I love DemonCrawl but I have mixed feelings about it. On the Surface this game has everything that I want from a roguelite. A large variety of items, classes and builds, lot's of replayability. But there are some massive issues that the game has. But I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start from the beginning.
DemonCral is a minesweeper roguelite. You play an adventurer that moves through various regions and has to avoid monsters while doing so. Each stage is a minesweeper board that you have to solve. This means opening up cells, checking the numbers that indicate how many monsters are nearby and marking cells that you believe have monsters. After opening every cell that doesn't have a monster you win the stage. If you however open a stage with a monster you don't immediately lose like in Minesweeper, instead you get attacked by the monster. Your character starts with limited health and every stage the monsters have attack power that shows how much damage they inflict. Harder stages have not only more monsters but also inflict more damage on you which could result in a one hit death. Solving the game is mostly possible through logic just like real Minesweeper but there are cases in which you have no choice but to guess. But thisd wouldn't be a roguelite if there weren't a ton of different items that can help you in that case. There are many different types of items. Passive items have a passive effect that automatically activates on itself. Consumable items can be used from your inventory to activate a one-time effect. Magic items are active items like consumables excep they can be used multiple times. Each magic item has a "mana charge" that is depleted when you use the item. Whenever you open numbered cells, you gain mana equal to the number revealed. This mana is randomly split among your magic items, so it's better to have less of those items in order to recharge them faster. Legendary items are incredibly powerful passive items that completely shift the gameplay in your favour. You can only hold one of those items and if you get a new legendary you are asked which one you want to keep. Lastly Omen items are negative items that you randomly can get from negative effects.
You find these items in chests. Each stage will usually have at least one chest, some modifiers and items can increase or decrease this number. You don't know what item the chest contain and you always have to take the item it has even if you don't want that item and especially if it's an Omen. The only exception is when your inventory is full, in that case the item is put on the ground which allows you to pick it up if you free up space. That being said, you cannot simply discard items except in very specific scenarios. This is one of the criticisms I have with the game, I get that you are not allowed to simply drop Omens but let me at least discard normal items I don't need anymore.
Besides items you also have various character classes that you unlock over time, starting with the Novice. The Novice is a beginnemr class that allows to avoid losses if you made a mistake but doesn't offer anything relevant in terms of power. Other classes on the other hand are much more interesting.
There are a ton of classes to discover and each one usually specializes in one of the many different game mechanics. Unlocking classes requires the player to fulfill special requirements, like killing enough monsters for example. However, just unlocking the class does not allow you to use it, you still have to buy it. And this brings me to the worst part of the game, the token system. During the game you can find two types of currency, coins which are used to buy items in shops and use the special abilities of NPCs, and tokens which is the metacurrency of the game. You get some tokens by leveling up and can also find some randomly in stages if you are lucky. The best way are however daily quests from which you can have up to three at the same time although you only get one new one per day. That being said, the amount of tokens you get is laughable and the amount you need is immense.
Let's take for example classes. Each class has to be unlocked in three stages which means both the requirement fulfillment and buying it afterwards. The first stage allows you to play as that class and has a passive effect, the second stage adds another passive effect to that class and the third stage finally unlocks the ultimate ability of that class which is an active ability that you can use every few solved stages. The first stage costs 10, the second 20 and the final one even 30 tokens, so to fully unlock a class you have to pay [b]60[/b] tokens! Not onyl that but you can only begin to unlock the next stage of the class if you bought already the one before it, which makes the entire process to unlock and buy every class incredibly tedious. And classes are not the only thing you can buy in the token shop, you also can buy permanent upgrades that affect all classes, legendary items that can appear in future runs and a bunch of cosmetic items which are of course optional but are still part of the grind. All of this is clearly meant so players spent as much as possible with the game. You would expect that kind of grind with a live service game, not a singleplayer roguelite.
But the grind does not end here. After you finished the campaign of th egame you unlock the true endgame. Two new game modes are unlocked, Endless multiverse and Beyond. Endless Multiverse is exactly what you expect, an endless mode. After you beat all required stages you can move to the next multiverse. You loose all your progress but there are NPCs that allow you to pay to keep at least some of it to make it easier for the next multiverse. These multiverses get hard with each recursion. That mode is mainly designed for grinding and farming. Beyond is where the true endgame lies. In that mode you only play three short but very hard stages. In order to play these stages you have to pay artifacts which you randomly can find in normal stages. You also have to pay a token to play Beyond. Beyond is the only way to aquire Divine items and sigils. Divine items are more powerful versions of normal items. Unlocking those allows you to find them in future runs. Sigils on the other hand are meta items that you can take with you on a run. Each one has randomized properties, positive and negative. Sigils have various tiers with higher tiers being more powerful. But to get those tiers you need to use emblens on Beyond and this is where I completely lost it. Emblems change the rules of the game, making it overall harder, but they also require you to pay more artifacts and tokens to even attempt the run to begin with. Tier 3 emblems cost 300 of each! You usally get around 1-3 artifacts per stage and only if you are lucky. In order to get that amount of drops you have to break the game and I don't think that's a good design philosophy.
But I would lie if I said I hate the game. Just the core gameplay is enough to get me hooked for hours. It's after all Minesweeper with extra stuff added to it to make it more fun. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, make sure to check the game out.
But be aware, the game has at this point over 1000 items and the devs cannot test every single interaction of every item, class and stage modifier, which results in frequent bugs and in worse cases, crashes. There are constant bug fixes and patches but the devs also want to add more which worsens the problem.
