best rouge like ive ever played, but im a fighting games fan, soooo

imagine if elsword was good

I would sum this game up as a 2D PVE Fighting Game/brawler, with a linear rogue-lite style presentation.

This is a very slick and satisfying side-scrolling beatemup, in the vein of Dead Cells. However, unlike Dead Cells, the levels are linear with no branching paths and no metroidvania elements, and there are ~10 characters you can choose from to start your run plus an extra DLC character. It is best played with a controller and performs like an absolute DREAM on my Steam Deck. If you're looking for a good side scrolling brawler to play on your steam deck with a healthy amount of replayability, I strongly recommend this title. You should at least get an hour of satisfying gameplay for each of the 20$ you spend on this title at base price, but the amount of enjoyment you get out of the title really depends on how interested you are in mastering the available characters and if you find them enjoyable to play so it may make sense to buy on sale.

You start out with a basic move set that varies wildly for each character - a unique passive, a signature skill that uses recharging mana, and a basic attack combo with ground, dash, charge up, and air variations. As you progress through a run you unlock "potentials" which buff your base damage while unlocking new attacks and combos or enhancing ones you already have. As a result, every character has a wildly different playstyle and feel from the others, and the same character can be played in different ways from one run to another. I found most of them very enjoyable to play, even the weakest.

In addition to potentials, you can also acquire passive buffs or curses, bonuses to max mp or hp, health recovery, and tactics which are additional elemental effects that can be applied to various actions and provide extra damage or utility - examples being, a fire tactic that makes enemies burn when you dash through them, a light tactic that causes nearby enemies to be blinded if you get struck, or an ice tactic that continuously summons floating icicles that attack and slow the nearest enemy automatically.

Once you either die or win a run, that character is given a rating based on your performance and acquired potentials and tactics. It allows you to save it, and from that point forward, when starting a new run you can choose up to two of your previous runs to "inherit", which gives you a watered-down version of its signature skill on a cooldown to use as a "legacy skill", a passive based on what character it was, and two of its tactics which you select at the end of your run. In this way, your previous runs act as a way to personally craft your future runs, guaranteeing certain tactics and gaining access to potentially synergistic passives from other characters.

All in all the gameplay feels slick, responsive, and fast paced. The brawling is very satisfying. The metagame isn't too grindy as long as you do story quests to get free character unlocks.

Pros:
- Excellent fast paced combat with tons of combos, synergies, and very interesting characters with distinct and entertaining play styles
- Lots of depth to upgrading tactics, attacks, and combos.
- Beautiful visuals and art style, with appealing character designs
- Lots of gameplay diversity and nuances to mastering each character.
- Interesting meta progression between mind upgrades, mind crystals, and inheriting skills/passives/tactics from previous runs
- Feels absolutely great to play. The cons and rough edges ultimately are minor, and heavily outweighed by the satisfying gameplay experience


Cons:
- runs will often complete too soon for you to fully enjoy all the powerful synergies and combos you have acquired. Game needs a way to loop runs or an endless mode of some kind.
- It seems there is a total of 7 or 8 different bosses, which feels a little sparse.
- Lots of poor translations and weird word choices for mechanical elements - "potential" for unlocking new moves, calling characters "Evotypes", shops are called "Exchange", unintelligible story segments that will just give you a headache if you try to parse all the technobabble and jargon. Many mechanics are unexplained or poorly explained. If you are a story focused gamer, look elsewhere.
- Learning curve is a bit steep, with it taking a while to figure out which potentials are the most important and which tactics are the most useful. This is worsened by the poor translations and inconsistent math - examples being, "Cold attack" tactic that gives "+40% damage to basic attacks" only giving 35 bonus damage to an attack that hits for 400 damage, or "100% health restore" restores 1 bar of hp per 10%, so 10 bars, not 100% of your current hp like you would think. However, sometimes percentage effects are accurate - such as tactic upgrades that increase the damage of the base tactic by a percentage. Needs consistency.

Areas that dev could improve:
- Make descriptions of percent bonuses mathematically consistent with their impacts.
- Add more levels, more bosses, and more characters
- Add an endless mode or the ability to loop runs
- Please buff Hibiki. His playstyle is so smooth and fun, but he really struggles to put out good damage. Many of his potentials are garbage.
- Some heroes have tons of potentials that are vital to their performance, so it feels like you never get enough upgrades to craft the run you want. Perhaps some of them can be combined. More opportunities for potential upgrades would be great, or longer runs, so characters can fully "mature".

I'm happy with my purchase and am glad to have a great time killer on my steam deck. An excellent game, despite a few rough edges and minor issues.