Recent reviews by Zukuu

This is a unpolished indie-take on an action souls-like that fumbles its landing. It feels clunky and obscure and for the price of admission, it's sadly just not good enough.

A genre mix that does neither of its part well, which leads to an ultimately subpar experience in each of its gameplay segments.

You face hulk hogan as enemy. Main theme has "oohh yeah" in its lyric

Pretty weird wrestling game, but it's alright.

Super fun little rogue-like deck-builder. The game is very limited in its content, which very much works for its favor. It's a breath of fresh air, that you can actually somewhat consistent can put together a build you want to do with a slim deck and most of your deck upgraded. The added positioning element is very similar to Into the Breach. You see what the enemies will do and in which direction they will attack and can plan out your turn accordingly.

You have most of everything unlocked right away. I took my first run all the way to the "final" boss. You can unlock like ten-ish new cards/items, a couple of starting classes, 2 item slots and permanent starting boosts in the form of a shop that offers goodies for your new run. You need to beat the game twice to get to the true ending. It also has difficulty modes.

If it's on a sale, you should definitely check it out.

This control scheme should be covered in the Geneva convention.

You have 2 buttons that do EVERYTHING. Yes, Takedown, Punch, Jump Punch AND Block IS A SINGLE BUTTON?! No, Kick, Parry another. Just why?

You also have a "item" button and a "show control scheme"-button. It's just awful.

Jesus you have no clue where to go, where you can go and what you should actually do. You are lost - at all times. And not in the fun-kinda-way. You are literally 100%ing the game, just to search for what you actually have to do next or how you get anywhere. It's just frustrating.

Otherwise it's the most vanilla metroid-vania with being unremarkable in every other aspect and slightly below average combat, since it feels a bit clunky and unfinished. Can't dodge through enemies, can't dodge through attacks and there is "contact damage" on top. Everything together makes for a very stiff feeling combat.

edit: After finding that one elevator I missed, which blends into the environment on that freaking huge map, I could finally progress. So, after "finishing" the first of like 10 endings, some of which require ng+ and post game and what not, I still can't recommend it.

You just reach other variations of the same bland and uninspired map over and over again.The game is way too huge with way too many dead ends and it's obscure beyond any reasonable degree. You get A LOT of quest items and have no clue why or what they are for. You get a key like 10 hours after finding the door for it, so have fun remembering that. There are barriers all over the world you can't get past. How to unlock those? Well, why would the game want you to know that?

The gameplay never evolves. You unlock some skills that are mostly bad or require specific weapon canceling techniques to be useful to avoid the awful animation lock. The biggest gripe is that you have contact damage and no way to void many of the full screen boss attacks since you don't have an invincible dash, requiring you to "tank" those and spam healing potions or out level the boss.There is sadly barely any skill involved due to that. You have such small damage windows, it's not feasible otherwise. The contact damage is so dumb, if you want to attack some bosses with some special moves or daggers, you actually damage yourself in the process.

I read somewhere that you do acquire an invincible dash at some point, but apparently not before finishing the game, so what's the point? Just reading up on what you need to do and with who to talk to get more endings is simply asinine. The story is also dull as hell and they tried their hardest to not make it interesting, relying solely on the gimmick of making everything obscure and fill in some (not all) pages in the later endings and story tidbits to provide "answers", but since you couldn't follow anyway, you never had any questions to begin with, so for the majority of the game it's just nonsensical drivel to you.

The gameplay itself is really decent and runs are really quick. Build customization of the skills is also fun to explore, but most skills suck really badly, making unlocking a gamble.

Where the game is severely lacking is that there is no helpful meta-progression (apart from side-graded skills that may or may not be better) and while you can unlock like over 200 relics, you can equip a whooping single one, making unlocking them really pointless.

The biggest offender is that you have NO invincibility during your dash despite having almost unavoidable full-screen attacks and effects. You can also get combed 100%-to-death, since you have no invulnerability frames when you are hit either. This makes the game just unfun and is just a puzzling design decision, which could easily be rectified (but won't be).

This has barely understandable English (which was clearly auto-translated via google). Some UI-elements are even still in Chinese.

The game itself plays reasonably well, but is utterly unbalanced and shallow. The weapons they boast with are a joke. Basically 2-3 are barely functioning and the rest is utter trash, but even with god-rolls the 2nd blood lady boss has a comical amount of HP and deals a ridiculous amount of damage. You can't even dodge around much, because guess what, dodging requires a "stack of stamina", which you have 3 of and recover very slowly. So dodge her billion attacks 3 times and you are stuck getting hit.

Meta-progression is laughable as well and requires you play an insane amount for a bit of extra max health (how much? Now one knows, because why bother showing that, right?). Apart from that there is increased crit chance and the rest is just when you die you keep gold/souls etc.

The game itself is fine, but the surrounding aspects and lack of meaningful informed choice makes this a tough recommendation. Add in a doom timer on every map and the snail paced progression and I'm sure the game can click with many, but for players like myself, it has too many downsides to be enjoyable for long.

You start each map with 3 races. Some fixed basic buildings are unlocked from the get go, the rest you will unlock when you progress your city via getting a random selection you can pick one of every cycle.

The main gameplay aspect, is carving your way through the forest to "glades" which have limited resources and sometimes a random minor event. Hostile glades are bigger and offer more limited resources, but always require you to spend resources to deal with the "danger" that is present in each of these glades. If you can't deal with it, you get some consequences (all roads are destroyed & your workers are 30% slower, or 5 people die or 5 buildings are destroyed etc).

You regularly also get "orders", which allows you to pick from 2 sets of random goals with random rewards. And you have to pick one of these, before you can open the next order.

What irks me is that resources are random. The species you have are random. The buildings you get are random. The events you get are random. What they require is random. The orders are random. Everything is random. You basically can't really make a plan. You can't really apply much of a strategy, when the choices you can do are so inherently limited. You often have to make uninformed choices, because you have to pick a goal from an order, before you can even see the next. You don't even know what resources you might find or what buildings allow you to even accomplish them.

This makes for a loop that is never really the same, but that doesn't allow for even the smallest bit of planning to an extreme degree, which is the main reason why I'm bouncing off this game so much.

Add in the doom timer on each map, and it's just constantly fighting the random odds at every corner to stay ahead.

You finish map, after map, after map with the goal to traverse an huge grid to marked spots. IT requires you like 100-200 maps to finish the goals, which is just insane and overstays its welcome long before you even reach the first barriers, since a single map takes roughly an hour at the very least (depending on gameplay speed).

After each map (successful or not), you get some points to spend on a very straight forward meta progression tree, which gives you banal +1% or -2% boosts or unlocks buildings from the get go going forward. These are also gated by additional resources, you only get at certain points on the world map, so you have to chase those, instead of going straight to the true objectives.

Overall the progression feels way too slow and it requires you to put hundreds of hours into the game.

It plays well and is responsive and the enemy patterns are mostly fair. The weapons (apart from the basic weapon(s)) are largely interesting and runs don't feel repetitive in the first few hours.

What keeps this game from being a full recommendation is the lack of real meaningful meta-progression. You can unlock new weapons, which sometimes are better, and sometimes are not, but they won't really help you to finish a run, unless the weapon is just strong by itself. That means the first run is almost hard/easy as the last one.

You passively acquire XP which unlocks some minor helpful meta-progression (starting with a single charge heal-flask, unlocking life-leech in the random skill pool etc), but that doesn't feel rewarding nor is it truly on a run-by-run basis. No max HP/MANA/DAMAGE, no better starting gear, no starting skill choice etc.

That makes every run basically the same "progression"-wise, which at the end, feels like you wasted your time if you died prematurely.

There is an "easier" mode that has no penalty attached, which is the only help you can get to make runs truly easier.