Recent reviews by Antiarc

Eh. It's just...kind of okay.

It's very pretty and the controls are mostly crisp. There's little overtly wrong at first glance, but once you scratch the surface there isn't a whole lot there. This is clearly a game that wants to be Enter the Gungeon, but it's nowhere near as good.

* The balance is really poor - the items and pets are mostly meaningless. Just get one of a handful of overpowered guns and stack badges, instant win. Given the choice between an item and a badge, you always choose the badge, and I've yet to encounter a non-gun/badge item that "made the run". There's no real sense of progression between "sucky starting gun" and "steamrolling everything with a good gun". There's a whole melee system that is mostly rendered meaningless by the ranged options being vastly superior and the lack of any real damage avoidance mechanic beyond "stay away from things". Most of the time, when you spend a resource (bomb/key), you get one back, plus some extra items. There aren't really any decisions to be made other than "collect everything".
* There's basically nothing in the way of a narrative, and the problems in translations end up being pretty jarring. Not that these sorts of games need too much narrative, but even a little bit helps. It *seems* like there should be some narrative, but you're just dumped into it without even so much of an explanation of who you are or why you're there.
* Systems aren't explained particularly well - the "pets", for example, are just collected and upgraded over time without any real obvious mechanic, but you don't make any decisions or have any input in what pets you get or how they upgrade. They can apparently die, but you don't have any means to heal them, keep them out of danger, or otherwise manage them. They end up being more of a visual distraction than anything else. You can't carry more than one weapon at a time, but all your upgrades carry over to whatever you're carrying, so you just pick a good one and roll with it. At one point, you're asked to collect "abyss gems", but at no point is it explained what they are or how you get them. Completing even full runs doesn't appear to give you any. There's no accounting of how many you have or how you get them.
* Characters don't feel particularly well-differentiated (I ended up just playing on "random" after a couple of runs for the extra starting item). There's not really anything unique about any of the bosses.
* The game mostly feels like a wrapper around a "grind for gems to complete your upgrade tree", except you'll be clearing the entire run quickly without needing any upgrades to do so, so there's very little compelling reason to grind it out. Most persistent upgrade mechanisms reward your improved finesse at the game with a more and more powerful loadout - in Neon Abyss, it mostly just feels like it's there to give you checkboxes to grind for.

It's not a bad game, but it's nowhere as good as it could be, and if you're expecting something on par with Enter the Gungeon or Dead Cells, you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's worth a few bucks on sale but you're not gonna get the hundreds of hours out of it that you will out of its competitors.