Ardein is a good and fun mix of a top down shooter and tower defense. Daily leaderboards provide a major source of motivation and does not discourage untalented players and new arrivals as much as permanent boards. New enemy combo every day keeps the game fresh and brings unexpected surprises. You get 14 turrets for your needs of mass destruction. A single session lasts around 20 minutes max and fits right in the spot of "short and sweet".
[h1]Gameplay[/h1]
Likely a developer decision, Ardein doesn't have any bit of hand holding. Some stuff aren't communicated to the player at any point, nor did the game provide any hints on the so called "builds" most roguelikes seem to utilize.
For those unaware:
- WASD to move
- Left mouse to shoot, stop shooting to charge a piercing railgun
- Right mouse for a sword (the sword is not affected by jamming enemies)
- Space triggers a dash
- Dash within a short timeframe after getting hit for a short parry-doge effect, where your fire rate is temporarily increased (affects all 3 weapons - other than making the machine gun shoot faster, it increases the frequency the railgun and sword swing "ticks" the enemy)
- Dash and immediately shoot railgun behind you to perform a warp dash (very helpful against swarms of basic enemy jets)
- At 250 scraps and 500 scraps you get a drone, and using your scraps on turrets drops a drone if it goes below one of those values
- Drones are not affected by the jamming enemy - rapidly tap your left mouse button to use the drones when you're being jammed
Each day you get a new mission, where you face off select types of enemies from a larger pool, and 2 boss types (out of 5) to take care of. Your goal in Ardein is to protect the mothership, by installing, upgrading and scrapping the turrets, while also upgrading your 3 weapons on your jet, and fending off enemy attacks in a combined effort with the mothership to survive as long as you can until you lose all your hull points, or when the mothership loses all its segments. As a change of pace, a boss arrives every 2 minutes, and you can choose to leave them be or kill them asap (more on this later). Note that each time you install or upgrade a turret, it completely refills the segment health.
[h1]Thoughts?[/h1]
Ardein is not a game about synergy and builds. Personally, I find it a good thing that I don't need to memorize builds, there aren't that many potential builds around. Turrets don't interact with each other, which is a bit of a shame, but many do have interactions with the player. Your time in this game is mostly spent on just executing and refining your skills, instead of figuring out builds and synergies like in Nova Drift. To be honest, Nova Drift hurts my brain too much when it comes to figuring out builds, and it really isn’t that fun copying others’ builds, but your own builds will usually suck since the pros have long figured out the better build way ahead of you.
Managing weapon upgrades might be one of the biggest challenges of the game. All 3 of your weapons are upgraded individually and require constantly killing enemies to meet the upgrade requirement of 1000 points per level, maxing out at the 5th upgrade. Another gimmick is that each time you kill a boss, enemies get more health. Eventually, a level 3 turret won't be able to deal with the madness of endgame enemies with a bloated health pool.
Which brings us to the point - do you kill bosses asap to keep the mothership from being drained of its health, and get quick upgrades to face the tougher enemies, or do you leave them alive for longer to farm the more fragile enemies while risking your mothership?
There's a problem though, among the 5 boss variants, some of them are extremely dangerous if left alive for just a tad longer, so you're forced to kill them earlier, toughening all enemies. Even if you choose to leave the bosses, your turrets will still kill them eventually, so you might end up scrapping your turrets immediately after installing them just to refill segment health and to drag on the fight, sticking with low level turrets at early to mid game, or only using very specific turrets in a very specific way.
Balancing of the bosses is one of the "wonkier" elements of the game, making encounters so wildly different that you will start blaming your failed attempts entirely onto the boss selection. Same can be said about certain enemy types that will give you so much headache that you start to hate them. Coupled with the ever-toughening enemies, the variety of choice no longer seems to matter that much, since you will more or less die in the exact same way at endgame - unable to scratch even the most basic enemies, and suffering a slow death as the bosses pile up and wear out both you and the mothership. It's quite frustrating.
In the end, the game is trying to do a lot at the same time, and it worked, just with some drawbacks, which makes progression (especially for score chasing purposes) feel gimmicky sometimes, and the arbitrary difficulty increases could be super frustrating.
[h1]Overall enjoyment[/h1]
For someone like me who really isn’t into brainstorming and experimenting too much with all the builds, Ardein is a bless. I jump in for the [i]action[/i], and the action [i]only[/i]. It did fairly well for what it offers! Even with the gimmicks, it was overall a lot of fun, and I would recommend it to anyone who needs a coffee break experience.
[i][b]Obligatory FA posting[/b][/i]
If you like this game, I also recommend checking out [u][b]Furious Angels[/b][/u]. They have quite a lot in common, but different pacing and gameplay loop. Neither of these two are about builds, but working with what you have. Ardein gives you more resources to work with, including actual turrets that defends the mothership, and more weapons to use at the same time, but also more enemy types to look out for. FA however, has everything laid out right in front of you, with a single designated upgrade path, no towers, and limited enemy types (7 counting the boss), but gameplay feels far more consistent and straightforward with almost no balancing or pacing concerns. It also does not have arbitrary difficulty spikes, so session lengths varies greatly depending on the mission and your skill level. As a bonus, you can have a laser tank ;]
