Apparently I backed this game on Kickstarter apropos of nothing some time ago, and recently I just received a code for the game via email, so I decided "why not, I'll check it out right now."
Now, normally if I reviewed a game I'd do that thing where I put up a list of Pros and Cons to show where the balance reaches, but holy jesus there's just not really any Pros to speak of. The kindest things I could list about this game would reach the lofty heights of "nothing to write home about" and consist firstly, and only, of "(some) of the voice-acting".
You could charitably describe this game as "early access". And yet, it has been pronounced "finished". To call this game finished would be for the creator to tacitly admit that they see nothing wrong with it, and they released what the game currently is as a finished product. But wait, you say, there could be hotfixes somewhere down the line.
A hotfix will not make this game playable.
At least with AAA garbage being pushed out unfinished with day 1 dlc or some other asinine current-trend dumpster fire-careening business sense, you get a game that may be boring at worst, but playable, with perhaps some fun glitches that make the NPC character models t-pose and fly away randomly into the sky. This game plays like a game jam demo of a 2002 Naughty Dog platformer ripoff that's been adapted into a Soulslike engine.
Poorly.
Oh, at first it was harmless-looking enough. Soon as you boot up the story you're blasted by what is basically a cold open of a fantasy slop plot you're given just enough context to understand the barest amount of stakes for. Your character merrily glides around with a stride animation that is somehow both too quick and too slow for the speed at which he actually moves across the terrain. You press the two attack buttons and you get (about four) different combos to smack things. You find and follow for a minute or two the most AMAZING model I've ever born witness to of an ambient bunny creature. "Alright", says I, "I guess it's not painful enough to condemn completely. I'll see if it gains some momentum as it goes."
And that, dear friends, is how easily the devil creeps into your mind to poison you with dark distractions from the foul truth right in front of you.
[b][there was a section here about non-combat complaints but I ran out of room for the entire review so I cut it, oops][/b]
But the combat.
Oh, dear friends, the [i]combat.[/i]
I would say the combat is bare-bones. I would say the combat is a chore, unwieldy. I would say the combat has too many choices and items to attach to your thin veneer of a justification of an rpg-style inventory system, yet nothing seems to be more effective than being forced to get up close and wack things with your magic stick. I would say all these things about the combat and more, and none of them would convey the frustration and inability to understand the programmer's half-arsed attempts to plug in a basic soulslike combat engine.
But god willing, I shall try.
You have a magic and stamina gauge. Every action you take that doesn't cost magic causes the stamina bar to deplete at a rate you won't notice is slightly too rapid until you finally get into a rhythm... and realize that you [i]cannot[/i] get into a rhythm. After a single combo you will have barely enough stamina to roll away from the obviously oncoming attack, and then you will have to wait a full ten seconds before your stamina recovers fully again. In the middle of a fight, this breaks flow not only harder than a concrete tampon, but with [i]unwavering consistency[/i]. Every single fight will have you milling around, backpedaling from attacks while you wait for enough stamina to pop another combo off.
Oh, and speaking of dodge-rolling, good luck doing so when you're in the middle of a combo. You're taught immediately in your first combat that you can stun an enemy's attack by attacking them first while they're winding up, but that if you continue a combo, [i]you[/i] can be knocked out of [i]yours[/i]. And guess what? Besides that initial hitstun, enemies do not suffer [b]any more[/b] for the entire rest of a combo. And [i]your[/i] combos take long enough that you will never be able to string one entirely together without being interrupted (or at least take a hit at the end) unless you spin around to an enemy's backside and launch one right as it begins an overly-long attack animation. You also need a half-second of animation reset if you want to dodge-roll in the middle of a combo, which can usually cause a total misfire of your evasion strategy and leave you getting hit even as you spin merrily away.
Remember what I said about four total combos some paragraphs back? Yeah, despite having two attack buttons that [i]allegedly[/i] allow you to mix up attacks for different combos, as well as a five-hit string for either, you have a total of four combos you can do by switching up the attack buttons. Believe me, I experimented. And the animations for them are way too over the top for both how quickly you're meant to be attacking and how much damage they actually do, especially with virtually no feedback aside from the baked-in hitstun rule.
Oh, real quick, before I get to my next main point about the combat, that magic meter I mentioned briefly earlier? Yeah, except for the bow, every ranged option you get guzzles magic like a hummer with 85-octane. And the bow's trade-off isn't even that it eats stamina at the same pace, it's that it takes a literal five whole seconds of holding the button to charge up the only worthwhile projectile the thing has! The magic-sucking ranged options meanwhile not only get maybe 3-4 shots before depleting your bar completely (your magic replenishes at about 1 point every 10 seconds and you have limited mana potions, by the by), they're not only annoying to aim, even WITH the target lock feature, but they also do virtually no damage! The full monte, babyyyyy! Also you still have to charge most of them up, thankfully with only [i]slightly[/i] less time than it takes for the bow to do so.
So clearly melee is the way to go, and that's already a pain in the ass. But no, it gets worse, dear friends. Whatever the hell this creator did with the combat engine, he went and decided if he could only polish one aspect, it was going to be the hitboxes. I can't know for sure, but I think they must have molded the hitboxes [i]entirely[/i] around every curve and crease of the models, because you have to [i]visually confirm a connection[/i] of both stick and enemy models before it will register a hit. And even then, sometimes the game will just bugger up and not register the hits at all!
Remember the INCREDIBLE models of ambient bunny creature I mentioned near the top of this review? Yeah, there's a bunch of ambient little goobers running around the overworld (and even inside the different levels sometimes) and attempting to hit them is one of the most incredible feats of skill I've ever seen in a video game. Half of the challenge is because of the obscenely tight hitboxes. The other half is because--and I've been holding onto this one the whole way through this review, dear friends--your attacks have [i]wildly different angles[/i] with each stage of any combo. Press heavy attack twice and you'll get a regular swipe into a small jumping lunge with a full overhead that's off-center just enough that only the baby jesus can know where you're actually aiming when you point your model a certain direction. Even when you fight enemies that are shorter than you, you will end up whiffing mid-high attacks in the middle of a combo because of the hitboxes.
I had way more to write here but I'm literally running out of character limit for this review, so I'll leave you with a final score.
1/10 only because my friends and I couldn't stop laughing at the bunny models.
