Spoils of Plunder

Suppose the makers of Diablo had a good engine and a few pretty art assets and a decent music loop, but just didn't grasp gameplay. That's "Spoils of Plunder". Running around and smashing stuff is easy, but melee attacks are much too fiddly, missile attacks too slow and weak, and the skill tree less than inspiring. Even free to play, it's not worth your time.

Spoils of Plunder is an Unreal based Diablo ripoff where you control a skeleton and go beat up other skeletons. The game features single player campaign and PvP modes (but of course, PvP is completely dead and SteamDB shows no players). Gameplay consists of what you would expect from this kind of game, smashing barrels, smashing enemies, collecting loot, inventory management, going up levels, going through spell trees and deciding where to spend your advancement points. Certainly, nothing wrong with the concept for the game. The game supports 4K graphics and looks pretty good thanks to old trusty Unreal engine. Many aspects of the game design are very good. While simple compared to other action RPGs, there's at least some sense of decision making as you decide where you put your advancement points for spells and attributes. Inventory management is okay too. The game was sincerely made with good intentions. So what's the problem? Well the game really needs so much more polish. It does work, but aspects of the game don't look great. Loot on the ground is a bunch of text boxes, that looks bad. I couldn't tell what the right-most spell tree does because the tooltips display off the edge of the screen! I didn't get far in the game because the first loot chest I ran into, while I was working out how to open it, I got stuck on it and couldn't escape. Glued to the edge of a wooden crate polygon for all eternity. The developers have made this free, which is a noble gesture and shows great dedication to the industry. And usually while I applaud that kind of thing, I think in some ways it's a shame, because if they had stuck to it and really completed the game with all the bug fixing and polish it needs, they probably could have charged for it and done pretty well for themselves. Sadly, the lack of polish here and general game breaking bugginess render this one impossible for me to recommend to other gamers.