This is a grindy game but the grind is rewarding and tied to char progression so it is a grindy good game, with female protagonist.
Story is simple, just get stronger climbing up the pagoda floors filled with monsters. Gameplay is also simple there is no walking around talking to npcs, straight to killing monsters in the pagoda floor, the space is quite spacious. It can be repetitive but since killing monsters over and over again is tied to character progression for getting stronger, it's more of chasing a goal to upgrade character stats. The combat itself is done surprisingly well, it involves kiting, range hit (magic) and melee (sword play), the rage hit after button mashing is the most satisfying when it lands especially on several monsters because it has huge damage but frontal line aoe. And when not in combat, the home screen/interface is for upgrading char stats, go to store, upgrading magic, crafting weapon, managing inventory.
There is a pet system, every monster in the game can be tamed using talisman and leveled up. It can die, but we can revive it with a core from the same monster. Look at the color of the monster's name when taming, there is color for rarity.
Crafting is kinda brutal, the minigame mechanic is interesting though, first we decide how many times we want to temper the sword in the forging process, the more hits the better the sword will be (max 99x). We have a running stripe in a large bar and inside this large bar there is a shorter colored bar that moves a bit, so when the stripe is inside the colored bar we have to hit the left mouse button, then the stripe resets and the colored bar respawns randomly sometimes at the beginning of the long bar so we have to hit sooner or later when it spawns a bit further in the long bar. It isn't hard, we always have enough time to hit, but the more hits we need to do, the more chance for error, and the brutal part is if we miss even once, the materials disappear. There are 3 mats needed, and each mat is color graded for rarities from white, blue, purple, yellow, red. It is RNG and drop chance is quite low. So to make a really good weapon is a bit of gambling and needs good reflex, or maybe can savescum this part, I imagine doing it legit would make the sword feels highly valuable lol. Good weapon isn't that necessary though, it just takes more time to kill the monsters with less damage.
Game is cheap esp when on sale (got it on 50% disc) but imo on sale or not is still worth it if you know what you're getting, just don't expect triple A quality game.
(Char progression itself can be a game of its own, just like mmos, we do the dailies, we do the grind, we pay for the item malls, all for progressing the character stats, and mmos can last tens of years just by relying on char progression alone.)
Item and talisman icons need rework, they all look similar only little difference between each other mostly just color.
This is a game that you can play for a short to long time in one sitting, Beat a few floors, raise some stats, done for the day or for the time being and pick it up later.
(you gain stat points with exp and choose any stats to boost while still have an overall increase to the whole stats when actually leveled up, this is another interesting mechanics)
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After playing for a while now, my two biggest complains are :
- too low droprate for some items mainly monster core and ore for weapon, this compounds with 2 other problems, first problem, if pet dies and it is higher tier than white (could be blue/purple/yellow/red) then that pet is gonna stay dead for a very long time probably forever, and second problem below...
- Crafting is too brutal, one miss when tempering many times will result in losing materials that is hard to get, it compounds with the too low droprate. What's the point adding crafting if I can't craft often to get better weapon via the rng ? it is rng on top of rng and it is real bad.
The game is actually fine, it is just unpolished, and while I like grind, with the problem I mentioned above, it is too grindy to the point it is wasting time. RNG is good, but relying on it too much for difficulty is bad and lazy. It's just padding playtime.
I've played for about 8 hours, and during that playtime, as far as I remember, I only got 4 ores for making weapon, one is Ice ore (blue), 2 is normal ore (white), another one is normal but yellow tier. 2 failed because I chose 50x tempers and I used the yellow ore and purple core I think and RED spider core for 2nd additional core, 1 success but the sword end up white tier , the last one is Ice I tempered for 12x and ended up blue tiered sword with Ice element.
So to make a good weapon I have to :
- RNG until I get high tier ore from white, blue, purple, yellow, red
- RNG until I get high tier main monster core, again from white to red.
- RNG until I get high tier ore, again from white to red, and RNG for the element
- Last is not RNG but need good reflex, but since we are humans not robot, sh1et can happen, if I fail, I have to go through the RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG until I get better mats and succeed in tempering.
Imo there should be setting for drop rates. Either add multiplier (x2 x3 etc) or add sliders for each item's drop rate, or whatever works.
-edit-
Still hoping the game gets updated but sadly the game seems abandoned or considered as final, been a year without update now
Feb 12, 2024
Still hoping the dev will revisit their game and make an update because the game could be a gem if it gets polished and have more settings for the RNG.
