Mortal Sin

TL;DR: Do you like high octane FPS roguelike dungeon crawlers? Yes? What about DDR/Rhythm based input for combat and by extension, combos? Now what if your level of skill and progression in this game is determined by how well you can essentially treat your keyboard like a game of DDR or Guitar Hero WHILE playing a game geared toward and skinned as something akin to Roboquest, Hades, Voin, Barony, etc.? If your answer ultimately ended in no, you will not like this game. The very choice of how combat is handled is what alienated me, and what would turn most people off from this game. Everything else is a win in my book, but unfortunately the core mechanic cannot be altered.

Like the vibe of it and there are many different classes but it just becomes so repetitive and exhausting to play. Enemies just don't really differ from one another and the upgrades you get in runs aren't too impactful. You might get more out of it if you are new to roguelikes but this one just didn't do it for me and there are just (too) many better games to play at this point.

This game gets a bare pass. It's fine. It's mechanically extremely repetitive and boring. It uses a colour coding system for the combos that make it basically impossible to play if you stop playing, kind of like the colour coding they use for Xbox controllers because the buttons are actually that colour, so it makes logical sense in that case. When criticized about this obvious glaring design issue, and given the suggestion that the yellow circle that represents "attack" should communcate the function rather than an abritrary colour scale, I was banned from the discord. I'll try not to let this effect my review moving forward. This is a first person roguelite with fighting game elements. You enter your fighting game combos out of a combination of three inputs - Attack, dash and kick. There are various classes that have different combos, and a shuffle mode to keep your combo list moving and varied. A wide variety of weapons, enchantments and roguelite run buffs enhance your character. Your eventualy goal is to clear 3 levels. The levels get progressively harder and have variants based off when you do them. So if you do the forest 3rd, it is scaled up to be a tier 3 dungeon. If you do it first, it's pretty easy. I basically described the entire game in that one paragraph. There isn't any nuance or anything unique about the game. The art style is garish even in the "realistic" mode that the developer had to make because he was getting such bad reviews. The story is basically a non event and is somehow pretentiously written, but also under written. There's a half naked angel and you're on some kind of path of redemption or something. It's presented to you exclusively through text and doesn't dwell on the story so I won't either. It's just there in my review like it is in the game. Ultimately, it just comes across as a student project. It lacks the care and precision of professional work. The animations look kind of dumb and it is extremely repetitive. If you're not the type of person who is amused by lots of colours on the screen you'll quickly realize you're mostly just pressing the same 3 buttons over and over and over and playing with the exact items your chosen class demands you to play with. In an attempt to feign difficulty the player agency was just basically removed. There is no balancing done as well so a lot of the time the best option is just to use power attack or the spin attack repeatedly because adding a kick or a dash would just lower your DPS, and the combo doesn't pay out for it's time investment in the vast majority of cases. Like the original art style, the gameplay itself was just poorly concieved, is as wide as the ocean but about as deep as a puddle, and is just an inferior version of things that are already on the market. If you're on the fence, I think you should grab it. Play it for 3 hours and then return it if you don't like it. It's one of those games. If you've looked at the store page and thought; "That looks a little bit ♥♥♥♥...", the feeling doesn't go away when you play it like some indie games, which is why it doesn't get a recommend. Even when you get into the flowstate in this game, which it seems to expect you to do, you're constantly tripping over dead frames and animations that have to play out and it never feels like you're in full control. It doesn't have a good gamefeel, well written characters, soul or anything particularly endearing about it, and if you want my personal opinion, I think it was made by a pretentious little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You can tell by the snyde nature of the post that said he added realistic mode for all of the people who didn't "Get his original vision". A lazy, self professed artist who's best work is embarassing when put next to an actual artist, failing upwards by copying other people's work and not really contributing very much overall. It only gets a passing grade because the games he copied were fantastic and the bulk of the criticism of this game from all sources, not just me, is the stuff he did himself. Again. He had to remake all of the art because it was awful but he thought it was good. That's what we're dealing with. It's better to just give your money to someone who is going somewhere rather than some kind of airhead with delusions of grandeur. Please refer to my Caves of Qud review if you think I don't give recommends to titles when I've conflicted with the developer. If this was an amazing game I would recommend it regardless but it just isn't. It's good enough, which is the exact effort that was put into most aspects of this title. It's technically a game and it technically has all of the parts there, but it's a pale imitation of actual art.

you can choose your own graphic styles and you can put all your frustration on the zombies in the game. I recommend like i recommend a stress ball

This game has a few interesting mechanics but it lacks the refinement that brings things a cohesive experience. The combo system feels divorced from the power ups. The enemies feel more like "vampire survivors" than "Dungeons and dragons" they are just random mobs that run at you like megabonk rather than denizens of a dungeon. The presence of a block mechanic and parry mechanic do not feel well integrated so you don't lean on them.

This one just didn't do it for me. The combo system (and controls in general) felt really awkward, and unintuitive. I felt like I was spending all of my brainpower trying to remember the controls. And the actual gameplay was kind of meh. I was expecting more learning enemy patterns, parrying, etc. But instead it just felt like spamming attacks against hordes of inconsequential monsters. There might be something cool here, but it didn't click for me at all.

This game cooks. Hard. Fast paced hack n slash (or shoot em up depending on the class) with a unique style and heaps of variation and replayability. When you get into the swing of it, chaining combos, refreshing your ability with bloody gore flying across the screen, this game is crack - and I need it mainlined right to my nervous system. Big props to the single dev who cooked this masterpiece, even if the community hates him for Enimatik...