Guild of Darksteel

Barely tried it so far. Here go my first impressions. Story seems interesring, I want to know where this goes. Graphics are pretty meh, you have to guess which button to press by its color as it's impossible to read the letters, I keep on the try and find that I have to retrack my path because it is a plotted choice.mmhhh, then comes a good old Master System vibe of Prince of persia and then my character freezes but the game goes one. I have to force quit the game and that is 20 min gone. Will I come back? I don't know, it deserves a better try but I just simple fun with these indie games. Vampire survivors just gives that so you will habe to wait, perhaps forever... get it at a very deep discount.

Juego cortito pero con un combate bastante curioso a lo Magicka. Tiene una historia oscura y tiene dioses primigenios, a mi me sirve.

A fairly neat experience. The lore and setting carry a fair bit of the game for me, but the combat is a nice balance of timing and skill that works well enough.

Fun little game with a very interesting combat system. I don't even mind it being quite short, it's one of those games that don't need to be longer to entertain you.

Really like this game so far. Thrown off by the combat system at first it got even more interesting when I understood it Really nice on steam deck

Really interesting game. The graphics are superb and very stylish, the story is simple but engaging, and it weaves a pretty neat world in the short time you're in it. The battle system is the highlight for me, as it's really engaging despite it's simplicity. Once you learn how to manage combos and enemy patterns, you genuinely feel like a badass swordsman and all mistakes are literally your fault.

The screenshots basically show you the entire game--including the final boss fight and the combo you will need to use in it. The art is indeed really good, but there's not much to the gameplay at all. It has the feeling of a project that probably had a lot of planned features but they were never implemented. While it's a finished game, it feels really sparse. It's like a polished MVP (minimum viable product). The platforming doesn't really serve any purpose in this game except to give you a sense of exploration. But there's hardly any points of interest or variety so there's not much point to it. Enemy encounters trigger a separate battle mode like what happens in RPG Maker games--it's not integrated into the platforming aspect. The overworld is just a single long flat platform with no warp points. There's no jumping, climbing, or sprinting in the overworld which is boring and annoying because all the quest NPC's and dungeon access points are spread out pretty wide. In battle mode neither you nor the enemy can move. The enemy has an attack pattern on a timer that it repeats verbatim. You have to time your attacks for when the enemy is vulnerable and block when its attacking you. It's just like Deep Dungeons of Doom in this respect. The difference is that you can do combos in this game. But the battles are very repetitive and uninteresting just like with generic RPG Maker games. There's not much variety of enemies and you pretty much stick with the same attack pattern all the time. By the way the final boss fight was a huge disappointment and anticlimatic. The story is linear. There's one ending and only one way to get there. There's a couple of missable side-quests but they're not important in any way unless you want the achievements. I didn't count but i think there's only like 5 main quest segments. The game is really short and can be beat in about 3 hours without trying. The NPC's aren't interesting at all because there's hardly any dialogue and most just have one thing they say on repeat no matter what. Other than basically being a barebones game, there's also 2 bugged achievements that the dev never fixed and probably never will. I got the game for cheap so i'm more annoyed about the time wasted playing this and the broken achievements.

I would hesitate to call it a bad game but it isn't particularly good either. Pros: - The story was moderately interesting. It wasn't as deep as the game description would imply but it was okay for a short game like this. Cons: - The gameplay was definitely repetitive. - There are only a few enemy types in the game and they get used over and over throughout the course of the game, even when it makes no sense (ie why would you be fighting bandits and ascetics in the freshly unsealed prison?). - Each enemy type fights using the same moveset, so you basically have the exact same fight over and over throughout the game... is what I would say if there weren't uncommon variants of each enemy that have a second moveset. Normally, I would consider that a good thing but, from what I could see, there is no way to tell in advance what the enemy is different (ie visual cues). The variant movesets are mostly just longer versions of the basic movesets, so it just takes longer to kill the enemies. On top of that, the fact that the variants exist means that you end up playing a bit more cautiously in general and that also makes the fights take longer. - You go through long stretches of enemies that all fight the same way and gradually make your way through, slowly losing health with each mistake. The next save point is ahead but you have no idea how far. Usually it about twice as far as you would like. Unfortunately for you, you died one room away from the save room and now get to go all the way back to the previous save room and fight all the enemies again. Sometimes, you may want to backtrack and some of the enemies will have arbitrarily respawned. - The combos aren't particularly great. Each enemy has a moveset that would let you get a few hits and maybe a basic combo (XY) in and then a lengthy pause during which you can get in a single full combo (ie XYYX) before they do their moveset again. You are supposed to be able to use "Focus" (aka switching between yellow and purple combos) to boost damage and take advantage of the effects of longer combos... but it never seemed to be all that effective. I basically defaulted to using the basic combo and heal (XYYX). - Due to the way the combo leveling menu is laid out they are also the easiest to level-up (especially the basic combo since it is selected by default). I found (with a controller) that it would move the selector a random amount and it was difficult to consistently select anything outside the first column. If you moved selector up/down it would at least land on one of the combos I actually wanted (basic combo, heal). - Lack of healing: the heal combo barely does any damage or healing (you would need to heal 2-3 times to restore the damage from one enemy hit). However, it is the only way to heal outside of the infrequent save points and thus the only way to prevent resets (other than perfect blocking). - The first "boss" is unbeatable, even though you should definitely be able to beat it (it is a common enemy in the third act). I did a bit of save-scumming and reloading the game to get the bats to respawn, leveled up the basic combo to level 10, and it made no difference. They basically just made it invincible so that you could die in-game and see a bit of lore (not necessarily a bad thing but poorly implemented). Technically, you could skip it by just killing the bats and going back the way you came. - The final boss seems to only have one way to actually win. It is excessively easy and just as boring: heal, basic combo, block, and repeat until it is dead. I was taking about as much damage as I was healing (even with block) and there wasn't time for anything except the basic combo, so I don't see any other strategy working. Bugs: - Everyone that plays the entire game should get all the achievements but a couple of them are bugged (hence the low % on those two achievements). - There are a couple NPCs that are part of short quest-lines (aka the swordmaster getting back the Focus scroll and the guy looking for a bandit sword). After you finish the questline they will disappear in front of you. For some reason, you can still talk to them while they are in the process of disappearing and it will hardlock the game.

Beat the game in offline mode, hence only a few minutes on record (but see Achievements). I wanted to quit partway through because it's boring to play after the first few fights (of many), but could tell it would be short (it was ~3 hrs) so I stuck it out for the story, which unfortunately didn't deliver, either. [b]--Gameplay: 1/5--[/b] Unfortunately, there is a lot of boring backtracking, the combat mechanic is mind-numbingly simple and barely evolves at all, and the lack of information about which order the options at a juncture should be tried in is just disrespectful of your time. There are no puzzles. If you liked wandering around dungeons in the original NES Zelda then imagine if it was just a map-less maze with a single enemy in every room that you had to kill to open any door. [b]--The Story: 2, maybe 3/5--[/b] The question implicit in the game's title-- "What [i]is[/i] the Guild of Darksteel?" --presents the philosophical issue posed by the game, which is: "What would it really be like, if you had gained immortality at the cost of being a soldier forever?" It's a great premise that is naturally expressed by the respawn checkpoint system. Unfortunately, neither the story writing nor the mechanics do anything to engage or answer that question. Instead, the story turns into a shallow collision of medieval christian and c'thuhlu tentacle cult themes, but the references are generic and there aren't any compellingly unique spins on the standard tropes of either.

nice art and animations but everything else is meh