First and foremost, I'd like to congratulate Keep the Engine Games on their debut. It's always a joy to see new indie studios take the leap of faith, and bring us new experiences with their craft. I sincerely wish them the best of luck on their future endeavors.
Now, Gems of Evolution is a direct jab at Vampire Survivors. Telling us the player that while unlocking all those powerful shiny skills is fun, yes, and literally annihilating waves upon waves of foes with flashing colors causes your brain to release dopamine; it's all a bit dull since the game kinda... plays itself? GoE takes that concept and says, look we know it's fun, but how about a little more challenge? And to that I say yes.
And challenging it is. All those skills, you have to cast them yourself. There's no autoplay nor handholding. Running around the map you have to keep an eye on your cooldowns as each second a skill is unused is wasted. It is up to you to create a valid build on the fly too, as the merchant has a time limit.
There are a lot of things to consider in a build. Your character, the starting perks, skills that you chose each time you level up, and the vendor you buy useful items from in between each wave. Lots of numbers, lots of reading. Which can be daunting. For me it definitely was. But not because it's difficult, but because the game falls a bit short on the UI/UX department.
And with this comes the bad. As you probably have noticed from the broken English on the game trailer already ("can you survive 30 wave"), broken English is common throughout the game. It's not a deal breaker in most up and coming indie titles, but here it kinda is. Because the game quite literally bombards you with paragraphs of text. The concept of "show don't tell" is nonexistent, which makes picking up the game for the first time a dreadful experience. And parsing through text written in poor English makes things all the more tedious. I believe the UI, by which I mean the way things are presented to players, needs a rework. And some proofreading would be very much expected before the game leaves Early Access.
There are other, smaller things that are not huge issues themselves, but would be great to have worked on. Such as;
- Walking animations don't make much sense. Characters feel like they're just gliding on or hovering over the map. Most of the animations actually are quite robotic.
- The cursor during gameplay is hard to see. It's tiny, and bears 4 different colors representing each main element. The concept is nice, but this makes aiming somewhat difficult, which is important on heroes like Eywriis as the primary attack spawns an elemental attack on exactly where you click on the map.
- The enemies get stronger and take more hits to die as time goes on, while having the exact same appearance. It'd be great to at least have a visual cue that it'll take more hits to kill the same enemy, which is needed to assess where to move to on the map. A good example would be aforementioned Vampire Survivors, which solves this problem by having a lot of different enemy types, or sometimes by simply changing their size alone.
- The music is repetitive and constantly loops over the same melody every few seconds. Can't imagine playing the game without muting it and playing something else in the background.
BUT! I write all this because I see potential here. The game has a very cool concept. With some further touches here and there, it can be much more enjoyable. All this gets a pass after all, mainly because of 2 things. First, this is an Early Access title, and small issues like the ones I mentioned are always expected before a v1.0. And second, this is Keep the Engine's first title, so they deserve to be given some slack.
Once again, I wish Keep the Engine the best of luck out there. They seem really eager and enthusiastic and I love it. I'll be keeping an eye on their future work for sure, on how they'll fine-tune GoE over time, and of course on what their future titles are going to be.
