Absolutely loved the demo, was so excited for the full release. I also like some of the changes they made like reworking the skill trees. However, I can't support their decision to lock skills in the skill trees behind levels and at the same time make grinding levels way too time consuming. The replayability of this game was already questionable in the demo except it was reasonable since it's not the full game. Now I can't use the fun skills on characters I like before suffering through countless unfun and brainless hours of grinding just to unlock the level cap for these skills. This combined with the time locked daily missions, which i don't feel strongly about, this almost feels like a live service at this point. Not even thinking of maxing our characters to 50 because it's 100% not going to be rewarding nor worth it. I can't recommend this game because of this new time consuming predatory rework, except if you don't care at all about skills and just want to do co op.

Having a demo that has different game systems than the release version available a week beforehand is a bit like deceptive advertising as the purpose of a demo is to get to try before you buy

Maybe it is just me, but the grinding in this game seems excessive. There are a total of 8 characters, and to unlock the full potential of each character you need to reach level 60. And have the "dust" available to unlock skills. Which is fine, seems to be typical now days. But then I realized you have to level up each character individually. That is just too much for me. Game play and artwork isn't bad. But the grind kills it for me. I play a game for fun. And grinding is not fun.

My UberEats order cost more than this and didn't give me anywhere near as much enjoyment. The negative comments were about the grindy game progression. When I first booted it up, I could see the daunting amount of unlocks available but I personally didn't have an issue with it after enjoying my first run immensely. The devs still ended up addressing all those concerns and sped everything up a ton (this game has had two hotfixes in the two days since release, as of writing this review...). They also added back the ability to respec, which was another early complaint. Personally, I've never had any kind of crashes or optimisation issues; however, I have a fairly high-end PC and have only played single player. Incredible response by the devs in such a short amount of time, for an incredible game that has currently given me a value of $2 per hour, a cost-per-hour that will continue to decrease as I'm bound to continue playing.

This is a fake review I guess. I had 72 hours in the Prologue version of this game and so I had to buy it, felt like I owed it to the devs on the one hand and was really excited what they had in store for us... Honestly: There is like extra 2 or 3 mechanics/memories I enjoy (Lizard is a nice idea and more characters with different playstyles is obviously great). The game is good and the new map environments do look genuinly amazing. I mean I had spent so much time with it already, so I guess it is worth the money as well if I was a new player. But actually honestly, if this was the Prologue version, I think I wouldn´t have spent that same time with the game. I unforunately have to agree, despite the rabid dog fans of this game (it caters to league of legends players after all so nothing else is expected) but the grind system is basically busy work. You can´t play the higher difficulties of the game, not because of your abilities, but because you don´t have the stats. The Prologue may have done much less and simpler things but the new system also barely adds anything interesting. It´s a roguelite for the hell of it. Most stats are basic statstick things, not something that customizes the playstyles. The worst part of that is probably the "improvements" to the basic skills. A lot of work went into that clearly, but IF I were to find something useful, I basically get rid of 80% of the basic skills the first chance I get. The new memories added might be fun for one playthrough to try it out...before you realize "oh yeah this is horrible to use against certain enemies so I will never use that skill again" and that is about all of the new memories added apart from a handful. Even worse, because of how many skills there are now, it is simply harder to find the useful ones. Many of them don´t work together. There is usually no good synergies, so you basically always want to take the same few. And what is the height of it, is that you find a lot of memories that sacrifice current health without finding a reliable way of healing. So unless you already have a way to heal, you lock even more skills away because it is completely unviable to use those otherwise since they don´t interact with barriers or invulnerability. Basically: Memories are the meat of the game and they are not any better than they were a year ago in the Prologue version. Essences...got completely forgotten. I don´t even know if they worked on them at all since then. Things I would have wished for: Some secrets, maybe extra pathways or secrets nodes you could find with explorations on the map, maybe some things you could only reach with certain skills. Something that rewards exploration or observation. Some way to change the map layout. Some way to break the essence limit on skills with some penalty. Some way of equipping the same essences multiple times with a penalty (suddenly so many more builds would be viable). Some more enemy variety for the third world. Some ways to change the base element of memories. A FRIGGIN STORY (literally everything they have in that regard was already in the Prologue so they didn´t work on that at all in the last year). I get that MOBAs don´t have a story, but if you wanna be a roguelite I expect at least something to unlock beyond the starting sequence. Yeah, none of that. Meanwhile they made the game actively worse with enemy tracking on ranged attacks where you now need to actively spam dodges. Sounds sensible? Yeah...but it is neither more difficult nor more fun this way. Just let me learn how to path instead of forcing me to spam dodges. In the Prologue I had a fully decked out build before the world 3 boss, now I can be happy if I find enough useable stuff for two skills and then only half of their essences are even leveled. And like said - with more trash stuff I have even less ability to play builds I want to build. Infact, some runs you can just give up if you stand around in world 2 with a hand full of trash and know you will not get anything going before the enemies scale beyond you unless you play on the lower difficulties. And while yes, stacking health with cold essence was an amazing exploit in the Prologue - in a full game release I am expecting them to do something more than basically trying to get you to wait 5 seconds between attacks for "optimal play". Another sign that no work was done on the essences in the last year. Speaking of difficulty...the game is not hard. If you play on nightmare you have some ability to make the game harder for yourself with lucid dreams, but that is basically self punishment, not the game giving you a challenge. I almost had beaten Nightmare after 4 hours just because I got one working build and then you roll your face over the keyboard. Guess what, it was the same build I played in the Prologue already just in worse. In return, sometimes you simply get worse maps that allow for less exploration because of a bad layout or putting a curse shrine right in front of the boss or putting all upgrade wells on one side of the map. And the rewards...well if you play single player you constantly have to reroll Ko-op missions. Why? Curses (the potent and intense ones) are not difficult challenges, they are straight up run enders. (oh cool I can´t move without taking damage that goes through shields - oh cool I can´t use my abilities without taking damage before shields get activated - oh cool I run into extra challenge maps while I´m cursed with some impossible combination like no dodging and ambush) Actual damage numbers are completely arbitrary, as you do not have a compendium at your disposal, so you do not know how much damage your skills will actually do, the shown numbers are more suggestions. Visual clutter like Hunter threat level ground effects overlapping each other despite being oneshot abilities. Final boss hitboxes not matching his visuals in the second phase. And appearently there is shady stuff going on with device observation in the EULA as well and the optimization is mostly ass. For example when you don´t have the shader running on highest setting, suddenly the whole forest will start to flicker - no wonder they gave a seizure warning, just not the way they were expecting it. So yes, buy the game. At least with a 30% discount it´s still worth it. But I am disappointed. I had literally more fun in the Prologue version of this. Any anticipation for extra content I had was basically canned within hours. No new story, no new interesting builds, half of the unlockables are busywork or useless, builds are less flexible despite more memories and new mechanics were basically not added. I´m just disappointed over the last year of waiting and will change to positive once I get over that feeling. But its still fine I guess *sigh* It could have been so much more tho....

Why Cooldowns in this game is so high when you have such low skills slots... It may get better later on? idk, but this game feels really bad at start and also bad decision in lock classes behind challenges that will take some time to complete, i didn't like any of the 2 starters or the 1st to being unlocked, which sucks. The amount of grind to upgrade and unlock things seems very excessive. Don't want to waste too much time in a game to find out that maybe it gets better later on, it should be way better right away.

Dev's please allow the group to vote on kicking a member from the party rather than the leader having all the power. Playing a 40-50 minute run just for the leader to AFK on a boss fight, having loot on the floor or even taking 5 minutes at each augment choice literally takes the fun out the game and traps 3 people. Also if the leader quits or randomly kicks you lose everything no EXP?? Come on these are basic things re-assign a leader or make sure you get the exp you earned. Having this multiplayer option brings so much more play time and enjoyment to what is an already enjoyable game so please don't let something like this destroy it.

Unfortunately i have to give this game a negative review. During my first couple of hours of gameplay it became abundantly clear that this game is not in fact a test of reflexes and strategy, but mostly reflexes. The very first boss is an annoying pos that constantly gap closes into you and the moment you get any reprieve to attack him in melee he starts summoning orbs denying you any chance to deal damage until he starts his stupid gap close phase again. There is this strange trend in games where boss fights are learning and reflex exercises that are entirely unfun but somehow focus of games with clearing the 5-9 stages before him a complete afterthought and i'm not here for it. Sorry. That being said i had no memory or crash issues in the 3 attempts i did. So there's that.

This game has cured my boyfriend and I of our League of Legends addiction. Now we are addicted to Shape of Dreams. No ragrets.

I'd really want to like and recommend this game but I can't.

GAME BALANCE IS TOTAL CANCER.

In 21 hours I've never seen someone beating the final boss respecting its mechanics. NORMAL DIFFICULTY BTW. The only viable builds able to finish the game are total cancer overhealing cheese. If you can't heal 400+ hp per second you won't beat the game. Those builds basically facetank all damage neglecting anything outside of using dodge to avoid 1! out of ~30 attack moves of the boss. This is the main and major flaw of the game. There are also some minor issues like: Inconsistent drops through the game: sometimes you have enough upgrades, other time you barely get stuff for your build to function properly. Boss attacks are really hard to avoid constantly (therefore, there is a major flaw I describe above). Lagging and stuttering in COOP mode.

A poor attempt at a PvE League of Legends rip-off using some of the world's most retarded art decisions and game mechanics I've ever met in a "roguelike" game. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to get hurt from a campfire when you're visiting the merchant?! Were all the moves and descriptions written by a woman? Seriously, there's a wall of text for each character and what they do. The learning curve is insanely long, tedious and no fun because nobody has the time to wait for your sorry ass to read the Bible of text that's being presented to you inside a freakin' gem/crystal/shard/memory/flicker or whatever you want to call it. Stop reinventing the wheel. Memory haste? Just call it cooldown reduction for what it really is. Sheesh!! If you're that obvious at ripping off other games, stop trying to be unique with some carefully constructed words that sound dope and thematic to the game that has zero story and campaign progression. Characters you unlock suck donkey schlongs because the difference between ranged and melee classes is so big that you're kinda forced to play ranged if you want to survive or have fun (it's not allowed here). Got this game for 10€ and it's worth just that amount. No more, no less. Paying full price for this is a scam.

Disclaimer: I have mostly only played Nightmare difficulty with 4 modifiers on, with only a few games on lower difficulties thanks to them boring me. Introduction: Shape of Dreams is a downright incredible game, and one of my most anticipated games of the year, ever since I played the demo that came out a few months ago. I was drawn to it by the extremely smooth MOBA controls, good animations and places for skill expression along with the high difficulty of it, which really sets it apart from its competitors in the Action Roguelike genre. While it is obvious that most of the characters and memories in the game are almost 1:1 copies of League of Legends characters or a mishmash of them, from Mist being Fiora, with the Lunge, Parry and vital procs as her memories and passive to Lacerta having the Lucian passive and Graves ult, Singed's poison trail being a memory in the game, and so on, so forth, that doesn't detract from the gameplay. I'd even say that the above contributes heavily to the gameplay. The main downside of League of Legends is having to deal with the toxic player base, having to play a PvP game, and having to sit in queue, and Shape of Dreams solves all of that with a bunch of extremely inspired Korean/Chinese developers who clearly know what they're doing. Pros: - Extremely tight and difficult gameplay The game can be considered quite difficult, to the point where it can get harder than Hades and Ravenswatch easily, providing a good challenge for players whilst remaining customisable. Modifiers are in the game to either make your journey easier or harder, or to just put a twist on it, from Healing Shrines only granting Dream Dust, every enemy being a Hunter, so on, so forth. - Engaging Bossfights The bosses are genuinely enjoyable to fight, with interesting mechanics that really stand out whilst providing a tough challenge. Getting killed by a boss is normally a case where the player can clearly see where they messed up, instead of having it be through bad luck. For the final boss, the developers clearly took some inspiration from bullet hell games/the infamous Terraria Calamity mod with one of his phases, making for a difficult challenge to end your loop. - Good Customisation The new rune system that came out with the main game is extremely good, allowing you to build every character exactly how you like them, from ensuring that you're able to snowball your run with Gold and Dream Dust generation to being able to scale well as you level up to changing how your characters play by modifying their abilities! Cons: - Stardust Grind This downside has been addressed to be more manageable through a hot-fix, but it is still a decent problem. Even if you're optimising Stardust gain and playing with a ton of Lucid Dreams(modifiers), it's still only about 200-300 Stardust a run with the 1-2 quests that you'll complete along the way. That's not sufficient to max out a basic skill, so you'll be at it for quite awhile, especially since the game introduced the Deja Vu feature after beating a run that allows you to take a memory/essence into your next run, costing a whopping 180 Stardust for a Epic memory or essence. I feel that this encourages you to stick to a character and 'main' them instead of being able to branch out much, as you'll be spending most of your stardust on a character's unique perks that can only be used on them instead of the common ones, due to them being oriented towards the character's strengths. - Mastery Grind and how this links to character viability Unfortunately on the highest difficulty, plenty of characters aren't viable until they have enough mastery and stardust to get upgrades, typically around level 30, which is around 10 runs after the buff to mastery gain. This holds plenty of characters back, and can cause players to drop a character after not having fun with them (E.g, Shell and Aurena are extremely weak pre-mastery, and much stronger once they get the perks that they require, such as being able to reset your dodge cooldown on a kill as Shell.) Every character has a nigh essential perk that's stuck in their higher levels, causing some frustration when it comes to being able to view the perk and just *know* that the character could be more viable in your hands if you could have it. - Lack of healing/sustain on some characters On some characters, they feel more RNG based due to not having consistent healing and/or shielding to keep up with the hoards of enemies the game sends your way on higher difficulties along with the chip damage (The fire world's enemies, the arrows in the Lotus world, etc) This can cause them to get chipped down and punished hard, especially when Nightmare difficulty punishes any healing that they *do* get by cutting it in half. When playing as a team, getting Mass Protection is almost essential with how much it helps everyone to avoid taking too much chip damage. Unfortunately, this also forces the player to prioritise certain memories. For example, as Mist, it's difficult to run the "Priorite" passive, as the default passive allows you to avoid so much chip damage with its shielding. If I wanted to run Priorite, I would have to plan out most of my build around it, taking Ice Shield, Frostbite, and so on to ensure that I could survive on Nightmare + modifiers, to the point where I would likely do more damage by just running the default passive. - Certain areas too cramped Certain zone maps are definitely too cramped, ensuring that it's very difficult to dodge enemy attacks with how many are piled up in one area. This is especially damning in the Lotus world and Naraka, where the tight corridors and single arenas almost ensure that you'll be taking some heavy hits. And when the Naraka mobs have heavy stuns and the Lotus world has heavy damage on their skillshots, it's extremely punishing in those areas, especially when the hunt is on with the meteors or the extra enemy modifier is on. This forces the player to prioritise shields even further to avoid getting one-shot due to taking damage pretty much being mandatory, especially on the first loop where you won't have a full assortment of I-Frames. Closing Comments: Overall, Lizard Smoothie has done an excellent job in bringing League of Legends to the action roguelites genre, and I'll see myself playing this game for a long time, much longer than its competitors in Ravenswatch, Risk of Rain, Hades, etc. This is especially due to the Co-Op feature which allows me to introduce the game to all my friends. While there are flaws like the hunter meteor still being overtuned and others that I have already mentioned, the core gameplay is just so compelling and addictive that I can't put it down, in all honesty. I hope that the devs are able to fix these minor issues and add more difficulty to the game along with more memories, perks and essences to further encourage experimenting with builds. More content would also be appreciated, from an alternate final boss or alternate bosses like the one that you can get for activating all the altars in the Lotus world. It's key that they don't go down the road of artificial difficulty. I would hate to see Shape of Dreams lose the charming skill-based gameplay that it has to be replaced with a "kill everything on the screen before it can kill you" simulator like some other Action Roguelites. The game is already pushing this barrier in the higher difficulties where damage and heavy shields are key over anything overly unique, and essences which can only proc every 10 seconds along with essences which rely on the enemy staying alive for more than a second are worse than the flat damage ones. A button mash simulator isn't what Shape of Dreams should become in my opinion, especially when the demo was such a tight experience of exhilarating skill-based gameplay where I no-hit all of the bosses. My curator group!

Demo was great except for limited content to play through, which is expected. Full release seems to have a good amount of content, and the characters are decently fun. Down vote is simply because they made the progression system extremely grindy for no reason, as if people are going to play a roguelite of this size long enough to unlock even a fraction of it. Devs are delusional, this is a game you play for a week with your friends and then stop until a big update. Literally feels like a live-service game without a cash shop.

Absolute grindfest, was so excited for this game, will probably play more, but what the devs did is deceptive, and it's only purpose is gating players that came from the demo with HOURS UPON HOURS of progress, and double gate them with another system that even if we have money to buy upgrades we can't because we need to grind again for "mastery levels" in order to even unlock the meta-upgrades (which there are a bajillion more now than in the demo). This felt wrong and literally like the devs were laughing in our face all the time. Until they change some of this aspects, I'm sorry but I can't leave a positive review.

A new addition to the GOAT collection, Game of the year, 10/10 - A overall perfect game! This is nothing short of a masterpiece, I cannot recommend it enough - a must-play! Probably the best game release for the last couple of years, especially for the price to value conversion. One of the games, where I'll be reaching thousands of hours, and still not be bored with it.

For a game made by a bunch of furries who play league of legends, it's about as clunky and poorly balanced as league of legends.

The demo was a lot of fun, but the release is a different game. I enjoyed the demo a lot more than this release. Difficulty has sky rocketed. Frequent 1 shot deaths even on lowest difficulty. Low or none dodge/movement speed bonuses available, rare even when present. Performance is bad. 4070ti and i9 14k - Cannot play without low frame rate majority of the time. Have to reduce graphics to lowest settings. Bosses have been massively buffed. Unable to move/dodge frequent 1 shot kill spam AoE powers. Maybe a bug, but some bosses insta-gib the entire screen. I should have refunded while I had the chance. EULA is also very sketchy.

There is a issue that after a run I got disconnected and lost all the exp, i have already expeirence this issue for two runs, which is more than 3 hours, if this issue isn't fixed i ain't opening this game again.

The progression system feels unrewarding and frustrating. You gain tiny stat boosts between runs, but each attempt still starts you back at zero with barely noticeable improvements. Success depends too heavily on RNG - get the wrong skill combinations and your run becomes a slog. Get lucky with good synergies? Great, until you hit a random boss with unfamiliar mechanics and lose everything to one mistake. The real kicker is you might not see that same boss again for ages, so there's no chance to learn and improve. It's this uncomfortable middle ground where the meta-progression is too weak to feel meaningful, but losing your run progress still stings. The game has potential but needs better balance between RNG dependence and player agency. Right now it feels more like gambling than skill development.

Even with the day 1 patch it is WAAAAYYYY too grindy to unlock characters, skills, stat upgrades, etc. Dash cooldown needs to be lower, as it is impossible to dodge attacks from some bosses that spam AOE attacks. Overall the action for the game is great and with a few tweaks (mainly progression) it should be better.

Didn't like it. It's heavily derivative roguelite arpg thing that you've seen a million times before, albeit with flashy looking AI-looking graphics. Big wall of metaprogession for fun things like atk +2/4/8/12 and unlocking characters. I've played this game over and over in different games. Multiplayer is about all it does new as far as I can tell. Also stop putting anthropomorphic creatures in games. Thank you.

This game seriously lacks optimisation, its a joke. The performance is so bad that my friend who has a system that is well above recommended specs crashed at the final boss, losing all progress. I have a higher end set up, using a 5080 with an i9 13th gen, yet I still experienced stutters in the new locations. The demo is a better experience. Cannot recommend this game until this is fixed.

This game lacks optimisation, its a joke. The performance is so bad, that my friend who has a system that is well above recommended specs crashed at the final boss, losing all progress. I have a higher end set up, using a 5080 with an I9 13th gen and still experienced stutters in the new locations. The demo is a better experience. Cannot recommend this game until this is fixed.

This game is not worth $30. As of time of this review the game is too grindy as stated by other reviewers. All the currencies in the game could costs half the amount and that would still not fix the grind issue. Because the currencies costs so much experimentation of builds feels impossible for both new and demo players. Gold drop rate is too low that the early/mid game shop feels useless. Memory Dust drop rate is so low that you cant even level up anything till very late into runs. Breaking skills into memory dust gives too little back even with !8% more refunded. Runs take too long around 40mins per run on higher difficulties. The cursed rewards are so bad most of the time you are getting nothing from them and getting debuffed. The time gates are awful. The barrier of entry for new players will be miserable even with the current hotfixes. (They need the ability to dodge easier). There are too many channel skills in the game now in a game where you have you dodge or explode. I really liked the demo and want to see this game succeed but the full game feels off as of now.

When multiplying and people using Bismuth to spam her Pure Soul skill at late game, its basically unplayble I cant even move and my screen just freezes. By the time i can move, its either I die or the map/boss is cleared. 09/15 Played a run with friends for 4 hours and somehow our host got dced and lost all the progress and we cant go back to the progress, now i hate this game for wasting my time. Not coming back now