Crusader: Dungeon Series

This is for now a negative review, but there's enough worthwhile about this game that I'd like to turn it into a positive review in future. For the cost, the game has two things going for it: a fairly fully developed dodge and roll combat system with a fun little set of special abilities available, and reasonably smooth if fairly off-the-shelf looking 3d graphics. There's clearly been a lot of work put into those aspects, and I've definitely played with worse games on those fundamentals. However, there are some fairly large drawbacks. First issue is that the combat system, whilst well developed, is kind of janky at present. Actually getting my blades to connect with an enemy seemed to be an exceptionally difficult task even when an enemy was properly locked onto and obviously and visually not blocking, and getting the positioning for the stealth-assassination move also felt awkward (I managed it once ingame after failing at all my attempts on the static dummy in the tutorial, and the time I did it ingame I'd been squat-waddling behind this guy for two circuits round a room before I actually pulled off the assassination hit). These aren't per se difficulty issues, just that it doesn't feel intuitive when you've got it right or not - though I'd consider making the early part of the game more forgiving for these areas, then ramping any difficulty/precision up later. The graphics, whilst reasonably detailed, don't necessarily help - the motion blur when you turn the camera is way too heavy and makes it very hard to get a good sense of your surroundings, I felt like my character was drunk some of the time. I'd want to see that fixed, maybe the dodge-roll sped up a bit, and reduce or remove stamina costs on the base attack: many of the enemies have a lot of health right from the start and the base attack damage is low, so given that already leads to drawn-out combats adding the extra frustration of running out of stamina for basic attacks & dodges isn't much fun. I'd have rather seen squishier and harder hitting enemies given this combat style. Second issue, there is zero sense of what you're doing or why. What is the Dungeon of Dagginor? Who are these random people and goblins it's stuffed with who are trying to kill me and vice versa? What am I really getting out of this and who am I anyway? There's not much compelling about the game because these questions seem totally unanswered. Developing the village more - adding the ability to talk to the people there (which as far as I can tell you can't do), maybe making them move around a bit and tell you some simple backstory, and making the player go back there to upgrade, would perhaps integrate the village better into the game and give some more sense of motivation for the player. Even if the motivation is just "the dungeon has riches in it, go stab things and get rich" that's still worth spelling out! Third issue, the way character integration etc is done is weird: the game does explain that e.g. redoing the tutorial wipes your saves, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a pretty weird way for a game to work in 2022. I feel like a priority should really be adding separate save slots where the player picks character look at the start (and maybe even gets to name their character - again, it's not the point of the game, but having your character be something more than a nameless avatar is nice). Fourth issue, there seemed to be sound sliders but no music, guess this may be a bug. I don't regret getting this game because I personally quite like poking around projects like this, but there's definitely work to do on it and it might have made more sense to treat this as an early access project. Hopefully this feedback is helpful and there'll be better versions out in the current months. Good luck to the developers & hope the next steps go well!