Video Review: https://youtu.be/JVgyWm6MalI
2/10
Will Re-review after a few major updates are released.
A top-down fantasy game with deck building elements. You play as Vahn who is betrayed by his fellow soldiers and falls in battle, Vahn is given another chance and finds himself in a small town having to start a new, he must build his strength and stop the darkness that plagues the kingdom.
Now this is the abridged version of the beginning because the intro and the dialogue in the begging is over 5 mins long, way too long in my opinion I was starting to get bored after the min and a half. The intro is voiced and the quality is extremely bad, very quiet, the static is heavy and the voice actor speaks slower than the text is written, but this is not a real big sticking point for me, it's an indie game, developers may find difficulty to have a buget for voice actors and do this themselves, not an issue. The dialogue that follows though is a hard point for me, its drawn out, and lacks any real substance. I read the first dozen lines got bord and just fast peddled through a good bit. I understood what was going on in the story and the rest was genuinely just filler not needing to be there. If they can shorten the intro to be more modest this would be fantastic, realistically have your voiced intro and run a tutorial through the dialogue to keep players interested in the begging would be the best option.
So, after the long-winded intro I finally got to the meat and potatoes of the game, I started off in a town called Green town and was told to go to the guild to find info on one of the culprits of my betrayal, Joined the guild and had my info, he was in a dungeon just south of the town, but I was far too weak to make it through the dungeon, so I look to the boards for the quest I needed to help me level up. The Boards are scattered throughout the zones and will let you know what the zones level requirements are going to be. This would be somewhat help full if it wasn't for reason’s that I will touch on later. Back to the quest simple enough, kill 20 goblins, ok there are plenty right outside of the town, walk up to the first 3 to kill and they charge me and almost kill me instantly. Sadly, I was shocked because this is supposed to be the first enemies you fight so I didn’t think the difficulty would be ramped up that hard, all I got in the beginning was a short 30 second tutorial and then thrown in to this world, but ok let's continue, then I saw it... something I couldn't believe, there was no save file, this game does not have an auto save and never told me that or if it did, I skipped it in the drowning dialogue in the begging
After restarting and making sure I saved, I tried the goblins again and died quickly again, so I looked through the info screens and found that I had 15 points I could invest, didn’t know I had them. I like the leveling system I will say that its well Indepth for what you get. You can have more physical damage, more magic damage, more health and attack points, or how fast you recover your health and attack points. On top of that you also have your cards that you can use in battle. the cards as well can be leveled up to your level if you have enough points to do so increasing their damage and crits, and armor increasing in defense. I like how you can swap the cards around and choose your style of attack.
Let's actually touch on how you fight in this game, A, S, D, AND F, are your attack buttons that can have up to 4 attacks assigned to them, It runs through them kind of like a combo attack, you can mix and match them how you see fit, Shift is your doge and C is your shield I like how this is set up and I feel like it could be extremely fun and fast passed, “could be” is the big thing though.
After leveling up I repeated my death from the goblins and had to resort to keeping out of charging distance and kill them one at a time, starting my adventure off at a snail's pace. This did not change for most of the game. Most enemies hit hard and when they are grouped in 2s and 3s can easily overwhelm you and defeat you quickly. The reason for this is because for you to regenerate heath and attack points you must stand still and do nothing leaving you open for attack; you can block but this uses up one point each time you are hit negating the refill. So, with this being the way you need to fight the quest boards also make it tough. Most quest are to defeat a set number of specified creatures. That set number always seems to be 20.
The boards also tell you the quest in the area are for levels x-y and this seems to be far from true. One area marked for levels 3-10, even at level seven, if it wasn't the goblins, I was very close to death if had to take them head on. You either need to be at the max level described or above if you want a fighting chance in the areas. And level seven is where I stopped playing from frustration and boredom, I had grinded to level seven after 4 and a half hours of playing and I made zero progress in the story.
The fighting is slow and sluggish due to having to wait for recharges during and between fights. During fights its easy to get stuck in attacks, you can’t move and have no option but wait to die, which I feel like is a bug and can be fixed. Progression in the game is slowed to a crawl and needs to be picked up and possibly enemies need to be scaled down. And again with the intro scale back and make the tutorial most of the beginning to give the players more of an idea of what they are playing before throwing them to the wolfs. These are some of the big changes that need to happen to make this game open to a large audience. It's in early access and they can get criticism now to hopefully fix the issues, but I'm afraid this may sully the game in the beginning and people won’t look back to see how it is coming along. It may have been released prematurely and I am afraid it's going to flop even though I can see real potential in the game. I want to come back after some big updates to re-review this game hopefully to find the game I believe it can be, but for now I can’t recommend it to most if any at the stage it is now. If you love to game test this is a great game to get, you can be part of the helping force to get the game off the ground. If not then this is something to avoid for now.
