Crimson Moon

É Bom!

This is a 5/5 game! Perfect with friends. You have to try it out!

It's okay. It's $20, and it really feels like it. There's the bones there for something much more interesting, but it feels as though the scope was very tightly controlled to leave room for adding more interesting things. For example, there are no boons that interact with your throwables or status potions, and there should be ways to build around those. Your choices for upgrades are never real game-changers, and that's sort of a big draw for this genre. You want to build around a theme or a mechanic, but there isn't really anything that strongly enables that in this. There aren't really "builds" necessarily, just stacking of buffs and debuffs on self and enemies that incrementally lead to you being stronger. You can start a run with a couple carefully selected pieces of armor that'll give you more or less a theme when you start, but ultimately you'll wind up with a little of everything, since many of the boons don't stack. I had thought the angels would affect more than just what your invincible button mashing mode looks like, but they don't. There are 2 of them, and they only change what your activatable super mode plays like. I had hoped they would have passive effects that lean into a playstyle that matches what their active mode is like. And that there would be more than 2. The controls are weighty and less responsive than I'd like, which is only really a problem against larger enemies or groups. The camera very much dislikes when your locked on target moves behind you, or when you try to change lock-on targets. The larger enemies all love to run at you and swing their locked-on limbs behind you, in a way that feels like they deal more damage to my camera than my character. There needs to be a maximum to the camera acceleration so that it doesn't whip around behind you against big enemies. The executions are also quite finnicky, and it can be difficult to perform them if an enemy is on anything other than a completely flat plane. The bosses are alright if a little spongy, but many of them encourage parrying, which only gives you a couple hits and little else for the amount of risk you assume in doing it. The last boss (only accessible after obtaining the second stone), is also an absolute slog and does not feel fun to fight. He teleports (with iframes) after you hit him once. You can parry, but you'll be lucky to get more than 2-3 hits in, as he will then reset by teleporting. He spams DoTs, zones you, and dodges if you attempt ranged attacks. That'd all be fine if the design rewarded parries or landing a big hit to stun the boss, but he has so much health that you don't feel rewarded for your aggression - you'll just trade into some DoTs and ultimately get whittled down. I beat the final boss and put the game down for a few days, and when I picked it up and got to that encounter again, I remembered why I had no desire to play anymore after beating him. The rest of the game has excellent bones that could build out into a great little roguelite gem, but that boss is fundamentally flawed in a way that I don't see them being able to fix. There are a lot of good things here, like the chunkiness of the core combat against regular enemies, the loot and upgrade system, and the way they've set up for variation in what stages you play across a run. Overall, though, I wouldn't really recommend it unless they address some of the issues with game feel and the camera. I'm accepting that the last boss will likely never be fun, but I'll put up with that if the rest of the game's good.