[h1]Short Review[/h1]
Gloamvault is undoubtedly fun, but it's also inherently imbalanced in a way that flattens most of its own systems. Fireball is busted enough to carry entire runs on its own, which leaves poison, burning, necromancy, sacrifice, and most other spells feeling pointless by comparison. Merging monsters is still addictive, the atmosphere is great, and there's a ton of monster variety to chase down, but the balance issues and underused features hold it back from being something more. The achievement grind is also really rough. Recommended, but def needs more polish.
[h1]Full Review[/h1]
Gloamvault has you playing as a resurrected evil wizard charming monsters, merging them together, and descending through procedurally generated dungeons while trying not to die to your own creations. I went in expecting a dense monster-collecting roguelike with a lot of build variety, and while that's technically what's here, the actual balance of the game steers you toward one strategy far harder than it probably should.
[b]The atmosphere.[/b] This is one of the game's strongest points. There's a good sense of atmosphere throughout, with fitting levels, background music, and ambient sounds that all work together to sell the vibe. There's also a huge amount of monster variety to encounter and discover, which keeps exploration interesting even when the combat starts to feel samey.
[b]The merging system.[/b] I expected merging monsters to be a more interesting and involved system, but it mostly boils down to sacrificing anything with good stats to pump up damage across your party, while trying to merge monsters with similar traits to get the best value out of it. I was hoping different combos would lead to unique traits and mechanics, but that's not really how it plays out. Don't get me wrong, merging is still pretty darn fun and addictive, especially when you're hunting down a specific monster to charm, but it's a bit shallower than I expected going in.
[b]The balance.[/b] This game is inherently imbalanced. Fireball is flat out overpowered, to the point where you basically just need to invest in mana cost reduction and fireball damage while building a team that can clean up whatever fireball doesn't outright kill. That's fun for a first run, but it gets a bit sad once you realize how much less effective every other strategy is by comparison. Poison, burning, sacrifice, necromancy, and consume corpse all end up flat out useless, since the late game punishes you hard for letting your monsters take hits, meaning you're always incentivized to oneshot enemies and avoid getting oneshot yourself. That playstyle directly conflicts with anything that needs multiple turns, dead monsters, or an empty party slot to function. Most spells suffer the same fate. I never once found a reason to spend upgrade points on the spells that reduce dodge, block, or crit chance, and the heal spell falls off hard once enemies start dealing thousands of damage a hit while your heal upgrades only add two points at a time. It's just better to build a dedicated healer that can heal for thousands per turn than to ever touch the actual heal spell.
[b]The smaller issues.[/b] Charming enemies is cool conceptually, but there's no real way to augment your charm rate beyond just whittling enemies down to low health and praying to some higher power. Some skills or items to boost charm chance would've gone a long way, though I get why that might risk breaking an already imbalanced game further. I also found the Meat Grinder to be pretty useless, since I never ran into a situation where grinding a monster down for health felt better than just sacrificing it to level up one of my mains instead. There also seems to be something broken with the Wizard NPC's prisms at higher levels, as the merge success rate for transferring abilities through her just never seemed to work for me. I dumped money into 10+ prisms with zero success, so maybe it's just bad luck on my end, but the game doesn't exactly incentivize gambling money away like that. On a lighter note, your character apparently shouts "Ah, sh**!" whenever you run into a monster, and once you merge enough monsters together, they just turn into an unrecognizable mess of pixels, both of which made me laugh more than they probably should have.
[b]The achievements.[/b] The achievements tied to dying, charming, and summoning a certain number of times are genuinely annoying to chase. At the time of writing this, I'm still grinding these out long after beating the game and pushing to a high level in endless mode. It's not particularly fun, but I want that 100%, so alas.
Overall, Gloamvault is undoubtedly fun, but the balance issues and the sheer number of features that never really incentivize you to use them hold it back from being as deep as it wants to be. The atmosphere is great, the monster variety keeps things interesting, and merging is still addictive even in its simplified form, but leaning entirely on fireball while ignoring half the game's mechanics isn't exactly what I'd call ideal design. Still, I had a good time with it, and I'd recommend giving this one a shot if the concept appeals to you.
[code]If you liked this review, then feel free to check out my [url=https://www.youtube.com/@VinroyIsViral]YouTube Channel[/url] for more reviews. I also have a curator group called [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43774503-The-Completionist-Crusaders/]"The Completionist Crusaders"[/url] that focuses more toward completionists. Thank you, and happy gaming![/code]
