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.