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The best parts of Slay the Spire and Monster Train mashed together, with an added really cool exploration system. The variety of builds (and viable ones at least at the lower ascension levels I'm still at) is incredibly refreshing and I've been able to do a different build every run so far even 25 hours in.

If not for the day 1 DLC with content in it leaving a sour taste in my mouth, I'd call it a must have for anyone interested in roguelites

Pros: A big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff
Cons: There's actually only 4 dimensions

Surprisingly fun. Mix of something like Squad TD and Nexus wars maybe?

Even the tutorial is a buggy pile of ♥♥♥♥, equally likely to let you continue on the step you're doing, or suddenly revert to the previous step and decide somehow you didn't do something correct. Have fun spending another 5 minutes backtracking to just be able to get to the point where you can redo the previous step.

I heard there was a beautiful world with fantastic ships, but if gameplay is this horrendous that's not something I even want to see.

I really really WANT to recommend this game, I love the idea, and there are so many fantastic concepts in the game. However, the core of the game really is combat, and there are just too many problems with it in my mind that the devs seem... almost defensive of even.

Classes:
There are 4 classes to choose from ranging from extremely difficult to absolutely braindead each with their own upsides and unfortunate flaws.

Runemage - Beautiful concept, the variety of spells is pretty cool, or at least would be if more of them were useful. Unfortunately, there's not really much reason to use many of them other than frostbolt->icelance and polymorph for party content. Pretty much all of the rest of the spells just don't do enough, and since it takes extremely "accurate" drawing to cast any of them, you'd have to sacrifice practicing a useful spell to work on a fun one you like instead.
Remember that "accuracy" part, well, the devs are EXTREMLY VOCAL about the "math" involved in recognizing the spells. I'm sure it's just a trained model, but whatever they used to train the model was definitely not the icons they give you for casting the spells lol. You can sit tracing the spell, checking all sides to make sure it's perfect flat, literally put the book into the spell and see it fits exactly on the lines and sometimes it still won't work, but then other spells you have some extremely sloppy shortcuts you can do (one lost frostbolt 2 for example) that shows however their model determines spells, it needs a huge overhaul.

Ranger - Aiming at things that aren't right in front of your face (unfortunately essentially nonexistant for solo play) actually requires a bit of skill and is super fun. However, the game is currently balanced so it's best to just wildly flail your arm to fire 3 arrows a second at things point blank, rather than actually aiming. Even with the wild flailing, using special arrows can take a bit of skill because the pickup and dropoff detection can be a little funky. Overall, with just a simple rebalancing I think this class could be great.

Warrior - I hope you're ready to learn combos, err, more like combo. Learn wound for solo play, it's all you'll do. Repeat it until your eyes bleed. Also, make sure you have some space to walk around in, because theres about a 1foot space where hit detection works properly, otherwise enemies will attack through your shield, or your attacks will pass through them, or every strike will count as a left-right swing. Now that you've grinded out a ton of levels, you can learn your other useful combo, provoke. Learn it well too as you'll basically be just swapping out wound for this to spam nonstop for dungeons.

Musketeer - An interesting concept, the utility and healer class has a fair amount of orbs and a couple of tough choices to make with those when deciding their loadout (but after that it's pretty much just spam them on cooldown unfortunately). Pretty decent at soloing because of the healing which means you don't have to worry about being as squishy as the runemage for questing even though in dungeons you're still the squishy backline. This is in my opinion the most well balanced class, but the similar straight forward "use things as soon as their available" mindset is kind of boring. For a game that talks about breaking away from traditional MMO button spam, it's essentially button spam.

There are also some "professions" which are non combat classes seemingly? It's kind of weird but sure.
Fishing - Actually pretty nice. The reel is pretty good and the jerk on mainhand to reeling in with offhand has a nice visceral feeling to it. Fishing gets (as one might expect) pretty monotonous without any other special type of minigame, or fish swimming around to at least try to cast near. Overall it's basically what you would expect from fishing in an MMO.

Alchemy - Alchemy is really cool, and the one thing I don't know of any glaring flaw with. Not only do ingredients have to be added in a certain order, the cauldron heats and cools, and you have to add certain ingredients at certain temperatures. This is honestly an awesome concept that really helps flesh out the system. Further, you can age potions at an (unfortunately out of the way) potion rack in your base. Which lets you make them stronger, but with the potential to ruin them if you leave them there for too long. The best executed part of the game in my opinion.

There's also a tablet/inscription profession that I won't spoil and seems extremely cool, but since you require other people to do it (can't analyze your own runes) it pretty much requires a guild or you being a reputable inscriptionist, which means you need practice, which means you need a guild.


"A lot of your complaints seem to be about the solo experience, what about the group experience?"
Well, I wouldn't really know beyond dungeons. Why is that?
Because for some godforsaken reason guilds start with EXTREMELY limited slots (starting at 10 people max initially). This means that most any guild that wants to work on end game accepts only max level players. That means grinding through everything up to max level by yourself or the occasional pug if you can't bring friends into the game. IF you don't have a lot of time to look for pugs for regular quests, you're probably soloing it.


My suggestion would be to wait for the team to flesh out the game more, and hopefully make a balance pass or two. However, the devs seem very ... defensive? ... about their decisions and very strongly push back on most balancing feedback it seems. Which means I don't really have a ton of hope for that. Until then, I'd only really suggest it if you have friends or are okay with a bit of a mindless grind to get to the good stuff.