It's been a while since I played this, so I decided to remake the review.
Bonelords is a game that attempts to fuse the combat of Dark Souls with the gameplay style of Terraria while also combining it with a Rogue-lite.
Defend the fortress, defeat your enemies and get their bones. You can use all of it to buy blocks and traps or use it to level up your character.
Let's start with the positives first. The music is pretty good, specially the boss themes. Genuinely recommend taking a listen to it on their Youtube channel, or by buying the soundtrack.
This game has a pretty neat gimmick when a run ends. When it does, you get rewarded with a bone marrow of your character, allowing you to carry some of the stats, a relic or even a weapon to any other run. Every class has a unique perk that can be acquired that way too. Not only does this make you not feel as bad when you lose a run since you still get a marrow, but it also gives a reason to play on harder difficulty because it gives better marrows there.
The graphics are ... presentable. But it does have its charm when you include the silly wizards teaching you how to play the game. It feels like a random old Flash game that you would find in Kongregate or Armor Games.
Now for the negatives, and sadly it does have a ton:
The game does not have enough replayability due to lack of content. You will always go for the same weapon that your class is good at. There's not enough blocks, traps, enemies and bosses. And sadly, more bosses are unlikely to get added since the developer is asking for a specific amount of sales of the game for him to add more, which sadly is not going to happen since a lot more is needed.
Half of the relics don't really do anything interesting nor impactful enough, a good chunk just increases your stats and does nothing more.
There's 3 weapon types, Melee, Magic and Ranged. Melee is by far, the worse to play. Since this game calls itself "Terraria-like", let's compare to it. Have you ever wondered why most "Melee" weapons in Terraria shoot projectiles or have long reach? Because the game would feel way worse without it, thanks to every enemy doing contact damage. If you ever wanted to experience what it would be like if weapons didn't do that, Bonelords is here to show you that.
Simply put, it doesn't work. You constantly take damage and knockback since you have to get so close, and you barely have any I-frames either, so you just bounce around like a ball when using those weapons. It has no crowd control so you get overwhelmed, the fort gets destroyed, and you lose the run.
It becomes [b] even worse [/b] when you're playing on a harder difficulty or with any of the challenges enabled.
It's also the most boring weapon, most of them are too similar to each other. Magic and Ranged have more variety, are way better, easier and safer to use.
Half of the traps aren't worth using, those being Flingtraps and Mines. Flingtraps just launches enemies and takes too long to do that again, and Landmines deal too much damage and are a waste of bones to be used on normal enemies, and are not powerful enough to be used on bosses and mini-bosses.
Despite the wizards teaching how to grapple, I don't see a single reason to use it. Grappling Is useless and overshadowed by Dashing. It's too awkward to use while costing the same amount of Stamina as Dashing. Dashing is just better, specially considering that there's the Trickster class that has a faster dash and it makes dashes cost half the amount to use.
And since I just mentioned something useless, we also have the Mobility stat. I don't see a single reason to ever increase this stat.
If you're going Melee you go for Strength, Magic increase Magica and Ranged uses Precision. If you're too frail, increase Vitality. Mobility just increases Stamina and Movement Speed. There's no reason to increase those, there's no class that focuses on this stat.
I'm not trying to throw the developer under a bus here, but the quality of this game is a little ... questionable to say the least. For example, I have proof that the dev doesn't test his own game.
When the Floor Is Lava challenge was added, which was early in october, players would take unavoidable damage from the lava since the final boss teleports you to it, and it was only fixed at the end of december of last year because I reported it to the dev. This is something that the dev himself easily would have noticed if he just bothered to get to the end of a single run.
And in one of the first few patch notes, he admitted to let an AI mess with the code, which ended up causing a bug.
Also, I highly doubt the game is beatable with all modifiers while on the hardest difficulty, specially if you're using melee. This isn't a Hades situation where this is mostly designed for you to heavily customize the experience, since Bonelords only has a harder difficulty and 3 modifiers.
If you're wondering why I changed my review from positive to negative, well, it's because of the new update, which added the new "Cursed Relics" challenge. What the hell is this?
This genuinely looks like an april fools joke or something. Enabling this makes every single relic you grab also have a random negative effect. It does give you an additional relic at the start of a run, at the cost of that one having 2 negative effects instead of 1.
This isn't a bad idea on paper, in fact, I want more relics to have downsides, there's only 2 new ones in the game with an actual risk or downside to use, those being the All-Or-Nothing Coin Slag (chance of taking double damage) and the Meat Cube (flasks heal less). The problem here is that the ones from the challenge are extremely punishing, and some are downright nonsensical. We have things such as:
-25% less damage;
15% chance to lose all your bones after each wave;
Shops are 70% more expensive;
Unavoidable damage from a status effect passively activating on your character;
Quick time events that if you fail, you instantly die;
Cannot walk or dash to the left;
Immediately lose all your non-relic items;
And my personal favorite:
You lose your first relic, and the game crashes. Yes, I'm not kidding.
The updates were going well, we got issues being fixed and more items being added. Who asked for this? This looks like an out of season april fools joke. Genuinely horrible addition that no one is gonna enable since it's a meme. Oh, and fun fact: according to the developer this is a major update, the first major update we got in this game, what a joke. I can tolerate bugs, those happen, but this? Something intentionally bad? Hell no.
[h2] Conclusion: [/h2]
I heard of this game thanks to a silly ad on Youtube. I bought it with no expectations and was surprised that the game isn't bad. Trying to get most of the achievements was fun. But the game feels like it's in more of an early access state, and the latest update just sucks.
There is potential here, but not enough content, rough edges and dubious decisions. It's an ok game. There's a lot of better Rogue-lites and Souls-likes in the market, but at least this one is quite cheap and somewhat unique. 5/10 game.
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