Disappointing.

I bought this game after trying out the demo and expecting there to be more to it given the current "overwhelmingly positive" rating on steam. The game is bland. Every playthrough feels the same. Most of the characters have essentially the same attack (some variation of doing damage in a cone). Only the sorceress and the one with the dog stand out a bit for me, since one can use a bit more positional play with them.

The incremental impact of in-game upgrades is so small that they make no difference to the gameplay -- what you are doing feels the same whether it is minute 1 or minute 30 (e.g. one usually needs 4-5 upgrades in multistrike just to get a second projectile...). The abilities bring in a bit of much-needed variety, but their upgrades are only slightly better than the standard upgrades.

One can gather items to equip as one progresses. Some are decent, but I ended up staying with what I found in the beginning (mostly stacking block) because there was no incentive to change it really and it was good enough to clear all levels with any character (on agony too). The sense of progression in general is lacklustre in the game. Maybe things could still be changed, but it does not sound like the devs are planning to do so.

I come to this game after having played Vampire Survivors. VS is hardly a game (you just move around), but at least it is fun and has a sense of mystery (lots of things to discover). HoT has moving around and aiming, but it just feels tedious.

Feels bad man. I appreciate the style and vibe the devs are going for, but the gameplay is sour. So many better bullet heavens out there. Boring level up options (6% range, woo), Boring items (one item drop every like, ten minutes, "+10% Defense and Health", yay...), horrendous screen readability (I get hit by enemies more often just due to the fact that I couldn't see them for the spell effects, color palettes, and attack animations), poorly explained mechanics (half the stats change based on which character you pick and also per spell you pick up; you pick up temporary boons of which I have no idea what they do), Boring and unbalanced secondary spells (some do literally 20-30% of the damage of others over the course of a run), the list goes on.

Don't worry though, once per full mission you can send one of the two items you got that run up a well to use in future runs. That means you get to send up three pairs of gloves even though you've been playing for two hours and you already have better gloves in the first place, because RNG. Then you have to pay a full run's worth of metacurrency collected to actually use it. Great first-impression experiences there...

Always crashing on SD. No save/load option so if it crashed you're back to square one. Tons of wasted minutes!