Hell Clock

I do recommend this game, but I'm not here to point out why, you can read other reviews for that. I'm here to share what I think could be improved. I have 71 hours in this game, bought the DLC 5 days ago and am already on Oblivion, 2nd act. I have over 10,000 hours in Path of Exile, so I'm quite familiar with this style of game. I believe this has potential to be my go-to between PoE seasons, but it's not quite there yet. -Dying should be something to learn from, not get frustrated about. Dying to poorly developed mechanics is not fun in the least. I should die to skill, or the clock(which in this game is a thematic and acceptable mechanic). Things I should not die to are things you can't tell are supposed to be art, or objects, especially walls! Every single wall has a column that juts out preventing you from rounding the corner, this is lazy game design and shouldn't punish players. Cactus/trees/bushes that have weird hit boxes that stop players dead in their tracks, shouldn't be a thing. You're racing a clock, not pruning your garden! -washed out ground, parts of the game get so foggy the ground is invisible, you can't see enemy ground effects that kill you, or you make so much mess it obscures damaging areas. There should be a clear difference between enemy damage and payer safe effects. Cull non-damaging effects, blur player effects, highlight/glow enemy damaging areas. Stop displaying enemy ground effects when they ended 10 seconds ago, but still show a visual effect. If you want the game to feel punishing, change how the clock works, subtract fractions of seconds after getting hit, do make me stand there for many seconds waiting for things to disappear when they're no longer actively doing anything. Skill should be punished/rewarded, bad game design should never punish the player. -Hit boxes don't match, I died to a bosses wing, when I died my circle and the wing were touching ever so slightly, but visually we were many feet apart. It's impossible to avoid damage when the hit boxes are larger than the graphics. -Loot sits on the ground long after you collected it. I understand how the could possibly be decent game design, forcing the player to choose between much needed loot and the clock, but forcing a player to sit there and wait for the loot to finally lift off the ground is bad design, especially if the loot is already considered collected, it just hasn't animated yet. At the very least, grey out the loot to show it's been collected. Maybe the idea is to show a player what they got as a reward, but you already have a scrolling inventory on the left side that's more than sufficient, it's slow enough you can easily see what you've got, but it's just unnecessarily punishing to have it sit there on the ground for no apparent reason. -The exits from some bosses are there only to run down the clock (boss from Dry Road floor 3 for example), 3-5 seconds of nothing but path is bad design. -Dodge skills .. What's the point of having a dodge skill if it doesn't really work? Urubu for example, spits out several rows of projectiles, but if you dart past/through him while he's spitting these projectiles, he can spin instantly(literally instantly) to spit those projectiles at you. The point of dodge is to avoid such things in a skillful manner, but this is just punishing by bad design. This makes any dodge skill somewhat useless if the enemy can avoid the benefit of such a skill. There's no slow rotation to re-train focus on the player, there's no delay it's just instant. You can tell because several rows of projectiles will go towards the player in 1 direction, but the rest immediately follow to the players newly teleported location. -Soul stones become irrelevant after awhile. Allow players to spend soul stones to upgrade he town store, or worn gear to top it up to it's maximum roll. -Town vendor is 1,000% useless. I've not once found an upgrade in the store, ever, and so many times I've found the exact same item after a reroll, even though there's 2 separate rolls with 50-100. It's clearly not random, this doesn't feel good. At least with soul stones there's an option to fix this bad design. -Passage skill(any movement skill) should follow the players direction not mouse. I shouldn't have to whip my mouse around to try and dash away from a monster while I'm also trying to aim at it for damage, this doesn't make sense. At the very least, offer a toggle on the skill to allow a player to choose if they've already gotten used to this behavior (or shift to choose on the fly) -Skills and stats are overly vague, even more than PoE which is pretty darn vague. Example, Tupa's Wrath, fires lightning bolts, there's relics to increase # of projectiles, and a blessing to give +2 and +3 projectiles, but nowhere can you tell how many projectiles you're firing unless you record your game and pause it and count them. Honestly, who really wants to do this??? How are you supposed to know if 2 projectiles is a 1% increase in power, 10%?? Constellation says "healthy", but no indication what that even means? 100% life? greater than 50? This is everywhere, nothing actually describes anything so you have to rely on the wiki or other players figuring it out. This is purely a single-player game, but you're forced to rely on multi-player support? -Lastly, Bell vs Constellation. 2 separate systems that just don't mesh well together. Having mixed skills on both upgrade systems feels bad as well as punishing to the player. Bell upgrades can be gotten through constant gameplay, the more you play, the more powerful you get, but that's not exactly the case, the bell only gets you small power increase, the constellation gives you the rest, but they're limited and unless you grow in size you can't really get constellation points to overcome those humps.... I feel like the bell and constellation should have very different functions. Bell should be solely player upgrades. Damage increases, cooldowns, defensive, etc. Achieved through just playing the game, putting in time, slowly growing. Anyone of any skill level should be slowly rewarded with simply playing the game. The constellation should affect the world behavior. That way when you get a constellation upgrade you actually feel rewarded, but you're not held back because you NEED that upgrade you can't get because the bell isn't getting you anywhere. Constellation should be things like reroll costs for totems, gold gained, soul stones gained, totem options favor worn gear/skills instead of everything in the pool(which just sucks when you can finish an entire run and get 0 items that you can actually make use of). Global monster resistance debuffs, red portals, nightmare portals, boost to nightmare perks, soften nightmare penalties, etc, etc. At least by separating them you have 2 systems that play well together rather than 2 half-systems that barely mesh together. Not to steal from the POE system, but masteries would be a decent way to move some of the constellation bufffs to the Bell. Separating the bell / constellation shouldn't be too hard, you already have a campaign bell and the Oblivion bell when you'd acquire your constellations. It would take a pretty big rework though, but I do think it would be worth it for the longevity of the game.