Recent reviews by Poeras

This game is the face of its genre. I think that says enough. GOAT game

I LOVE ABSOLUTE RADIANCE!!! IT IS MY FAVORITE BOSS EVER!!! I CAN'T WAIT TO FIGHT IT AGAIN!!!

This is going to be a brutally honest review. As a quick disclaimer to start of I will reference Vampire Survivors, a well known staple in this genre of games, a few times. Of course I don't expect this to be Vampire Survivors 2 and there are lots of things this game can do in its own way, but having a point of reference is nice for explaining.

Also this review contains a lot of MY OPINION, so be ready for that.

First of all, this game is at this point (the demo) very lackluster. It has a lot of potential but it just doesn't feel quite right. The gameplay cycle is honestly a bit boring and it felt as if time moved slower than normal. Not necessarily, because the enemies are slow, but because it was so repetitive.

Metagame Progression
Just like how in Vampire Survivors you get gold each run and you can spend it after to increase a stat permanently, this game offers you an entire skill tree. The skill tree offer 'decent' rewards with some good ones in the later upgrades. However leveling up to attain these skill point just takes way too much time. With my 3 hours of runs I think I got to level 10, which gave me 10 skill points to spend. This may not seem that bad, but one skill tree is 12 points high, With the higher you go the better the rewards. Only one problem is the rewards, they are barely noticeable during gameplay at all. I will touch on this in the next section as the rewards are virtually the same as the carvings you can choose during gameplay. Also I have tried a few builds, as far as I could get with my skill points, and in my opinion the only viable strategy is to get chain lightning, cost 3 skill points in total, and then reroll during gameplay for lightning damage and only lightning abilities.

Ingame level-ups
When you have collected enough ?blood clots? you level up. This gives two possible options. 1. You can choose between 3 abilities with the chance to upgrade one. Or 2. you can choose up to 4 blades to increase some stats, given you have enough blood clots as payment, these are known as carvings. These options I think go one after the other, but I can't say this for sure. Reason is, leveling up is pretty slow. It might be that I am too bad to pick up the blood clots but I felt as if sometimes it took just a bit too long to level up. This meant I barely got stronger, whilst the enemies grew stronger 3 times in the meanwhile.
First the abilities, as said before I found the lightning abilities the best. Some fire and physical ones were alright as well, but some were quite bad. The ice abilities were mostly quite bad with one exception, the spikes that hit a 'random' enemy. I say random here in quotation marks because, I have noticed the 'hit random enemy' abilities seem to prefer enemies closer to the player. You could work with this, but I expected it to go for a random enemy in the giant pile of enemies I had built up such that the AoE could do a bunch of damage. Instead it prefers the lone goblin that just spawned in :/.
Now the carvings, I think in general this works fine and as intended. Except for the usability of the stat increases. pretty much all stats, except the '<type> damage' ones, are barely noticeable until you get to around 20% stat increase, when it starts giving a slight difference. However this doesn't even apply for movement speed and attack speed, for which I have not seen any difference at all. This might be my mind playing tricks on me, but I could swear nothing changed. Which is definitely unfortunate, since those are two stats I was most excited to boost tremendously.

The enemies
During gameplay you will, naturally, encounter enemies. It is unfortunate that in the demo, there is only one map available, with only 4 normal enemies and 1 boss, which spawns very rarely after a few 'world upgrades' that increase enemy HP. The normal enemies are as follows and I will explain some more about them in a bit: a goblin, a boar, angel 1 and angel 2.
The goblin is your standard enemy it runs towards the player at a constant speed nothing to really say about it. It's good.
The boar does virtually the same as the goblin, but it's larger and sometimes does a short ranged dash attack. It's pretty alright, although the direction of the dash is sometimes hard to tell and due to it's size is likely to hit the player multiple times because they get stuck on it (or it gets stuck on the player idk).
Angel 1, is the first angel that spawns, pretty much after the first time you level up. This enemy shoots a red projectile. Seems simple enough, but oh no this enemy is the actual devil. i can confidently say that every single run I have died thanks to these projectiles. Now I must say I sometimes run away like a cartoon character backing up instead of out of the way, but still. The screen gets very easily overwhelmed by these projectiles and it is difficult to quickly decide a safe way out of the way. Also there is no charge up, so it is hard to tell when a new projectile will spawn. And sometimes when a new angel 1 spawned in the projectile spawned in before the angel. which means that enemies don't have a short cool-down after spawning before attacking. In Vampire Survivors certain abilities can destroy projectiles to keep you safer. Obviously it is just a suggestion, but something like that could make the gameplay loop just slightly more fun. And if it already is implemented I did not notice which is my fault.
Angel 2 has two AoE attacks which are pretty reasonable. Either one big one or a few small ones. Two grimes though, the big AoE is perfectly coordinated when it explodes, but the small ones are harder to read. Then the AoE attacks are shown on the ground. and big swarms of enemies walk over them making them sometimes hard to see. Although you wouldn't want to be inside the big swarm of enemies to begin with, still something to think about.

General gameplay
I have found a few things to say about the general gameplay. To start off, enemies can spawn everywhere, all the time. This doesn't sound like a big issue until they start spawning inside the player and suddenly you died. I don't know a lot about coding, but I think this can be a reasonably easy fix, if so desired.
Also the health system for both the player and the enemies is a bit off in my opinion. For the player getting hit by an enemy means instant chunk off your HP. This is honestly fine, however in games like this it is only natural you get hit quite a few times, especially because of the dodge roll which I will come to later. In other words i think a system like in Vampire Survivors (continuous damage) could work better. Or decrease the damage dealt a bit. Also the healing apples that sometimes spawn are most of the time more a loss to grab. Since trying to get to them means going into unpredictable enemy spawning and they heal less than one hit will deal damage.
For the enemy health system, my grime is mostly the HP bars. My grime in particular is that it doesn't give a sense of HP at all. Since all HP bars are the same length it is difficult to assign anything meaningful to them. Yes you will quicker learn that boars have more HP than goblins, but the size difference can already indicate such a thing. Also even without health bars you would eventually learn that they do have more health. Now I'll give credit where credit is due, it is nice to know which enemies are close to being defeated, but that can also be indicated by a slight sprite change. And getting rid of the health bars would clear up the screen a lot.
Talking about the screen being cluttered. It is surprisingly difficult to keep track of your cursor during gameplay. That is especially surprising when a lot of abilities revolve around cursor placement. My biggest problem was that it was hard to keep track of the cursor and the player at the same time so aiming abilities came at the risk of being hit.

I will end off the last section in the comments as I am running out of characters.

This game is great. It's a relaxing game with lots of amazing features. Lots of menus = Lots of reading yes i know.
But the amount of cute bees that you can collect, the business you can create and thanks to the new update the new butterflies and solitary bees that are now collectables, this game is more than worth it. I haven't played multiplayer but I'm guessing it's even more fun.

I definitely recommend!

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incredibly fun! Terraria + amazing mods = evne better Terraria experience. AND it's totally free