Liberte

It's very hard to pinpoint what is wrong with Liberte - other reviews often mention the word "jank" in describing the problem, mostly relating to the feel of the combat. But its hard not to give a positive review for the developer's efforts in creating a decent roguelike that uses a different theme (historical/french revolution/lovecraftian). They're also listening, having revamped some of the more annoying parts of the game, such as the deckbuilder UI. Nonetheless, the game has about 70% of the elements in play to make it a decent 5-10hour experience. The story is interesting, the artwork beautiful, unlocks and cards are there to make for a decent progression, and most importantly you can feel the love the developer has put in to make the game enjoyable. I'm leaving this review as an overall positive in hopes that the developer will not give up and continue polishing this game. Lastly, it would be good to consider some kind of major combat overhaul or revamp to try and see if its possible to fix the "jank" mentioned by other players - maybe test drastic steps like redoing hitboxes, modifying telegraphs, increasing map size etc.

There's an important distinction to be made in this review. I like this game quite a bit, I just wouldn't recommend it to many people. This game is a creative concept with a great setting, likeable characters, and gorgeous art tied with a strong core gameplay loop. It is also very repetitive, buggy, and grindy. You have to have a strong tolerance of tedium to get value out of this game, which is a shame because what is here that is good, is really good. Is it worth wading through hours of fundamentally the same hour of gameplay over-and-over to get there? Not for most people, I wouldn't think.

Where do I even begin? I think the fact that achievement for finishing first (!) chapter has been done by 1.3% (and the final chapter? 0.4%) of players says it all. The game is simply bad. Which is a shame because the artstyle is good, the voice acting is good and even the soundtrack is decent. But everything about gameplay just doesn't work. This is a rogue-like where you pick a mission from your hub and then do a series of "rooms". Most of those rooms are simply battle with enemies, some are shops and at the end there's always a boss. And here we have a first problem: you can't choose your way through level. In "Curse of The Dead Gods" for example (same as "Slay The Spire" I think) you have a map of the level where you can see different rooms and can plan your way accordingly. Here? Nothing. You just move through a linear series of rooms without an option to choose anything. Deckbuilding doesn't work. You have 4 skills: Melee, Ranged, Support and Ultimate. You also have talents, some of which are tiered (you can acquire them several times and each time you'll improve the one you have). The game wants you to create a deck with all those skills (except ultimate, you get those during level) and talents. Each time you level up during your run you get 2 (I think) random cards from your deck and that's the ONLY way you "improve", no stats increase, no weapon or cards upgrading (except those tiered talents). Each card has a mana price and you get mana by burning cards you don't need. The problem is that you don't need all these skills after you get 1 melee, 1 ranged and 1 support because you can't upgrade them, you can only replace them so what am I supposed to do with any melee/ranged/support skill after I fill these slots with decent skills? Just burn them. The only cards I'm actually glad to see are tiered ones because they actually make you stronger, everything else is useless. Difficulty doesn't work. The game is very simple. You have all those skills I've mentioned, basic attack and dodges that give invulnerablility frames. What you don't have is stamina. Yes, you can attack and roll as much as you want which makes the game pretty simple. So, in order to create some challenge, the devs decided to make the enemies hit hard and have ridiculous amounts of health and shields. That just makes the game a bore to play. Same thing with curses - debuffs you get during runs (and, unlike "Curse of The Dead Gods" you can't manage these curses, remove them or use them to your advantage - you're just stuck with these debuffs) - they're just boring. For example, after you kill an enemy it spawns a swarm of insects that slowly moves towards you. Is it interesting? No. Is it difficult? No. But it makes you waste time rolling around enemies because they're covered in these swarms and you just can't move close to them so you have to wait for these swarms to dissapear. And that's just one example. "Enemies heal when they damage player", "Enemies sometimes throw projectiles at player" or "Enemies have armor and restore it if you stop hiting them for few seconds" are no better, they're just boring. Also, because you very quickly stop becomig stronger because of how deckbuilding works you will quickly start playing against more and more strong and tough enemies. Because they do improve both in damage and in health. Meta progression doesn't work. You have 4 factions - Crown (Nobles), Rebels, Church and some Vodoo cultists. Each faction has 20 levels of reputation you're supposed to level up and for each level there is a reward. The first problem that these rewards are trash. Most of them are just crafting materials (for example in one of the factions (rebels, I think) the reward for level 20 is the same as reward for level 3 - some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ crafting material) for new cards which you probably won't care about because, as I said, you just need 1 melee, 1 ranged and 1 support skills and all other skills are just for burning. The levelling of those factions is very boring. Each mission you pick gives you 500 XP. You need 1000 just to get from level 1 to level 2. Now I don't know, and don't care, if you'll need more XP for later levels, but even if you don't (which I highly doubt) this already means 160 times of doing repetative and boring runs to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ crafting materials and blueprints for new cards. Again, in "Curse of The Dead Gods"(I just finished this game recently) you can buy new weapons after EACH run. In "Hades" you get new stuff after each run even if it's just some new dialogues with people in your hub. Also, there are some unpolished things like weird controls (character sometimes rolls two times instead of one) and small bugs (sometimes skill don't work untill I press the button again or character stuck in textures). And pretty steep price of 20$.

Very repetitive and grindy roguelite with bugged gamepad controls. Gameplaywise there are only four missions and one region with very similar looking stages. By completing a single run you will have seen and experienced everything the game has to offer. Unfortunately you need to complete about 50 tedious runs to finish the game's "story" due to the way the text-based story encounters are trickle-fed to you. Deckbuilding is very barebones with little synergy opportunities (more damage = good) if you are looking for a roguelite and you are on a tight budget, play Curse of the Dead Gods instead.

I know nothing of the development of this game but it plays like a first project. It took me a while to fully understand why its so ♥♥♥♥. The devs couldn't figure out collision. Enemies do not reliably lock their direction when an attack begins. When they have a longer windup they frequently 'recheck' the players location right before firing. So you see a big swing, dodge behind the enemy, and the enemy instantly turns around to land the attack on you. To compensate for this they tried to make red outlines on the ground, but said outlines frequently do not line up with the attacks and have no animation to indicate timing. For example musketmen project a red line on the ground when they aim, you have a solid 2 seconds or so till the damage actually lands. Pistoleers project the exact same solid red line, but fire almost instantaneously. Other games have solved this by filling the red area in time with the attack. This is made substantially worse by the slow deliberate combat with permanent health loss. Every time you get clipped by an attack from an enemy that projected a red arc forward then turned around and did the actual attack in the opposite direction to catch you that is a loss of resource that will not come back for the whole run. The game has movement,I-frame "parry" dodge, and a basic 3 hit combo. You unlock additional abilities by spending energy on cards that you gain by leveling up. You draw said cards from a deck that you can customize. There are limited duplicate cards and when its out its out. In order to apply these cards you need energy. Energy only comes from burning cards or from shops that have a random chance of spawning. So leveling up stops doing anything around level 18-20 when you've drawn your entire deck. This happens at about stage 2/4 in each run. This means that cards are a hard-limited resource. However the main way to gain energy to play cards and improve your character is to 'burn' the cards permanently destroying them for mana. So optimal play is spending an hour plus each run without the 4 abilities you can unlock with cards, and few or limited buffs, hoping that you'll get another shop where you can fill your mana at the cost of money and actually use upgrade cards. (which still might not be very good) Money itself is a problem because it drops from stage decorations. Which means again optimal play is running around and destroying every box on every stage. Even then your coins cap out at 500 for reasons unclear to me, giving you just enough money to clear out the shop once and then start over from almost nothing. This is made worse by the random shops I mentioned earlier. They are truly random, sometimes you'll get a level then a shop alternating over and over till you hit a boss. Meaning you get about half the chance to gain money, which limits what you can do at the shop, which in turn limits what you can do with your character. There are a bunch of factions and the setting is interesting, but they usually only give you 2 random options for missions and no guarantee that either is for a faction you like. They have no effect on the story and frequently repeat. You see two faction leaders having an amicable conversation and then kill a bunch of the other side's people then work for the other faction. There's absolutely no reason to care and no positive or negative repercussions save for unlocks when the faction influence gamer pass reaches its next experience level. It's just baffling how you can make a story about lovecraftian entities in the french revolution utterly boring. (answer: nobody seems to give a ♥♥♥♥ about the monsters) Speaking of the monsters, you occasionally run into little corruption nodes. You get a choice here: Either purge the corruption by facing a boss and maybe gain some of its power, or let the corruption fester and gain power from the corruption.... That's how the choice is phrased, and it seems interesting, kinda like maybe trading the city's health for power or protecting it or something. The reality of the choice is either have a boss fight (not very hard) and win a random 'ultimate' ability card which are limited use and may or may not be useful in any capacity. Or don't have a boss fight, get the same card, and add a negative modifier from the pool of negative modifiers that already get applied each run. So... always do the boss fight. That's the most that you interact with your eldrich patron. This is a collection of interesting ideas executed horribly. It's like the coding, animation, and art teams were all locked in separate dungeons and forced to make a game. Recommended to game devs as a 'what not to do' and to literally nobody else.

Currently pretty bad and should not be out of Early Access. Might need a few more months before being ready for Early Access. The combat is janky, random and often unfair. You get stuck in terrain. Disconnected props are floating in the air. Geometry is missing faces. Incorrect subtitles display for audio. Scenery NPCs walk in random direction and through each other. Some cutscenes are just a camera pointing at a wall to the sound of narration. City section start being repeated very quickly. Some reviews say it gets worse as you progress further. The story looks like it could go somewhere, but the gameplay is currently too unbalanced, grindy and repetitive to find out. According to achivements, close to 20% of people got through tutorial. 1% completed chapter 1 and 0.2% finished the game. That might be a sign of how many have given up.

Interesting premise, but the gameplay is pretty dull. Voice acting is great. Writing seems like it's decent too. The quest design and level design are the reason why I put the game down. Most of the game in the first two areas was just navigating down corridors and defeating enemies in the corridors, then proceed to the next corridor. The only choices you're given in this roguelike are which of two factions to help at the start of each section, and which abilities to use. The abilities are an interesting concept. You find cards and spend mana to learn them. You get mana by burning (throwing away) cards. Skills you use from cards go on cooldown after you use them, but the cooldown goes down by 1 for each normal attack you do. It's a very interesting take on a combat system. Unfortunately the rest of the game isn't interesting enough for this to carry it alone.

This game is what Tainted Grail should be.... Yes, its a slow grind and repeat to build up your deck but, unlike the aforementioned, its roguelike for real. You get to play the battles. And has a lot of (repetive) content, i barely scratch 8%. Anyways, still enjoayble for me after 15 hours.

An excellent little game with very unique worldbuilding and lore. The storyline is engaging, the characters are memorable, and combat is fun with a surprising amount of depth and customization. I will say that while replay value is high, you do end up replaying the same maps quite a bit. Considering it takes a very long time to unlock all of the skills, I think that the amount of available map content does not match it. This is the main complaint I have though for what is otherwise an absolute gem. 4.5/5.

Although the art style, concept, setting, characters and even voice acting are wonderful, the game at a core level is just not that much fun. The gameplay loop is boring and leaves no agency for the player. You are just on rails for either another fight, or maybe a shop or event room. And those are always the same. Don't get me wrong, I have played a lot of Slay the Spire, so repeating things is not my issue. The issue is this game is just not fully baked. Looking ahead I can see literally hundreds of hours of grinding just to get the story and a few meh unlocks. Don't get me wrong it isn't terrible. 4/10. There is a lot to work with and could become a 8 or 9/10, but currently this is lacking much fun.