I'd like to say that this game is good. The store page looks very fresh today. However, it paints a very different picture of the total experience that this game has offered, as a person who used to be incredibly passionate about it.
Following 1.0, the game was an amazing experience, but it had problems.
Two years without any content left this game's main gameplay loop feeling very dry post-completion. While some characters like Captain or Mul-t have a lot of different options to choose from; other characters like commando, huntress, even bandit feel much less developed in comparison.
The game's item variety, which at first glance seems very diverse, became increasingly narrow when you realized that the dominant strategy revolved around finding the items with the best general purpose. Other, more niche items, had much less, or zero conceivable purpose. Which made their existence noninteractive and frustrating. Consigning even red, or boss items to, scrapper at best, straight up detrimental at worst.
In my opinion, drawing the few items that actually do have a purpose, pales in comparison to the times that you get items that would be better... reworked. Entirely.
Regardless, the game still worked, and it was fun. It just felt like it was severely hampered by it's less-complete areas. However, those issues were very small in comparison to the whole experience of running this game. At any time you could boot it up, and have a very fun, or competitive feeling experience, condensed into a run. There were also a variety of ways to end, or continue the game. It's very obvious to me, and to the friends I played this game with at the time, that what kept this game going was it's solid replayability and the promise of further development following early-access. The problem is that it stayed in this state for a very long time, with very little communication from hopoo, as to it's continued development. Leaving the community to reflect on present content, discuss item niches, and speculate on the next big content drop.
Survivors of the Void released in 2022 as a very very sweet addition, but it did little to fill in other obvious areas in which the game still felt empty, or broken. Following a preliminary period of bugfixes. The total content offered was: 41 items, five maps, a bunch of monsters, and variants. andyou know what i dont give a ♥♥♥♥ anymore. The biggest news that this brought was months before release it was bought by Borderlands dev.
I played this broken ♥♥♥♥ for 6 years only for it to get purchased by gearbox, and then fed through DLC, and external licensing. dont buy this ♥♥♥♥ they're not gonna develop it. Post-Sotv DLC feels completely different from the previous identity of this game without even half of the charm. This game is a shadow of it's former self. Only carried by the fact that Chris Christodoulou posts all of the soundtrack publicly. Rest in peace.
