I randomly came across this game, and as a massive fan of roguelikes and, more recently, survivor-likes, I found this one to look interesting. It was on sale, but the negative reviews warned of a horrific sounding mechanic where if too many enemies were on the map, your run just ends. Sounds counter-intuitive to this type of game. There was an update just recently where this mechanic was changed from outright killing you to immensely debuffing you instead. I decided to take the plunge with a 20% discount and try my luck.
I did not enjoy it. I couldn't get past the first boss, the first level, nothing. I'm not saying it's all the game's fault, but I found many frustrating, anti-gaming mechanics thrown in here that made little sense beyond packing the game in with frustration. You start off with a very slow firing, low damage bow that fires automatically. You'll get swarmed pretty quickly in this game. The balance of ramping up the amount of enemies versus your own power is very tipped towards the enemy. I found myself hitting the limits of this baffling horde mechanic in no time. Had I played the patch previous, I wouldn't have made it past the first minute in any run. Even with the change, this horde mechanic still helps stack the deck very much against you. I didn't see a reliable way of powering yourself up. The chests are random and may not give you what you need, the "Sister Statues" will only buff you if you take a debuff first or will add to the enemy count/decrease your max HP/other penelty if you don't take the blessing, and the first "boss" I encountered was a slime enemy that messes with your movement big time by causing the ground to be slippy and force you into obstacles and enemies against your will. It is abnormally easy to be surrounded and trapped against an obstacle, causing a quick and frustrating death. This all coalesces into a gaming experience that is not fun, at least in my eyes.
Part of the charm of the survivor-like, at least for me, is the power ramp of your character. A bit of a peak of difficulty is expected, but only in line with your own power increase. Every mechanic in this game seems designed to build the difficulty wall and force you to scale it with almost no increase to your own power. It is supremely unfun.
My last run, which was my best attempt at it, is what decided I was going to refund this. I was slipping around because of the slime boss, not having any real way to even get to it because there were so many enemies on the screen blocking it. These are enemies that will push you around, drain your health quickly, and all of that is multiplied due to the horde mechanic which will almost always be maxed out. I definitely tried seeking out chests, forges, sister statues for blessings (even if they hampered me further). I activated a statue which would give me a random blessing, but the trade off is that I had the slime debuff, on me (which I already had permanently because the slime boss was still alive) until I found a corresponding statue which was marked. I just decided to run there because any help I can get against this ridiculous tide of enemies that I had no real chance against I would take. But, for whatever reason, the framerate started plummeting. I somehow ended up at literally single digit frames where it would skip to a future frame maybe once every few seconds. I was able to pause and navigate the menu okay, but any graphical changes I would make did not help whatsoever (potentially not helped by the simple graphical options I had). My guess was that the mixture of amount of enemies densely pooled together caused the game to deteriorate. For reference, my computer has Intel i9-9900K processor, NVIDIA RTX 2070 Super, and 32 GB of RAM. I should not be experiencing such a thing.
So, the above has caused me to initiate a refund and share my negative experience. It is a shame, because I really like these types of games.
