This is going to sound overly harsh, but I really don't intend it to be. I waited for release before I played to get the full experience. Put bluntly: the game is boring and poorly thought out. It's slow. The builds aren't interesting. It does nothing all that strong to stand out compared to others in the genre. There's a lot of gameplay elements that aren't all that thought out.
The basic game design is you pick a stage, pick a character, pick a weapon. Each character has different passive abilities and one active ability. During your run you kill enemies, level up, pick abilities. Every 5 minutes a boss will show up. Pretty standard affair. You start off with two stages, two characters, and two weapons unlocked. The game almost immediately fumbles this.
The two stages unlocked by default are virtually the same. One is a 10 minute version, and one is a 15 minute version (essentially just an extra boss at the end). The 10 minute version is intended to be the 'fast play' for busy gamers, but it plays exactly the same as the 15 minute version. It's the same music. Same map. Same enemies. Same bosses. Same gameplay pace. Just 5 minutes longer and slightly increased stats on the enemies. It feels lazy. Playing the 10 minute version to get the feel of the game then playing the 15 minute version and playing what feels like the exact same thing is not a strong foot to start off on. Then you unlock the third level and realise it’s not just the first two. All 5 levels are the same. The single difference between all of the stages is the stats of the enemies. That’s it.
The two default characters, Wolf, and Tiger, differ enough that you can call them distinct. The Wolf moves faster while the Tiger attacks faster. The Wolfs active is a *small* AoE, and the Tigers active grants crits for a period. These abilities seem like they're intended to guide you towards certain builds, however I found them to be extremely arbitrary. The gameplay difference between a 20% movement speed increase vs a 20% attack speed increase is almost unnoticeable. The actives never felt like they made an impact. It was never something to save for a 'clutch' moment because their effects were so minimal. The stats and these abilities do not change over the course of gameplay. There are no unique skills to pick specific to the class, and the stat boosts do not appear to increase as you level up. So characters are not mechanically all that interesting, and they do not become more mechanically interesting or stronger over the run.
The two default weapons are virtually the same. You throw a Bone, or you throw a Rock. There's no weapon specific boosts or skills, so nothing differentiates them during play. You don't add additional weapons to your kit during a run. Whatever you pick at the start is what you're locked in with the entire run. You throw one bone or rock at a time, which means you're likely killing one enemy at a time. It is *painfully* slow and awkward. The trailer shows the character throwing two bones at a time. This is not the default. It's a skill you can pick for every weapon (you can see this in the trailer where they throw two rocks and wield two clubs). The lack of variation is absurd.
What's ironic is that there are melee weapons you can unlock, however instead of potentially displaying the difference between melee and ranged gameplay from the start, the dev opted to with two ranged weapons that are functionally the same. Imagine if a game presented you with 'pistol A attacks slightly faster for less damage’ and ‘pistol B attacks slightly slower for more damage' and that was the difference. It's poorly thought out. Oh, and there’s no AoE weapons. There’s only ranged and melee. In a game where you fight off hordes of enemies and are constantly being surrounded.
Now you're playing the game and killing enemies. Killing enemies doesn't grant experience to level up. Enemies drop gems, and gems grant experience. Enemies dropping a lot of experience you can’t get is standard for the genre, so the game will have the enemies drop something to help with this. Usually something like a screen clear to kill all the enemies and give you a chance to run around freely, or a magnet to suck all the missed experience to you. Not this game. Enemies don't drop anything. Unless you pick up the gems yourself you gain no experience and the kill was worthless. I often found myself screwed over in a run where despite the fact I was killing enemies I couldn't actually get to the experience to level up because a horde of enemies was on top of it. It's such a baffling choice and shows a fundamental lack of understanding towards basic gameplay mechanics. There's a reason why mechanics like that are standard for the genre. If they aren't going to have them, the game needs *something* to balance it out.
Also leveling up is an absolute slog. Even with an increase to experience gain, and gaining experience at a consistent pace, it still takes way, waaay too long to level up. As leveling up is your only way of gaining skills it limits how mechanically interesting the gameplay is.
Next is builds. Something that is unique to this game is that the upgrades you purchase outside of a run aren't all applied like other games. You pick and choose what you want before the run starts. Maybe you want to learn towards crits. Maybe you want to lean towards fire damage. You have 5 tiers of upgrades with 5 options each (eg Tier 1 Water, Tier 1 Fire, Tier 1 Earth). You can pick 2 of the 5 options in each tier. Seems alright on paper. In practice it's yet again poorly thought out. Let's say you want to go for increased fire damage. There's no character or weapon that deals fire damage. You're entirely reliant on getting fire skills during your run. I had at least 2 runs where I didn't get any fire skills for several levels meaning half my build was useless. Given that leveling up is already slow, this made the process even slower because half my stats were useless. One could chalk that up to bad luck, but I would chalk it up to poor game design. You can't have one half of your game be about tailoring towards specific builds and then have the other half be random as to whether you will get that build or not.
Finally, skills. They range from lacklustre to pointless. For example, you can throw a rock. You can get a skill that allows you to throw two rocks (but dealing less damage). And that's it. That's as far as that goes. Where other games would have skill trees where you would throw out dozens, this game stops at two.
You can get a skill where frozen enemies explode and deal damage when they die. This would be useful in a game where you're fighting hordes of enemies. However the enemy has to be frozen first, then killed. Meaning if your rock kills the enemy in one hit, they don't freeze and therefore don't explode, making the skill functionally useless and forcing you to fight off the horde with a rock (or maybe two, but never three). Alternatively, you do manage to freeze an enemy, but because there’s a horde they’re immediately swallowed up by the crowd and you don’t get the second hit.
You have 3 hits before you wipe. When you get hit, there’s a needlessly *big* knockback, meaning you’ll often immediately get pinballed into another enemy and lose another life. You can get a shield. Logically the shield protects you from getting hit. You still get knocked back though, meaning that your shield pops and you’re immediately pinballed into another enemy and lose a life anyway, making the shield almost pointless.
Not every game needs to look and play exactly the same. Making something different is how you can stand out from the crowd. Overall, while I do think the dev tried, I don't feel like they understand the genre. Nothing about this game is exciting. Nothing makes it worth playing compared to others in the genre. This feels half baked. This feels like an early build of a game, rather than a completed game.
