Recent reviews by Sebin Nyshkim

You can sink hours into this game and still find ways to improve your game play with each session. You start playing at noon, forget the flow of time and suddenly it's 5am and the sun's coming back up.

It's what you come to Doom for: shooting up some demons, cracking some skulls in intense combat with some secrets hunting for good measure. It's the formula that invented the genre and it still kicks ass.

Disclaimer: I have hardly ever played dungeon crawlers. My main reasons for buying this game were the character design, the pixel art, the banging soundtrack (available on Bandcamp) and the intriguing battle system.

The character design is absolutely superb, the artists have done an amazing job. The animations look equally fantastic. As I'm hugely into pixel art to begin with, it was a feast for the eyes from start to finish!

The soundtrack consists entirely of FM synth tracks. If you like chiptune, especially the sound of the Sega Genesis, you'll be in for a treat. I often couldn't help but hum along with the tracks and got myself on a real battle high especially during fights.

The game lives above all from the large strategic element during the battles with a good portion of RNG from dice drafts. Each of the four characters has their own style of play. I had to adjust to that at first, but once I had internalized the mechanics, most of the encounters with enemies in the dungeons were quite doable.

The RNG element in particular tends to drag out fights, though, sometimes going for rounds on end without either side presenting an opening to land a hit on the opponent. Often it seemed to me that the enemy AI would always play with minimal margin of error, even after I had lowered the difficulty from "Normal" to "Story".

It was not uncommon that I had to abort a dungeon several times even on the first level because I found myself in hopeless situations where it was impossible for me to avoid hits even with maximum use of items and stamina. This in turn added to the difficulty of the later levels significantly, because the high stakes continued, yet I had already exhausted all of my resources. I wondered more than once if the difficulty setting had any effect on the gameplay at all.

The mechanics of the battles thus largely fall under "easy to learn, hard to master" – the latter being more a result of the relentless enemy AI and heavy RNG. Casual players will be required to have a great deal of patience and a high tolerance for frustration, which the aforementioned otherwise great components of the game might struggle to compensate for. And since battles make for the majority of gameplay it might be hard to get into the swing of things before the game even begins proper.

Despite this, I would still recommend this game. Even though I struggled with the sometimes volatile difficulty curve in the beginning, I still had a good time in the catacombs of Julesvale - albeit a bit short-lived in story mode.

With a bit more fine-tuning of the difficulty levels, Dungeons of Aether could rise to an unconditional recommendation for most people.