I don't like this game. And I think I would dislike it more if I played more of it.
Visually it's great — nice lighting, water reflections, and genuinely good pixel art. Music and sound design pull their weight too. No complaints there.
The problem is everything else stays exactly the same shape from biome one to biome four. You explore somewhere new, mine the local ore, craft the local weapon and armor, kill the local boss, move on. As Ranger I went wooden bow → tin slingshot → iron bow and none of them handled any differently from each other, just reskins with a new coat of paint. Compared to something like Terraria, where you've got a genuine [i]pile[/i] of gear and weapon options available at [i]every[/i] stage for [i]every[/I] class, this game feels extremely compressed due to a lack of options — crafting included. Nothing sits still long enough for you to actually sink into it. The entire game feels like a boss rush, and everything that isn't that feels tacked on.
Speaking of bosses, they don't help. With barely anything prepared going in, mine were dying in 30-60 seconds. Very little health, very little threat.
I checked the wiki hoping I was missing something, and technically I was — a lot of the actually interesting, unique gear is locked behind extremely low drop chances instead of being craftable, and for some classes you don't craft your weapons at all, you just grind the same handful of enemies and hope. I burned a while grinding for early Ranger armor pants before giving up and switching to ore armor, which was just straight up better anyway. Summoner apparently has 7 weapons total per the wiki — I found 3 of them across the first 3 biomes. Roughly one new weapon per biome, and while the other classes have a little more flexibility, it's still rare enough not to matter much. Games like this live and die on how much they let you express yourself through your build, and this one just doesn't give you much to work with.
There's a skill/XP system too, technically. It rewards spamming quick repetitive actions, so the only skills I ever leveled were running and mining, for rewards too small to notice. Feels bolted on.
Old biomes get dropped the second you leave them — no reason to ever go back. The first three areas are at least open to explore freely, but once the wall comes down and unlocks the next three, you're funneled through them in a strict, rigid order instead.
I kept going for a bit purely on sunk cost, but partway into biome four, staring down yet another ore that turns into the same tools, the same weapon, and the same armor shape as always, I just stopped.
