Lynked: Banner of the Spark

I recommend this game, but with a big caveat that I'll get into in a bit. The gameplay loop of Lynked is mostly solid. You have a basic city building, resource gathering, and farming system which works like a hub area that you return to in between missions. It has some similarities to roguelike games. The townspeople offer you quests. Some of those quests are to improve or increase the number of people and buildings in the town and this gives you access to upgrades and varieties of your weapons and gadgets for use in combat. The second type of quest is to complete missions in a combat zone area where you proceed between different floors or regions of the zone. If you complete the mission, you keep whatever upgrade materials you acquired during the mission. You lose many of those resources if you die. The city building part is pretty well developed. You gather townspeople from different combat missions and then they return to town and offer items for sale to improve some aspect of the game. They also provide different tiles and decorative items you can place in the town like streets, benches, structures, lighting, and your own personal house you can decorate in various ways. It seems a bit like animal crossing or a much simpler version of decorative games like planet coaster and the like. The combat in the game isn't overly difficult or complex but dodging and hitboxes are a little slippery. It's like dark souls if the dodging mechanics weren't precise or a platformer where jumping was a little loose. It's not ideal, but it's workable. That is, until you get to the combat missions themselves. There are two kinds of combat missions: main story missions that progress the plot and side missions that progress the decorative or social parts of the city building. Unfortunately there isn't much difference in how the missions play out. If I had to use one word to describe the missions it would be "repetitive." You start a mission by selecting the weapon you would like to use, activating the special abilities you want to use, and selecting a free upgrade for some aspect of your combat. You unlock more options as the game progresses. This seems fine on first glance, but aside from the initial setup of weapon type and gadget behavior, every upgrade is entirely random. Some of the upgrades are really helpful to overcome limitations in the combat system. Others are not. What do I mean? Combat is fast-paced and reactionary with very specific moves by a limited selection of enemies. This would be great if there were exceptional dodge and aim mechanics. There aren't. Dodge doesn't cancel your attack animations. This isn't a problem in most games once you learn the attack patterns of enemies and when you find an opening. What it lacks here is a smooth adjustment from attack animation to dodging. Once the attack animation is finished there is a significant gap before a dodge can occur. Given the fast-pacing of the combat it seems counter intuitive to leave gaps between actions. This becomes more noticeable as you start fighting stronger and more numerous enemies. It might have been helpful to introduce invulnerability frames shortly before and after the dodge animation occurs. You seem to take no damage in the split second of the dodge but after, you are immediately vulnerable. Getting stunlocked is frustratingly common. I'm sure your mileage will vary if you "git gud." All of this pales in comparison to the real downside of the combat. It's boring. There are a significant number of weapon types to choose from which is great. There aren't a lot of enemy types and there aren't a lot of weapons that are fast enough to allow effective dodging as well as proper aiming of attacks. So, by default, fast-firing ranged weapons become the preference. The rapid fire blaster seems to be the best weapon I've used. Not because it does a lot of damage or even because it is very good. What it does allow is the shortest time between attack animation and dodging and it has the ability to fire a charged shot for when the enemy is moving slowly or charging up their own attacks. The versatility of the weapon is great and the standoff distance is ideal. But, unless you are required to use a specific weapon type, you'll always choose the weapon that feels the best for your playstyle. The biggest limitation for using the other weapons is how much damage an enemy does with basic attacks. It's common for a single attack from a larger enemy to do 1/3 or 1/4 of your max health pool. The slower the weapon you are using the more likely you are to take a hit. Healing is rare and ineffective. There's a special ability you can get that restores about 5% of your health when activated and has a long cooldown. Given the fast pace of the combat itself, most battles are over quickly and then you are stuck trying to heal or search for healing items in between sections of fights. If you want to actually get through the level as quickly as possible without downtime, you have to select the weapon that provides the most mobility and damage without relying on healing. One of the upgrades available for every weapon is a 25/50/75/100% chance to restore 5 health when you kill an enemy. You will probably have 400-1000 hp by the mid to late game so this is a trivial amount of healing. But, if you take a hit you can recover the lost HP after killing several enemies. This randomly generated weapon upgrade is so helpful for survival that if you don't get it as an option early on, longer missions become exceptionally more skill intensive and difficult. Most of the limitations of the combat system would be ironed out by making this an always available passive effect rather than a randomly rolled upgrade. In some maps, especially with lots of resources, it's not as necessary. In other maps, especially the ones without chests (which drop health items), the bullet hell requires a lot more attention and skill. I'm not sure what might be the correct solution but if a single random upgrade turns an otherwise difficult mission into a faceroll something needs to change. Either tighten up the dodge and aim mechanics, make healing more efficient overall, or balance all the weapons and upgrades so they each have the potential to be good as well. These would amount to seemingly small changes in the game but I think they would make this one of the better action roguelikes on the market. The lack of diversity in missions is also a limitation, but I think tightening up the combat system would offset the perceived downside. For one, you'd be going through the missions experiencing more action rather than the downtime you have currently. Give the game a shot. It is fun and there is a lot of decorating you can do in the city building portion that I really enjoyed.