Asgard's Fall — Viking Survivors

I played Asgard's Fall when it first went to early access and was pretty excited to see what they had in store for 1.0, but I dunno, it feels like the devs were tired of this game/gave up and just pushed this out. It took about the same, if not less time, to complete the 1.0 than it did early access. The reworked systems feel flat. tl;dr There's a lot of potential here in the various systems, but they don't feel complete and overall feel rushed. Not recommended in current state. It is fun for a few hours/first few stages, but the train loses steam very quickly. Enemies on each stage are very similar to other stages in both size and attack. It's a lot of rinse/repeat. The difficulty raising option doesn't really feel like it leads to many more rewards --- even at level 75 difficulty, the legendary+ drops are still woefully low. Warpaints cap out at rank 9. The Unique powers on warpaints are not great, outside of fire-based ones. There's no real end game and stages are limited to 20 min or 10 min after beating. No endless, no additional challenges. Combo abilities are limited to just a few of the total ability pool? Why don't all abilities have a combo? Also, not sure if it's possible to have two combo abilities at once ---- seems like once you have two abilities that create a combo, no additional combo'able abilities show up in the pool. Could just be my rng though. Speaking of rng, I like that you can now align with a certain element for primary weapon. I like that the chosen element has more frequent abilities of that element. But this also makes it harder to get the combo ability. Banish option would be really useful here; it's pretty standard in bullet heaven games now. Warpaint inventory is flexible, but smithing is confusing at first. Higher ranked warpaints don't feel like much of an upgrade. In terms of warpaint quality, it's often better to use multiple normal quality single slot runes rather than epic or legendary 2, 3, or 4 slot runes since a 4-slot rune might have just 3 stats attached, and the stats are really any higher than the single slot normal quality rune. Weapon unlocks are just cosmetic and have no impact on stats. Druid is an afterthought of a character. There are still some glaring bugs (e.g. inventory navigation is terrible on controller and sometimes warpaints can't be selected without mouse; node bugs [+atk speed node for each "living" enemy gives atk speed for dead enemies, too]; it's not obvious how to unlock ability node upgrades and some never unlocked for me no matter how much I played them).

I like the concept, however the "War Paint" meta progression seems broken? When I open the menu I drop massive frames, the UI starts to bug out, and sometimes I get an error message that saves the game but then I have to force quit and restart, as ESC key no longer functions. It also seems to get worse the more War Paint Runes I collect in my inventory. I would like to engage with this part of the game, heck it might even be integral to higher difficulties and build crafting, but at this point in my playthrough it's completely unusable.

I don't really see any reason to get this over the many other roguelikes out there. The war paint metaprogression feels clunky and unpolished, the different levels feels like they're mostly just visual, even if you go with completely different abilities the runs feel pretty much the same, there's just not a lot of replay value compared to other games in the genre. It's okay for a few hours of fun if you can get it on sale, but they said they're planning to increase the price on full release and this game is barely worth the full early access price.

Save data was wiped when the 1.0 update came out. 30 hours of progress was lost when the devs could have spent more time making the save data compatible with the new update. Gameplay is fine but having to replay everything to get 100% achievements a second time is a very bad decision.

Roguelike bullet-hell game with some really fun mechanics. It’s still in Early Access, but the devs are very active, and 1.0 is coming soon. The gameplay is smooth, the art looks great, and the different builds are a lot of fun to experiment with. Personally, I think a full Lightning build is pretty overpowered if you can get Overcharge. For achievement hunters, most achievements are easily earned just by playing the game normally. The only exception is the 1 million kills achievement, which you may need to grind for after finishing the game. Some players have reported bugs, but I personally haven’t noticed any, or at least haven’t encountered anything that affected my experience. Definitely recommend it for the price, even with increase to $9.99. You can easily get around 15-20 good hours of gameplay out of it, making it to Odin, experiment with different builds and getting steam achievements. Maybe even more if trying to complete other goals in game.

There are better survivor games out there. This is still half-baked.

Asgard’s Fall is a fun survivors-like with interesting systems that set it apart from its competitors, the Web of Wryd adds an extra layer of strategy to keep things fresh. It’s got great ‘game feel’ as you tear through hordes of Norse cannon-fodder as the abilities are varied and engaging. I look forward to what the devs have in store for us in future updates.

The game is poorly optimized and starts stuttering and lagging right from the beginning. I’m a fan of the bullet hell genre and have played many games such as Vampire Survivors, Nordic Ashes, Conquest Dark, Funguys Swarm, Yet Another Zombie Survivors, Rogue: Genesia, Halls of Torment, Army of Ruin, Grind Survivors, Tower of Babel, and many others. I’m not here to discuss whether the game itself is good or bad. What I don’t understand is how the game can already lag and stutter when I’ve only just started playing, while there are no any graphics options available to improve performance. Even though the game is very cheap and currently 50% off, it’s still disappointing that I’ll have to ask for a refund.