Plains of Havoc

There is just something about all that EXP laying on the ground that kicks the dopamine into overdrive. This game has had me coming back daily, run after run, trying new upgrade paths, swapping around the skill tree, trying to grind the online leaderboards. Friendly local dev's open to feedback and suggestions.

Very nice game to play after a long day! Great progression and movement feels good! Satisfying! Would recommend!

very good game, lots of fun!

Super addictive gameplay with charming graphics, an awesome pick up in early release with so much being released frequently!

As someone who quite enjoys Horde Survival games, I am interested to see how this one develops. At the moment, it feels pretty barren and the progression is far too slow for the amount of content. At the moment you have 2 weapons, from what I can tell 2 maps, and 3 progression trees that after a certain point take an abysmally long time to acquire a point for. There's no timer to tell you how long you've been in a run even though that appears to be the mechanic for which the round progression occurs (as is standard for this type of game) As things stand now, there are 4 types of enemies, 3 of them showing up in the first map and 3 more showing up in the second map with 2 of them being reskins of monsters in the first map. Ravens with helmets, hopping skulls, and skeleteons in the first map, the ravens and heads in the second map with flying eyeballs, which provide the first real sense of shaking things up. The 2 bosses are not too complex, the first one seemed way more fleshed out than the second. Its a giant flaming head that when taking enough damage splits into 2 smaller heads. This type of boss is not uncommon, but actually I felt like this one stood out from the others. The heads have a good amount of health even at their smallest and the area attack they have starts to feel more pressing when theres 8 of them. I'm still not certain theres ever any real danger from it if you keep moving but it at least feels like there is. I only fought the second boss once (and given my experience in the first map its possible there are more maps but that's a separate issue) and as far as I could tell its a big dumb skeleton who looks like it has more range than it really does. I didn't see it ever do an attack, I just kited around it and hit it for a while and then it died. Once you kill the stage boss, an infinite horde is spawned and you can run around for a few seconds but eventually they will kill you. I'm willing to consider that this part of the game is where you're going to rack up the experience for Meta Progression points given the drastically increased spawn of enemies, but they're so beefy that at the moment it feels like you're not really getting anywhere. There are a few different level up paths you can choose from in the run and you do get to combine a few of them, though after about level 6 or 7 the experience required for level ups seems to increase drastically, so if you don't end up with a decent perk set by then its going to become even more of a slog than it already is. Somehow in spite of this, it feels like there aren't enough options for the amount of leveling you get in a run, as you can complete 2 or 3 paths and have the leftover "choose this upgrade to marginally increase one type of damage" perks showing up for a fair number of levels. Given the Early Access I don't want to judge the content too harshly, though I do feel that $9 is steep for whats there at the moment. The art style seems simple enough and there's not too much variety. I do like the simplicity of the art, its not overly barren and I find it charming, I just don't think this game compares at all to other games of a similar price point or even ones that can be had for $5 or less from where the game stands now. One thing I noticed mechanically that I've seen maybe once or twice before is that there is no Critical Chance mechanic. I don't feel one way or the other about it. Where I will critique the hardest is that this game UI tells you next to NOTHING and that makes it feel incredibly harrowing. There's very little sense of meta progress which you can't quite make sense of until you've made a little bit as the tracker is runes on the border of the level up monolith, but even then there isn't any display that tells you how close anyting actually is. As I mentioned before there's no timer to track how far you are into the run, even though it tells you your run time when you die. There isn't any major indication that what I assume are perks that haven't been implemented into the game yet are just not implemented and not something that you haven't unlocked yet. Normally for Early Access games theres some kind of info on the state of things and some sort of roadmap to indicate some rough idea of whats planned, but not so with Plains of Havoc. You just hop right in and hope for the best.