Combat loop of Vampire Survivors.
Upgrade/Meta progression of Hades.
Looting/Item management of Path Of Exile.

If any of these aspects even remotely peaks your interest then you better slam dunk this bad boy into your library ASAP, cause this ♥♥♥♥ is straight fire.

This game is like dad coming home with milk instead of drunk

Review after completing all achievements currently in early access in November 2024. I'm about 40ish hours in, but I didn't really start even looking at the achievements until playing for a decent amount. They are actively adding more to the game while it is still in early access.

This game is really for folks who liked vampire survivors but wish it was a little more meaty. The vampire survivors comparison is really on the nose. However, in vampire survivors you find weapons and upgrade them during the mission. In this game you will gain god powers similar to Hades and upgrade them in the run. You will only lock into 3 actual gods per run plus some passive benefits from the fates. Each god has a theme, so Summer will be doing fire stuff while there is also an earth and lightning god as well. You'll get to choose a new power or upgrade an old one once per level up, and there are typically around 40 level ups per 20 minute run. There does not seem to be an upper limit on how far you can level a single skill, but I have not really pressed the system to find one.

One way this differs from vampire survivors is that each character has a slightly different attack and moveset. Like, one character is an archer who's main attack shoots arrows, while another is a rogue who just stabs things up close with a knife. Each character has a skill tree that is unique to them that is leveled up outside of the run based on bosses killed during the runs. The characters all have different limits on how many slots they have for summons or strike abilities etc. So each character can be pretty different from the others if you want them to be.

In addition to that, you will also find equip-able items that can be used from run to run in a similar system to Diablo. Items come in common, rare, epic, mythic, and unique rarity levels. They are randomly rolled, and you will get a LOT of them, especially if you are doing well. I actually find this a little annoying as inventory space is limited. Sometimes during a run I have to pause and drop things I don't care about to pick up other things; which is a bit tedious. The game does have a loot filter so that you can just stop seeing common or other tiers of loot if you choose to do so after a certain point.

So if it wasn't clear from all of the above, you can buildcraft pretty well in this game.

As for the actual runs, its about what you would expect. At this point there are two acts in the game with intent to add more. Act 1 is a sort of forest theme and Act 2 is a desert theme. Each act has unique monsters and bosses. Inside the acts you will also find shrines that grant run-specific bonuses when interacted with. The bonuses are varied so that they can be a small pile of gold or +44% attack speed for this run. Typically you will try to find shrines during the run. Each run is 20 minutes long with bosses coming at time-based breakpoints. They recently added in a feature to increase the difficulty and randomize some of the enemies in Act 1 (and improve the loot) which helps keep it interesting.

Outside of the actual run there is a Darkness system which is a lot like Heat from Hades. You can pump up the difficulty on things like enemy health and accuracy to improve the drops. That system caps on providing benefits around 30 Darkness. It can go up significantly from that if you want to just push yourself.

Overall there's a lot to like for the low asking price. I certainly got my money's worth.

Fun game with some terrible boss designs that really make it not fun for melee characters

Tried it out bc some friends recommended but after checking it out I didn't vibe with the gameplay. I knew it was a survival/bullet hell but I'm used to my bullet hells being kind of fast-ish, the game felt progressively slow and I got bored. I read some of the patch notes and it turns out they turned up the difficulty when releasing act 2, and also slowed the game down. As someone who wanted to get into the game, I'm not invested and I'm returning it, but I may come back in future updates and keep this one on my radar. Rn this game feels like a mix between wanting to be a 2D dark souls survival and a hades roguelite mixbreed. I didn't explore too much of the build variety so I can't say I got the full breadth of what the game has to offer.

The developers of this game took the only good thing from Hades (Dialogues and character interactions) and mixed it with actually decent gameplay. And it turned out to be really good.

UPDATE after 5 hours played
There are 2 things in this game that seem like they were implemented SPECIFICALLY to annoy the player and induce unfair deaths.

First thing is the moment when you are surrounded by an unpassable barrier and swarmed by hundreds of exploding slimes. What is the purpose of this? On certain characters, it is nearly impossible to survive this "challenge" without losing at least half of your health bar. You need to have some specific upgrades that are good at dealing with tightly packed swarms of enemies, and if you don't, you have very slim chances of success. I see no point in this "mechanic" and I think that at least the unpassable barrier should be removed, so the player has some chances to escape.

And the second thing, archers, and especially homing archers. WHY? The screen is already littered by innumerable numbers of projectiles, enemies, your own attacks, casts and much more. Why do we need a type of enemy that shoots a tiny, 3 pixel wide projectile that can travel across 2 screens, home in on you, and still deal a HUGE amount of damage? This just harms the overall experience, this enemy type should be completely reworked or even removed. I think it can be fixed by adding a long attack warning indicator, like those the gargoyles have when they do their charge attack.

The game still needs A LOT of balancing, changes, new mechanics and more. I will continue to monitor this game, but if these two things are not reworked in the near future, I don't think I will return to this game anymore.

I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this game after the initial 1.5 hours.

+ The presentation is stunning.
+ Music and sounds are okay, but nothing spectacular.
+ The controls feel smooth

- The visuals get in the way of understanding what’s going on.
- I do not feel like I’ve progressed in terms of the character’s power.
- After multiple deaths, I still more or less die at a similar point (either I’m missing something, or the progression is grindy).
- The third character is outright terrible to play and obnoxious as hell.
- Items are ornamental at best so far—I can’t feel that they do much.
- While the gods' characters are cute, the writing is embarrassing.
- I still have no idea why "the death must die."

I was super excited by the premise, but right now, for me, it’s a 4/10.

Game is forgotten by DEV

Probably the weakest bullet heaven game I've played so far... and surely the worst that I've paid for.

The game tries so hard to make you think it's not taking itself seriously that it crosses the idiocy borders with literally every piece of dialogue - obnoxiously cringy character lines ended with EMOTICONS or phrased like "who tf are u", monsters "shouting" some nonsense in form of text bubbles every few seconds, angsty and/or literally gut wretching with embarrassement "introductions" from "gods" that give you their powers and so on.

The game visually is supposed to be a mix of medieval and gothic, but... the soundtrack is predominantly synthwave, the "gods" that guide you are entities straight up from a virgins' dream of censored hentai encounters, and the third character that you unlock is an e-girl wearing stockings. I wish I was joking, but I'm not.

The sound effects add another layer of shortcomings - at this point I really don't know if it was supposed to be yet another "funny (in the mind of the creator) thing", but most of the fight effects sound like if they were taken from a "kitchen rumble soundpool"; what I mean by that - dying skeletons sound like a mix of paper and plastic being squashed, when the armored skeleton lords are defeated, they burst out with a sound of a f*cking beer can being opened??? And then, there are hordes of slimes, with corresponding "playing with the jelly" harmonics.

The gameplay itself is nothing captivating or satisfying. There's only ONE MAP. Random loot doesn't make up for lack of content. At this point there's literally nothing to keep you coming back for more. I'm serious, better go play Vampire Survivors again. Or anything else for that matter. You can waste your time in a way more pleasant way.

Overall, "Death Must Die" is devoid of innovative ideas or addicting core gameplay loop. All these things I've mentioned above account for an absolute lack of ANY coherent identity; this game is so full of "funny" (a.k.a. out of place) things, that it ultimately becomes a joke itself. I'm really patient with my games and try to give them as much chances as I can, but playing DMD I felt like my neurons are being damaged.

good game