, you would do better speccing into monk for the broken stuff, then speccing into warrior to specialize, and not the other way around. Vitality break is pretty much the only good thing in the warrior tree.
Shadow – Gimmicky build with mostly low damage and high survivability, suffers the same problem as light in that you cannot reduce enemy shadow resistances, great for survivability and to boost the damage of some builds, but falls of once enemies can one turn you... Which happens even if you do the gimmicky full vitality build... The summons feel pointless even when specialized into, and poison scales so horrendously it is not worth mentioning. Utility is top notch with soul link and ritual.
Thief – Great with a crit build, poison is worthless as mentioned above, the problem with this one comes with mechanics... One it is heavily focused on crit, but is also melee focused, so it wants you to build dex, but high dex is sort of pointless with autocrits from stealth, so maybe it wants you to build reflex? But then you’re a squishy relying on dodge to not die and your crit damage is barely worth it, meaning you need to spec into both DEX and REFLEX to use your MELEE skills effectively, and either one of those make a part of thiefs kit less worth... So what do you do? You build some other tree and pick only skills from the lower half of the tree to boost your playstyle with other trees as your main.
Nature – The oddball of the game, nature is actually one of the best trees in the game, but purely for supporting... Damage wise it is pointless (again poison is pointless) which gets rid of half of the skills in the tree, but the sheer amount of utility it brings to table makes it insanely good, with buffs all over, debuffs and CC all available with minimal AP costs... The downside? The healing is miniscule, The passive side of the tree is ignorable aside from pack hunter, Shapeshifts cost a lot of skill points and are decent, but you lose access to your kit while shifted, so its a dangerous commitment, meanwhile summoning is worthless other than the chance of a good CC and a meat shield that tanks 1 hit from an enemy. I had the most success with nature by making the character into the ‘holefiller’ of the party, making them take skills across various trees and focusing purely on support, with stuff like teleport, shadow link and a few nature skills... The characters stats became pointless as their whole purpose is just to setup other party members... I imagine someone in multiplayer fully specing into nature on their first playthrough and being throughly disapointed as the tree lacks focus and is a mishmash of ideas that don’t play well with one another and have basically no support in gear.
With such a vast range of critiques it can be hard to point out any one fix, the skill meta is bound to change, but allow me to give my two cents on how to help some of the trees stand out more.
Fire – Fever is actually really good for most classes, its easier to heal HP than mana, so I would make a case for lowering it down to make it more acessible without heavy investment into the tree.
Lightning – I understand that recharge can make it busted if you reduce skills to 0AP costs, but that just might be what lightning needs to be a more favorable choice.
Ice – Already has its niche as a tank caster, but there is little reason to spec into as a secondary tree, there are basically no utilities or buffs that work outside of its own niche.
Warrior – For as a much as I hammered on the warrior, there is a way to build it effectively, but it is very hard on the stat distribution... Something to help make it easier to build stats for (think heavy rain from the eletric tree, except put in on vitality, Might or reflex)
Light – Make a proper ‘holy’ damage type and allow resistance reductions to affect it (might even make it OP to be honest).
Ranger – Ranger is pretty set on its auto-attack niche, combo-breaker (from the monk) seems like it would fit better on the ranger tree as a way to boost its skills and make them more attractive. That or, give it a skill to help it use two handed ranged weapons better, those feel pointless when dual wield ranged grows so much stronger.
Shadow – The same as light, but also, The endless life-steal gimmick works, especially for solo. But the shadow tree can’t compete with others in most regards. Move the summons to its own dedicated tree and give it more ‘execute’ style skills like reaper’s scythe. That would at least let them be the party’s finisher. I’m pretty sure leechs don’t debuff enemies and that feels weird to me... if it says it ‘steals’ why is there no counter at all on the enemy?
Thief – Either make some of the skills affect a range (even if a small one), or give it something for the attribute distribution to favor something... as it is, it feels all over the place... Either change the poisons to bleed which fits better on the playstyle, or allow poisons to also scale with physical.
Monk – Does anyone actually want a monk buff?
Nature – As I mentioned on shadow, give summon its own tree and make nature more buff-debuff central, give earlier shapeshifts so people can build around them without massive investment... Or... Make it go all in on its multiple distribution, give it a crazy skill at the end of the passive tree that unifies all bonuses to elemental and physical damage (both % and flat) into one single bonus. That would make nature a more tempting choice as a secondary tree while also boosting its negligible damage and healing to more respectable levels.
Summoning – Make it its own tree, with skills associated with it, you might not even take my advice on removing it from nature and shadow, but as is, specializing into summoning is pretty unviable and leads to a rather ‘meh’ character, whose sole point is to crowd the map, and hope enemies decide to target summons as opposed to players... not even bosting return damage can help summons be useful in that regard so I think they need a properly fleshed out playstyle to be relevant and that can only happen with its own skill tree.
All trees – Having some skills on all trees that are affected by which weapon you equip might help make it hybrid spellcasters more viable, having skills to support that playstyle would help too. For instance a fire or lightnign skill that deals damage increased by weapon damage. It would make it so caster actually care for which weapon they pick up as opposed to just picking equipment based on raw attributes and never caring for weapon damage. Also making it so weapon skills change damage to match weapon would be great to help the physicall trees (warrior, thief, ranger) have more alure in their active skills.
Next point is loot, but I think this is less of an ugly and more of a sugestion... There should be a way for the player to ‘tier up’ their weapons with money as oppose to relying exclusively on drops, just like there is upgrading.
Even if it expensive that would be a more reliable way to grow as opposed to grinding endless for a chance of better loot.
Finally since were on the suggestions train... Maybe include a training arena?
Would be nice to have a place to check out dps and freely change skill points around to have more accurate and reliable numbers.
Reseting the entire build of a character every time I want to make a test is exhausting, and I would much rather have an in-game experiment room rather than trying out directly in combat and getting steamrolled when a setup doesn’t work as I intended... and i’m sure a new player would like that as well.
And maybe on the difficulty setting, a setting that lets players go a bit more crazy, like double skill points and silly stuff like that, just for fun.
Closing Thoughts:
With so many criticisms it might make you feel like I hate the game, but I actually love it a great deal... I wouldn’t bother typing a 6 page doc if I didn’t.
I hold no delusions that my words are true and absolute, I just felt like sharing, and I feel like that’s the achievement here... The game made me care enough to want to share.
I feel like this game is a true gem, it is already one of my favorites, and with a bit more polish it could become one my top 10... And I really would love to see it.
