This game should get credit for being an OG of the roguelike genre, and for 2013 it was probably revolutionary, but playing it 2024 looking through a similar lens, man this game is rough to play with so many problems it's baffling.
First off, mechanics. The platforming is super slippery and imprecise, especially when you're faster moving. You'll accidentally jump too high into spikes, jump a bit too far to the right or left, etc. And for games with loads of traps with enemies doing contact damage it should be much better for how much precision it asks of you. Dodging also has no i-frames which is another issue. The hitboxes are awful. I would constantly get hit by a guy coming towards me who I would try and hit and then move away from, especially bosses, even if they didn't seem to touch you. I would be hurt by spikes I was standing next to but not on, and at other times a projectile would go through my head but not hurt me somehow. For the precision asked of the game and how much of a bullet-hell it is, the hitbox issues should have been solved.
The combat itself has tons of issues. First off, every single class just uses a sword and has a single forward slash. Theres a downslash but for some reason it does way less damage, is SUPER finnicky and inconsistent, and if done once you'll just bounce up again and be forced to try and use the super precise window it asks for the attack to do again, and if you don't get it perfect you'll just fall onto the enemy and get hurt. So its pretty useless. Yes different classes get a few different spells, but a majority of the spells are shared by all classes, and theres not that many. This means all characters feel almost exactly the same, besides the stats they have which isn't that interesting. Theres no new weapons to try, etc to spice up the playthroughs. Then theres the inconsistencies in combat. Some enemies can go through walls and go through the ground and come up under you, while theres no real way you have to attack up or down. Enemies can also shoot at you from off screen, and some of them can shoot projectiles or throw SOLID BONES through walls for no reason, even though you can't. When you get hit you get stunned and bounced back in the dumbest castlevania style every, but if you hit a guy running at you he can just tank the damage and keep coming and attack you. Your attacks don't effect enemies at all for some reason even though they do you, keeping up with the lazy design, meaning you'll get hurt when trying to hurt others.
Then theres the issues with the roguelike elements. Theres 4 zones and 4 bosses to defeat to unlock the final boss. That's about it. You fight the same enemies in the same zones, and the enemies in the harder zones are literally just the same as the enemies in the lesser zones but with more projectiles thrown with more health and maybe a slight color swap. The zones never change out of the 4 pre-set, and the zones themselves feel the exact same in each biome than they did before with no real variation. You will unlock most of the classes (which once again play almost the exact same) in the first few hours, and since theres no new weapons to unlock, theres not much excitement. You just keep collecting gold and upgrading small stat projections over and over until you're strong enough to beat a zone. Find +2 damage or +4 health or +2 armor exciting every 30 minutes of grinding gold? Well too bad that's literally all the game boils down to. And because the upgrades are so tiny on purpose, you can literally upgrade health 75 TIMES for exponentially increasing costs......that just goes to show how much they expect you to grind for small progress. Most runs are just gold farming runs fighting the same guys. But for some reason they add this stupid Charon in so if you don't have exact amount to buy another upgrade you have to lose all or most of your goal for no logical reason other than increasing grind.
The other feature is the "lineage aspect" which honestly is just kind of dumb. You're given three characters to choose with no control of your own, and since some like hokage are just way better, there might be none you want. You can't reroll and theres no way to just start a new run, you have to run out and just die which takes extra time, and you'll be punished with losing more gold. Then theres the stupid "traits" which is a novel idea but flawed execution. Some are fun, like faster move speed, but some are soo stupid and punishing like "seeing the world upside down" or "seeing enemies that aren't there" that it basically just means you'll never choose them leaving your selection to 1-2 characters. You should be able to choose one of each class with random traits, and there shouldn't be ones that are un-useable and that much worse than all others. The spells can change things up, but its almost useless outside of the mage class because spells you can use 2-3x until you're out of mana, and even though you can collect mana pots they only will give you 7 mana when you have 70-80 max mana and spells cost 15-30. Meaning every 5-10 min you might collect enough mana to use your spell again 2-3x then not be able to use it again for 5 min. There also should be a potion system, because randomly finding health pickups or vampirism trait can be useful but its not practical especially after long runs through multiple zones only to get to a boss with half health and die with nothing you could have done.
The game also makes some rooms just so unfair with there being 20-30 guys all shooting multiple projectiles at you, that there is literally no way to escape without taking of ton of damage. Bosses are just bigger versions of regular enemies which is boring, and they of course have the lazy trope of the infinite respawning smaller enemies to make it even more annoying and artificially inflate difficulty. Some rooms are un-doable with treasures you can't get unless you have this one specific random trait which is pretty dumb to do. And the other things you get besides gold is some equipment which just provides stat boosts, and then runes which give you abilities. The problem with runes is you can only equip one in each category, and some are for basic movement abilities that you should just have already, like double jump and dash. And the other ones you will decide on early in the game and just use those same ones throughout, meaning the rest of the ones you collect are pointless as its just the same set of runes for different body parts.
So due to imprecise platforming, bad hitboxes, repetitive enemies and environment, bad trait and character selection system, boring combat with only 1 weapon and attack, poorly designed enemies and enemy/encounters, and a super grindy uninteresting roguelike progression, theres not much positive I can say about this game. You can play it for nostalgia and to pay homage, but theres not many other redeeming features. Instead play dead cells, have a nice death, blade assault, or one of the other 100000 roguelike 2d platformers that do everything better than this game. 5/10
