Play through the campaign until lvl 35-40, then grind until 100 to finish the campaign... W T F...

At first glance (and to be clear that's all this game really is so far) this shows a lot of promise, but when actually stepping back and looking at the roadmap, there are some red flags. I am basing this EA review on what the game is right now, as in the value of buying right now, and on what sounds like is planned on the roadmap. Content right now is extremely minimal, and the content that has been talked about on the roadmap is just as minimal. This could change over the course of EA, and I will adjust this review as needed, but for right now there's not enough in the game and it seems like a bit of a risk to buy. I'll start with story. There essentially is no story. It says an irrational story, but really it's just a few quick lines of text leading you into the same map over and over. The current "act" is the graveyard, where you run what could very well be a procedurally generated version of the same tileset 16 times in a row to fight the same 3-5 enemies each time. The "story" that leads you through this is just a fetch quest with a moving target, you need to get some "important" item from the graveyard, so naturally the first thing you need is a shovel. You spend several maps looking for the person who owns the shovel, then several maps looking for the shovel, then several more looking for a way to repair the shovel, each separated by essentially a single line of "quest dialog" like "Haha, I forgot it was actually over in this other area." After which you instantly return to the graveyard and do another version of the map. It is minimal to say the least, even by ARPG standards, and there is no indication that the current Act 1 is just a placeholder. Story usually isn't that important to most people playing these games though. The issue is more variety, you have to go through the campaign to unlock game modes and progression devices, and act 1 is a single environment you do over and over fighting the same enemies over and over. There is also no indication that this will be changing, instead it sounds like on the roadmap each new act being added will consist of a single environment and 5 new enemies to fight on every level of that act. The act 2 environment is already in the game, it is called the prison and you can encounter the tileset in the current "endgame" mode, this tileset is even more repetitive than the graveyard. It consists of like a 5x3 block of rooms always in the same layout with a random locked door here or there forcing you to navigate it slightly differently each time you encounter it. It sounds like they will be adding 5 more environments over the next 2+ years for a total of 7. That sounds a bit sparse. Character customization, in some ways is decent, in other ways is essentially entirely lacking. The game takes a Diablo 3 approach where none of your decisions matter and there's no reason to make alts. In fact, you sort of can't make alts, there is no character creation in this game. You have 3 save slots, each save slot is progress independent and consists of all 3 classes that you can switch between at will. When you start a save you pick one of the classes to start with and after progressing through act 1 a bit you gain the ability to switch to the other two. As you level you gain stat points to place on a stat grid, these points can be instantly swapped to any other stat at any time for free, reaching certain threshold of one stat provides extra bonuses. As you use a skill you gain exp in it, 1 exp per use of the skill regardless of the level of enemies (or if you are even hitting an enemy, you can sort of AFK level a skill by holding it down on a map near an enemy that can't kill you), as you level a skill you unlock several tiers of exclusive upgrades that requires a resource essentially identical to exp that you collect from killed enemies. You can invest this skill exp into upgrades to strengthen skills of your choosing, swapping between these upgrades is also free and can be done anywhere, to get the exp back from the upgrades you need to talk to a NPC in town that takes a 10% cut, but this isn't worth it as it's pretty easy to max out every upgrade. There is a fair amount of "build" variety, combinations of skills and their upgrades, along with unique weapon effects, stat related effects, and future passive upgrades means you can take the same class and do many very different things with them. Since there is no motivation to start a new character to spend time building/playing these different options the replayability is extremely lacking which is generally the point of such build variety. Classes are also gender locked and the devs have said they don't plan to change that, if that is important to you. The focus of the game seems to be in the endgame grind, a system which isn't really in place yet so is hard to judge. The game allows you to craft "perfect" gear and upgrade it to a ridiculous degree which could take you hundreds of hours, but there seems to be little motivation to do so, it's mostly just incremental stat increases, and the idea of grinding the same 7 maps for hundreds of hours seems questionable to me. I did not run into any bugs or crashes, seemed pretty stable to me, but it sounds like it did have some issues running on higher resolutions and I'm not sure if they have been entirely fixed. The art style is alright, very low rez pixel art, minimal animations and no directional sprites (there's just a left/right facing sprite that is mirrored), but if you like 2D art the game has a decent style and looks pretty good. The soundtrack is pretty amazing, reminds me a lot of Disgaea and actually got me playing some of that again recently. I can't recommend buying the game at this point, I pushed it as much as I could and got bored long before the 12 hour mark. There just not enough here to justify a purchase yet. If it's a concept you like and hope to see it do better, supporting the devs now may help with that, but I consider this one a bit of a gamble. It has done reasonably well so far, this may cause them to extend the scope of development and add more than is planned on the roadmap, but unless that happens I'm not confident it will ever be more than a casual little title with an excessive optional grind. Check back in a year or two and see how things have changed.

The game is by no means perfect, but it has kept me entertained for far longer than any other ARPGs like Diablo or Last Epoch.

better itemization and buildcraft than diablo 4

I really would like to recommend this game. There is a considerable amount of charm and creativity in the game's presentation, especially in the animations. Unfortunately, this does not extend to the underlying game systems. As of writing this, the current game version is 0.4.91bc with the last major update being the "Luxuriant Update". I won't go into specifics because I don't want to get bogged down by the details, but everything really feels like a big mess. There are a significant amount of passives for each of the abilities in the game that you can choose from and many of them are very creative and unique. However, they are so wildly different in both effect and usefulness that any synergies between them often feel accidental, rather than intentional. This is made even worse by the fact that some of the current strongest mechanics, such as "Inner Fire" stacks or the Soul Eating Mantle unique item, exist outside of any of the games classes or class mechanics, causing the actual classes to feel redundant or ancillary at best. These same problems extend to the weapon system in the game. In addition, many of the more creative weapons suffer from their unique effect not being scalable, causing them to quickly become useless. The stats in the game are no different, being a redundant and jumbled mess in their own right. They have crits in the game, but they also have "Ancestral Strikes" which proc OFF of crits. Crit crits, if you will. There's the base Raw Damage you can deal, but there's also Weapon Damage which is added together with your Raw Damage and becomes your Skill Damage. All three of these are different stats that can be buffed separately. This is to say nothing of Elemental Damage, which also affects your abilities. All of THESE stats in turn can be increased by investing points into the eight different attribute trees, which themselves are bizarrely redundant. For instance, the Zeal tree gives "+xx Max Mana" per point invested in the tree and will give you "Mana on hit" when you invest enough, but does not give you "+% Max Mana". However, the Willpower tree which gives "+xx Elemental Damage" per point DOES give "+% Max Mana" after enough investment. Boy, I hope you don't want "Mana Regeneration", because that's over in the Determination tree which buffs your elemental resistance. Why does the Savagery tree give percent based weapon damage while the Dexterity tree gives flat weapon damage? Who knows? I don't. As a last aside, I feel it prudent to mention that the base level 0 difficulty has a "+0%" bonus to enemy health and the max level 10 difficulty has "+20,000%". I want to like this game, I really do. I spent enough hours in the game to make a character that can do Wrath 10 Great Forge. The problems are just really too fundamental for me to recommend it to anyone else. I certainly enjoyed going through the story and I'm sure you would as well, but so much of the development time seems to go into these long-term goal "endgame" modes and progression systems, and the game just doesn't currently have the compelling foundation needed to support them.

i bought the game like 3 days ago and i have 14 hours played, im lvl 43 and loving ittttttttttttt! Edit: i may have a problem

Just don't buy it yet. People claims that this game can allow wide variety of builds but in reality it's simply wrong. Try check any endgame build in Youtube. 99% of those builds uses "shoot multiple bolts that penetrate, does fork, and bounce" setup. For unknown reason, the devs aren't aware about it. Suggesting a change in their discord will makes their whiteknights angry and makes them either calls you toxic person or says STFU this is still early access. On top of that, as of today we have spent 4 month from the release; there are basically no progress whatsoever other than "hotfixes". They "hotfixed" saying totem type skill are extremely powerful so nerfed it to no existent where basically nobody used it for meta builds. Some people were suggesting that why they had to nerf totem instead of one of most powerful setup didn't got nerfed at all, then the whiteknights just came nowhere saying "you are sad guy if you only enjoyed totems in this game". It's completely missing the point. Also, after 4 month of release we still got basically 2 maps. The negative reviews are real. You can't expect any content so far; you are basically play testing rather than enjoying. If you just want to have good old school hack and slash, just grab Chronicon instead. The game had very smooth updates and the dev was actually listening the community. It got very deep build variety and you can have fun for any builds. Edit: We have spent 4 month+ after initial release, and they are still working on "hotfixes" without adding any real content. Like other reviews says, there are basically 7-8 type of enemies with two maps. We know it's "early access", but I am not sure changing game balance at very, very early stage of development helps anything.

6 years of early access - and still boring. No dynamics in combat, uninteresting builds, just walking and clicking

Quite boring in the beginning overall and also got disappointed how boring were all of the specializations you unlock. Maybe they add more synergies in the end game, but for the most part each of the three specializations you have for each of the class just gives it one different active skill (like blink, turret or dash). Looking into all of the skills, potential end game synergies seem quite generic. Additionaly, repetitive maze-like environment is a let-down for sure too.

Maybe it gets fun and addicting later but I will never find out because during the first hour I got so bored from running to the graveyard for the fifth time in a row that I fell asleep.

Better than Diablo IV Better than PoE2

Game I think has potential to be good but the beginning was very boring. From lvl 3-10 or so, I just went to the exact same NPC at the left edge of the castle and kept doing the same boring maps on repeat for an hour. Not sure when you start getting some more variety but it felt like playing PoE if you never get off the starting beach and just play the entire campaign there.

Is the devs vision for me to have my screen flooded with materials? Can you not stack these all together or atleast let me click 1 button that automatically loots all of them at once? Or better yet just have them auto looted? Hello?

Too easy, too grindy, too slow, too talky. The mountains of unlocks work against them here, because they flood you with resources you cannot use because they require other resources that they don't give you until you grind for ages. You harvest slorm, which can be used to upgrade this massive tree of ancestral powers... except you can't, because they require ancestral stones that, as of an hour or so of play, they have not given me any of. Alternately, you can spend it on weapon upgrades... except you can't, because you have to kill hundreds of enemies with your same basic boring attacks so you can 'level up' the skill (which does nothing) in order to be able to spend these points to *actually* level them up. You crush pots for pathetic amounts of gold, which you can then spend on.... I don't know. Something, presumably. Eventually. Once you unlock the ability to spend currency to unlock things, which probably then just unlocks the ability to unlock the ability to let you buy actual abilities. It's just more mountains of needless grind for its own sake. You like gear drops? Yeah, they got those. You will get all kinds of boots and shoulders and chestpieces giving you such riveting choices as whether to get +35 hp and 0.5% attack speed, or +30 hp and some amount of some stat they don't explain and you don't notice, because it's probably on par with zero-freaking-point-five PERCENT attack speed. 1/200 increases to stats aren't even worth the text space to describe them. Zero serotonin drops all around, it's a total snoozefest looking through your gear page. Characters talk... and talk... and tell you to fetch protein shakes so they can exposition you some more, before running you across town to talk to some other guy. I'm fine with story, but if you can make it to the first actual fight in this game without spamming 'skip dialogue' (at least they let you do that), then kudos to you and your saint-like patience. They will then send you to some pathetically easy, short, unrewarding dungeon, before forcing you back to town for more talking. The fights are so easy that all of the time they spent making these pages-long upgrades (that you can't take anyway) seems extra pointless. I feel like this is the sort of game that tries to bait you into playing two hours before you can actually do anything fun or meaningful, so you're stuck with the purchase when you inevitably realize it isn't worth it. I'm onto their tricks. Solid thumbs down.

Game is completely broken, everything you do is a reason for it to crash, but it's ok right guys? it's just an early access, so it's fine for it to be literally unplayable, you just can't say they aren't trying, you have to be somewhat reasonable, right? i mean, they even gave us a million solutions regarding the black screen issue, which you can try them all and still not get the game to work properly. i won't refund the game because i still have faith in it(that somehow it will magically work again), but i can't recommend it in that state.

Wait on this one. There's not much to do in this game but kill the same 4 mob types... Same maps... Yes, it's very in depth but I dunno, it's so easy it's kinda boring. The graphics are amazing, they're going in the right direction with this one, if they keep at it it'll be great, as for right now It's samey and there's no learning curve to it. Not one boss/mob could touch you, everything is telegraphed, there's no challenge. Wait a while, then revisit this one. I only gave this a thumbs down because I really can't give this a thumbs up in good conscious. Curator Page https://store.steampowered.com/curator/27040334-DuhGamingSavage/

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuuKF2g4Vyw

What Bangs?

• The skill system has an insane amount of customization available. You get three classes with 8 skills that each of 8 levels of mods with 2-4 mods per level.
• This is over 200 different unique skill mods
• Dozens of different weapons per class
• Even in the initial release there is up to hundreds of hours of grinding that can be done to max out all the different characters/skills/weapons
• The story is just getting started but it’s a little quirky and funny and off to a great start

What Hangs?

• There is no multiplayer and a lot of people have expressed disappointment with that
• The combat early in the game feels really flat. It gets better as you unlock new skills and start to customize things, but I think it could be better overall
• There are about a half a dozen to a dozen enemies in the game right now. Their roadmap points out that they are going to be adding a lot more, but you definitely feel the repetitive enemies in the current version
• The merchant is unconventional and somewhat obtuse. You have to pay A LOT of money to be able to buy things, and even then the selection is like a bodega on its last legs.

fellas, this game really fucking blows I'm three hours in, it's slow I've done 22 levels of the same two tilesets and the same one set of enemies. None of my skills synergize with eachother, their talent trees don't even synergize with themselves. the devs were far too focused with whatever ~crazy~ builds you can do end game that they made the starting levels the most boring shit i've ever played i threw sticks for the first 14 levels until i could use the hookshot and whirlwind combo and now im stuck with whirlwind hoping i can level up this lance skill because you have to have a skill as your secondary for it to gain exp, even if its worthless early on The three specs I have as knight are worthless because I kill things instantly. They all involve mechanics that I have no chance of making use of because I guess my talent tree progression or gear isn't there yet. And Knight has some annoying meter that goes from 0-100 and spends itself so I have to constantly watch it to get small pointless damage projectiles that do jack shit on my whirlwind gear is a list of numbers, the talent tree seems absolutely pointless and impossible to parse. what the fuck is this game and how is it at 80%

Depressing and hopeless story that makes you want to crawl into a deep hole and cry? Nope. Whimsical and ironical story that cleverly pokes fun at the above? Yep. Sluggish, dawdling combat – just as one might expect from a pixel ARPG? Nope. Deliciously snappy and fluid combat – even in a pixel ARPG? Yep. 'Professional game development' from a AAA company? Nope. Surprisingly professional game development from a handful of devs? Yep. A massive, impressive, yet ultimately heartless world to explore? Nope. Several well-designed and delightful environments that eventually start to feel repetitive? Yep. A couple dozen meta builds, few of which are actually enjoyable to play? Nope. Dozens and dozens of viable builds, most of which are enjoyable to play? Yep. A fixed camera zoom that gives you a picturesque view of your character and also makes it impossible to actually play the bloody game? Nope. A reasonably good camera distance (after changing it in options) that allows you to, you know, see the enemies you're attacking? Yep. Loot? Yep. Lots of loot? Yep. Lots of loot you'll never use? Yep. Lots of loot you'll never use that can be filtered into materials which you'll later use to improve the actually good loot? Yep. Occasional loot that inspires a whole new way of building your character? Yep. A simple, intuitive way of modifying loot to make it perfect? Nope. An initially daunting but ultimately logical way of modifying loot to make it perfect? Yep. An obsessively grindy end game, which leaves you feeling that with the hours you've put in you could have cured cancer instead? Nope. An obsessively grindy end game, which leaves you feeling that with the hours you've put in you could have cured cancer instead, but then you wouldn't have found that sick legendary, and is cancer really THAT bad? Yep. Lightning Imbue Round: Best Reaper? Meticulous Primordial Sword of Resonating Thunder. Best hip thrust while casting an AOE spell? The Mage. Obviously. Bitchinest Ancestral Legacy moniker? Oppressive Cold Halo of Radiance. Bugs? A few, but no ant hives. Ant hives? Bees, man. Bees have hives. Baby's mama? First Torchlight. Baby's grandmama? Secret of Mana. Worth the price of admission? Emphatically Yep.

This is the Disgaea of the ARPG genre. You gain levels. Your skills gain levels. Your weapons gain levels. Your items gain levels. Wait, your weapons evolve? Uh, your levels gain levels? What, your critical hits can crit? Yup, and that's only a fraction of what the game is about and how it is smart and fun ! The story mode is quite short and humorous and only serve as an introduction to the Slormancer. It begins quite slow but give it two or three hours and then you won't be able to turn your computer off. There are an insane amount of possibilities inside the game, you can make any build you want and change very easily every time you are bored or find yourself lacking in power. You can reallocate every points spend, currency used in a few clicks and change from A to Z your playstyle. You can tweak every item you find, modifying stats, increasing its powers at your will to match your goals. And speaking of builds, each characters can go any any direction you want, each new weapon you get can basically completely change the way you will be playing! Knight with mana regen and elemental damage? Viable! Archer close combat with evasion? Viable ! Mage with heavy armor and thorns damage? Viable ! The possibilities are endless and the game, thanks to its weapon system, gives you general directions to follow, that is really smart! In most ARPG, you lock yourself into a stereotypical route and then you build around it. Here, it's the stuff you unlock which guide you in numerous surprising ways. I often found myself going down a way, only to find a new weapon, being amazed and changing my build and playstyle completely ! The game is basically as if you bought an ARPG like Diablo or PoE but it launches you into the endgame after 10 hours, but the endgame is massive because the game is constructed arount it ! And if you enjoy killing monsters and looting stuff and trying to make your dream builds work, you might be playing this game for a few hundred of hours, no less. These last years we saw a tremendous amount of games following the tendency launched by Vampire Survivors, simple games where you destroy hordes of monsters without needing to use more than two brain cells. Some of those games are great, but most are incredibly boring after a few hours because of the lack of thinking process while playing. ARPG have always been more stimulating because you have the same pleasure shredding loads of monsters but it also feels more rewarding thanks to the character building process. You aren't just mindlessly clicking on whatever upgrade the game launches at you, you are making impactful decisions and steering your game into the direction you chose. And that is what makes gaming really enjoyable to me. Having a goal, and getting there. Anyway, I digressed ! Excellent game if you like ARPG, character building, leveling up and endgame grinding hence my comparison this Disgaea at the beginning :)) You can feel the passion that has been fueling the development team for the genre here. Btw, it's a studio of two people, congratulations to them, it was worth it, true indie achievement ! (three if you count the compositer which made an excellent work with the music, I often find myself humming the melodies currently)

Every single use of an ability causes your character to perform a mini lunge which moves your entire camera. It likes being forced to play with omega screen shake permanently enabled.

The game is a little pricey, and feels pointless. I followed the main quest and soon enough you have nothing to do but grinding, and that's it, press the buttons as waves of enemies are defeated until the game starts having any challenge. I will play some more and maybe I will change my opinion, but only one boss has any noticeable mechanic, the whole game I just kept the button pressed and walked around. Still the game is well made, has some neat systems, but I think it fails grabbing the player long term while, at the same time, not giving that satisfactory feeling of closure when you finish the main quest, if I finished it, I don't even know, but the only thing I can do now is random dungeons for grinding, nothing else.

This was a pretty bad time. I know I only gave it 22 minutes, but I only needed 22 minutes. I started the game with one mediocre spell, a magic missile kinda thing, pew pew. It killed skeletons in 3-4 hits. When I gained a few levels it was faster. I gained a second spell after killing about 30-40 skeletons. Excited to finally press another button, to finally have some game play, something, with which I can take out skeletons in, what I hoped would be 2 hits! This powerful new spell, gained by killing an army of skeletons was.... worse.... Much worse.... it was really bad. Think the ray of disintegration in Diablo 3. But instead of doing a huge amount of damage in a ray in front of you, it does a tiny amount of damage. I couldn't move around to avoid the skeletons hitting me, I just had this second rubbish spell. Would it get better if I levelled? Probably.... but would it be fun to do that, with only the first left click spell in the game? No. It would not be a fun time. The game is trying to go for humorous rather than anything else and honestly I'm tired of that, but this is a me problem. Maybe you'll enjoy silly humour and bad jokes... I prefer things to be at least a little serious. I'm still not sure what a Slorm is, far as I can work out it's experience points, so, experience mancer? Either way, it wasn't the delicious slug piss beverage from Futurama.(Slurm) The character models do not change with armour or anything... disappointing, but expected. It's an indie game with sprites. I just really didn't like how the mage looked. I probably should have chosen another class, but despite being told I would be able to do that, I couldn't work out how to do that. I assume it's unlocked later, and I really didn't fancy replaying the start of the game. Honestly, I recommend against this game because I didn't like it. This is an extremely biased review. Because it is MY review. Maybe you'll enjoy it, then by all means, you should play it. But I won't be recommending this to anyone. I looked online and from what I can tell, this is yet another game that focuses on the end game. That seems to be the main excuse for the levelling to be a bad time. Early to mid game is going to be boring, because it's all about the grind to end game. And this game is most certainly a grind. There are other reviews with over hundreds of hours to find out they didn't like it. (I don't want to brag, but I only needed 22 minutes. That's 99 hours and 38 minutes faster. Should be a record or something.) If the game takes hours to get good, then the game is not good. You want the entry to your game to be as good a time as the exit. Give me a reason to keep playing. Give me a taste of what's to come, because maybe I'll get to "the fun bit" and hate that too. But most importantly, if it takes many hours to become fun, then that's many hours of... what? Not fun? Why would I spend hours of my free time doing something that isn't fun? Finally, I looked online about other classes. The mage is apparently the best choice for early game. Which is discouraging. Then the archer and finally the warrior, who tends to die quite easily. My suggestions for the devs? Add a bit more character customisation, even if it's just recolouring your character, it would've helped a lot. (I hate blue) I don't feel any like for these characters, maybe that comes later, after many hours... Do what you can to make early game interesting, or give a taster of what late game is like. Find out what people like about late game and see why they hate early game. Why does early game feel like a grind? Some games are mega grindy, but still fun. If the early game sucks, make it faster. Much faster. Clearly people don't enjoy playing it. Don't make people EARN the fun part, it's a game, it should all be fun. It shouldn't be work. Unfortunately I don't have many suggestions. Most of my experience with the game is googling stuff about it. My play of it was very short. I need to keep it short to get a refund and from what I'm seeing online, 22 minutes is basically the same as 2 hours, people say it's too short a time after 70 hours. I don't have 70 hours to spare finding out if a game is worth playing or not. That's silly. Sillier than the games jokes. I usually have a gameplay video with my reviews, but I was watching Deep Space 9 and didn't feel like pausing it. But thanks for reading my review... or for skipping to the end. Have a lovely day.

No release date after 2.5 years in early access .... He game itself if rather dull.

This is a tough one to review. I liked the game but ultimately it came down to the wasted time. I recommend waiting until this game is finished. I like the sound design and the visual feedback. It made the gameplay satisfying. I had a good time progressing through the story. Things seem like they've been done randomly all over the place. There is endgame content but the end of the story isn't finished yet. There's nothing in the codex to answer the many questions I have. It makes me wonder if they made this stuff up without writing it down somewhere. The endgame content forces you to play hardcore. You need to do certain things in order to progress but to do those things you must play without dying. It got old after the third or fourth time dying to something stupid and feeling like I wasted the time. Once I even got stuck in a door. Classic. There is simply too much gambling in the game for my tastes and this is the main reason I give it a thumbs down. I could either progress at a crawl or risk wasting up to an hour of time for greater strides. Item crafting costs a lot and depends almost entirely on luck. You might spend 3000 gold getting the stat you want or 1 million. The stat doesn't even make that much of a difference either. The items are pretty boring but that's expected at this stage. There are a lot of weapons but due to the cost of crafting and lack of mechanics to support changing builds there's no reason to use more than one or two of them.