This game is good, but it's trying to be GREAT, and it's making some baffling decisions trying to get there. Honestly worth buying for the price, but there's a lot of really weird jank holding it down, so I'm leaving this review to hopefully bring some stuff to the attention of the developers.n As a disclaimer though, I don't think everything I suggest in this review is a good idea. I just hope there's SOME good ideas in it.
First the good: the core concept is genius, and it's executed quite well. The jelly physics on every enemy and the player are fun, the levels match the organs they're based on (although some of the bosses make me concerned for the world map's health), and there's a few nice secrets to find. The core gameplay loop and design is solid - evolve your cell, place varied organelles in limited space, and try and make something good.
The issue is that the game design does NOT facilitate this gameplay loop. The rarity system, while cool on paper, is essentially a requirement to progress - if your organelles are low rarity, you'll just be out-tanked by all the enemies and die (or just waste a ton of time if you're good enough to dodge every attack). But loot is random, and the only way to get high rarity organelles is luck (finding an enhancer or rare organelle to begin with) or double-luck (finding copies of the same organelle). Since there's such a variety in weapons, it's actually very hard to find duplicates, so it's very hard to progress without very good luck or finding a game-breaking exploit. And I suppose that's true of all roguelikes to an extent, but most roguelikes either offer you some way to scrape by without needing insane luck, or limit people from doing things too crazy with REALLY good luck (i.e. Gungeon's starting guns being not terrible vs. Binding of Isaac's engame boss damage caps). This game has neither.
This results in a game where bad runs die pretty much just from RNG. This isn't really a bad thing on its own - one of the classics of the genre, Binding of Isaac, is also like this. The difference is that in BoI, a bad run dies in the first three minutes, while in this game it takes fifteen or so. Any trash will get you through Level 1 and probably Level 2 if you're not braindead. Once you get there, you've wasted a bunch of time on a run that was doomed from the start.
All this said, some final thoughts on item rarity: I think it works for passive organelles (infusers) since they mostly provide effects like piercing and not pure damage, so increasing those linearly doesn't directly affect the pacing of the game but does allow progression.
Some of the 'modifiers' are also a bit problematic in terms of game design. 'Cancerous' organelles spread, which is an interesting mechanic, but so many organelles rely on specific adjacencies that it ends up being a dealbreaker a lot of the time. 'Eternal' organelles can't be moved, which IS a good way to mix up the arrangement of items - but the issue is, when your cell evolves, the position that Eternal organelle ends up in may have nothing to do with its original placement, since your cell layout changes, and at that point you're just boned. Ephemeral organelles are useless unless you're desperate, but never seem to show up when you are. The only modifier that is usually worthwhile is Excitable, organelles which only activate when charged which brings me to the overcharge system -
It's good. This should have been the main method of increasing basic damage instead of organelle rarity. It fits the theme, the weapons interact with it well. If it was tied into the stamina system somehow the entire game would make way more sense as a cohesive whole, although I also understand why it wasn't.
In that sense, a lot of game mechanics are kind of extraneous to the core equipment-optimizing, evolving experience. I do think outright removing them might be bad for the difficulty, but I feel like in a game with multiple unlockable difficulty levels especially, it's probably okay to let players breeze through the first one. Dead Cells does this nicely - you get a feel for the game, feel like a genius, and then discover you've been playing on Easy Mode the entire time. (Incidentally, Dead Cells also does the 'rarity' thing better with its item levels - which, notably, INCREASE as you progress further into a run, which rarities in this game do not without specific passive upgrades, and even then barely).
There's also a few bugs - some organelles will say they can be combined but can't actually - I think this is due to a requirement for higher rarities (i.e. you can't just add a normal rarity to a legendary rarity), but for some reason the UI says you can, which is confusing.
Overall, an OK game with a brilliant premise, but design that stumbles at the one yard line.
