Core gameplay:
Its a fun brawler with decent itemization. Not amazing, mind you, but decent. It has a surprising amount of options to its combat between items, which DoT or passive damage you decide to stack, special moves and the customization you get after beating the game.
Randomization:
Bad. If you are here for runs which feel different; wrong game. You constantly see the same rooms with the same enemies.
Itemization:
Its okay, not as good as it seems. Mostly you pick if you want do X element damage and X bonus damage (slash on hit, periodic aoe, projectile on I don't know its in russian for some reason). You spam items do that thing better. As such, while you may see like 15 items, they all just boil down to "rune slash better" and if you are doing a rune slash run you take as many of them as you can every time; most items, as such, boil down to "do X betterer", and the variety in X is not that high.
A consistent problem across all difficulties is that the rarity system does not seem to be a rarity system; its more of a "how far in a run are you" system. "epic" items become common later, for example. There are no items, stats or mechanics to make these things spawn earlier. Legendaries in particular are near never seen outside of the very final area.
Enemy balance:
Largely fine until you get to higher difficulties, specifically 4 (of 5).
Below that, you are fighting enemies that can largely be hitstunned, trying to deal with those while super-armored enemies are usually rare elites, or enemies you can somehow avoid getting overwhelmed by (like the ice enemies who grow if you leave them for too long, but can be 1 shot if small by pressing one button) and bosses usually have either
A: Downtime when they get tired after a combo
B: Downtime between attacks to get some quick hits in
C: A bar you can deplete to stun them and get a bunch of hits in at 0 risk
They're generally fun and fair
The execption is the castle area, which has far too many super-armored enemies with tons of hp, usually making it a boring slog (a shame since this is where you may find legendaries, only to have nothing actually fun to use them on)
In difficulty 4 and 5, enemies having super-armor is the norm. Unrbeakable. It spawns in new enemies that either
A: Ram you constantly
Or
B: Spam AoE's; usually 2 at a time
These enemies can be stunlocked, but also have completely unreasonably high hp. So I'll often finding myself just spending ages unable to actually do anything because if I hit the armored enemies these guys hit me, but if I hit these guys armored enemies rush me down.
I would consider these difficulties largely not fun, and they very much promote leaning on specific mechanics I will note at the bottom.
Bosses you find on these difficulties usually have no downtime between attacks while also passively spamming aoes, never get tired and either lack the blue stun bar OR get powered up and attack faster if you break it. I honestly do not know how we're supposed to fight these things without overrelying on spamming dodge and quick burst damage/invul actions.
These boss fights are terrible, and could use a total rework. They feel nothing like what you fight up to this point.
Status/build balance:
Its quite bad. Poison I don't really get how to make work outside of kicking poisoned barrels at enemies because its main mechanic (clouds) simply do not work. Enemies move. You can get a item to make them move to enemies... insanely slowly. Most attacks barely give any stacks of poison on hit and even high stacks tend to do low damage.
The lightning balls you can run into to make them hit enemies are both annoying to use and insanely underpowered. They should be the strongest effect if I am giving up all my dps to use these; they're probably the weakest.
Fire is hard to judge because it seems to be balanced around "explosions", but the tool tip on how to proc explosions is incredibly vague so I seem largely unable to use it? Very few items proc it.
On the other side, rune quake (periodic aoe) and ice are both absurdly overpowered, the former letting you just run up to most enemies and spam like 8 hits of >1-2k damage within a second to everyone in a group and repeat (and you can make it ice), while the latter is the ONLY WAY to actually use anything with commitment on higher difficulties towards the ened, since almost every enemy has super-armor, spams projectiles or both and bosses otherwise NEVER STOP ATTACKING, EVER
This could use some serious work on both balancing and onboarding. I can't even comment on rune projectile because how it works is in russian. It seems okay?
Progression:
Pretty good. You can unlock passives that give you minor mp regen, etc. New weapons. New throwable/useable tools. When you beat the game, you unlock modifers to change how your weapons work; ie this attack now auto-blocks, you get a new move if you press RB twice, etc. This adds some decent experimentation options.
Healing/mitigation options:
Its kind of iffy. On the one hand, it has a plethora of ways to generate resources to heal yourself; potion meter per room, on hit, 1 per room potion, 4 per room banana, heal on crit, etc...
On the other hand, its got this weird obsession with arbtitary limitations on these things, which enforces an annoying loop of using 25% of your potion meter, then hitting enemies to get it back, then using it... just let me restore it to max? Would that be so bad?
Regen is like this too, always stopping at I think 35% hp. Which, on higher difficulties, reads: Completely meaningless you're going to die from this low. Would 100% be so bad? Or runes to raise this cap? Also, outside of giving yourself guaranteed potion points per room, that resoruce is annoyingly rare for no reason. Most enemies drop 0.
You can also bring an NPC ally with you to distract enemies, which higher difficulties feel balanced around as its basically the only way to get breathing room. They vary in effectiveness, with mages notably giving you mp motes to pick up passively, knife users kind of sucking and katana uses going absolute sicko mode 24/7, but they all are very tanky, self-revive seemingly without limit and do good damage early and okay later. Unfortunately, you can't bring the actual town npcs with you, even if you can see them fighting in the field.
I think that covers gameplay, so; story. Its bad, but mostly skippable, outside of the memories they force you to watch for some reason. Its too vague. Even when you see what happened, all the important details are totally skipped. Likeable cast, though.
Now as for the things you lean on on the higher difficulties;
The curses for hp on crit and healing potion on hit. At least one of these feels basically needed, as otherwise you can barely heal outside of fountains you get once per area.
Autonomous mech or distraction summon. Either one. Or just an npc ally. Without something like this, there are many rooms where i genuinely do not know how the game expects me to do literally anything. 2 phantom pigs with permanent super-armor, hook guy, like 5 basic enemies and do aoe spamming demon king enemies, all in a tiny space? Second area of the game? Was this tested?
Any attack that either moves you a lot, has lots of invul or both. Ie the legendary demonic katana has 2 moves on its skill
A: Stand still and swing rapidly (completely unusable without freezing enemies, especially on the bosses of higher difficulties, who will just teleport away while summoning an aoe under you while hitting you)
B: Dash half-screen while invincible, doing a chunk of damage
Guess which I used to beat difficulty 4 first time? It was the latter. I mindlessly mashed RT (to use the skill) RB (to dash) over and over again. Through every hitbox. Every phase. Every fight once I got it. It was very easy. ANY time I tried to have FUN and use the former? I had to dodge out or I got hit.
