Recent reviews by Azzy

Lovely game that gives you a cosy platforming experience without wasting your time. Visuals and music are absolutely delightful and you can easily finish it in one or two sittings. It took me four and a half hours to finish it with all achievements.
An absolute pleasure.

Delightful puzzle game with a sex positive theme to it. Dev donates to amazing causes through this game and encourages further donations through the cameo system.

But seriously I'm just here for the puzzles I swear.

What we have here is an incredibly fun combat system with plenty of fluidity and impact to your attacks, as well as a reasonably fun movement system if you choose to use equipment that gives you extra jumps etc. There's a lot to explore in the two existing levels (as of the time of writing) and I found the means of levelling up and cleansing/upgrading equipment to be fairly self-explanatory once I found the means.

What the game lacks at the moment is clarity and direction. You can have an excellent time exploring and fighting for a while, but outside of bumping up the difficulty before each delve into a location (done just outside the level portals) there's not much progression to speak of in the current Early Access build. Levelling up doesn't visibly do anything because the Character tab of the menu is currently inaccessible, and once you've fully explored the current levels you'll be left waiting for updates. However, you WILL want those updates, because the combat is just so much fun.

I eagerly await the rolling out of future content, because this game is gonna be really special if the current slice is anything to go by.

After a full playthrough of the game with all missions and side missions completed, my view on Spirit Mancer is somewhat mixed.

The core gameplay feels great once you have a handle on the controls, and the visuals are pretty excellent in most places. There are some real bangers in the soundtrack and some genuinely funny moments throughout the story. So ultimately, all of these factors come together to make me recommend the game.

However, the game has several small issues that hold it back from being as excellent as it could be. Some story scenes have odd pacing and a complete lack of sound/music that cause some moments that are meant to be impactful fall flat instead. I encountered a bug that caused me to have to alt+F4 and restart the game at one point, losing me some progress. There were some major tonal shifts at seemingly random points in the game that threw me for a loop (namely some very unusually dark background elements) and I had some achievements simply not trigger upon fulfilling their requirements.

Spirit Mancer is trying to do it all. Action platforming, fishing, farming, crafting, guild management etc etc but feels like it falls a little bit flat on all but the most former. It's nice to have the little distractions in between missions, but they also feel a bit tacked on which hurts when the main game is just some polish away from being great. I feel that if the game were patched up a bit and given some small improvements, it could really shine.

Tl;dr: Ultimately enjoyed my time with Spirit Mancer, but would have liked to see a bit more polish and care put into it. I'll keep an eye on updates in future.

Been loving this game as a casual player so far. 1v1s with friends are just a great time.
Looking forward to seeing continued development. I'm rooting for my old favourites, Absa and Mollo!

I've dipped into traditional fighting games before but always dropped off because I couldn't handle the inputs I felt were required of me. I was gifted Strive and after one week of playing with friends I can confidently say that I finally understand what's fun about traditional fighters and am thrilled to say it's juuuuust simple enough that I've been able to grasp the core mechanisms at play, after all these years. Smash is no longer the only fighting game I can wrap my head around.

I haven't played any random online stuff, likely never will, but playing with friends in casual lobbies is amazing fun and I'd definitely recommend this to anybody who wants to learn a fighting game for the first time. If you actually have the drive to learn you'll do great! If I can do it, anyone can!

Short, relaxing, has cats. What's not to love?

I've been having a lot of fun with this game so far and am definitely excited to see where future updates take it. Kudos to the 4-person dev team for putting out a first game of this quality. I know that they'll knock it out of the park time and time again as they push improvements to make this a true gem!

Just one more turn...I can quit anytime I want.

Outstanding visuals, truly spectacular. New Blood have done it again.