The Black Pool

A great co-op experience, if a little short and lacking in enemy variety.

I wanted so badly to love this game. An action roguelike with wacky abilities, unique enemies, and a slightly weird setting - it's everything that I want in a game. Unfortunately it's marred by extremely bad balancing and poor design choices. Many abilities are just terrible or completely impractical to use, a few regular enemies are harder than the level bosses (i.e. colossus), certain maps make it hard to see or easy to get stuck, and so on. I'm really sad to give this a thumbs down, but most runs ended up being infuriating in unfun ways. ----- [i]Edit to detail my issues with various abilities.[/i] There are some fun abilities in the game. And others that I can appreciate as creative or interesting. The problem is too many skills are dull or ineffective, leading me to finish most runs unsatisfied. [b]Area attacks:[/b] Enemies move around so much and stay so spread out, if you're lucky you hit one target who leaves the area immediately. Most Area attacks are very short range or body-centered but don't do enough damage to make up for the risk of getting so close to enemies especially considering the lack of healing. Most don't work at all against flying or distant enemies, including several bosses. Super long cooldowns compound these problems. Generally I pray to get good Quick and Strong attacks because Area attacks are so useless. - Light's diameter is particularly small, plus you can't use other attacks while charging it, making it extremely difficult and risky to use. - Fire is the most annoying, its overwhelming visual effect makes it impossible to see anything. - Ice's small area and lack of DoT means you have to pray whatever you hit stands in it for it to do any damage at all. - Wind covers a nice area and its projectile actually travels, unfortunately it's so weak (even when upgraded) it's more of a utility skill for picking off scattered low-health enemies. - Terra's turrets are nice, but again their damage is so low even when heavily upgraded that they only help against the weakest of foes. [b]Quick attacks:[/b] Most are just little round projectiles that go in a single direction. They don't hit hard, it's difficult to hit enemies due to the slow projectiies, they're boring/repetitive to use, and they quickly go on cooldown. - Decay, Fire, Chaos, Ice, Terra, and Void fall into this category. - Terra is the worst, the summoning animation adds an extra click and short delay before shooting, which means in a firefight I can never be sure if my shot is going to just go or if it will just start an animation and mess with my aim and timing. - Void is by far the most effective since its homing effect means it usually hits something. It can easily be the highest damaging skill in a run but it is incredibly boring to use. [b]Strong attacks:[/b] Generally the most fun and powerful. But long cooldowns means they get limited use. - Terra's pillar is just not practical in a fight. Positioning yourself behind a stationary object to line up a shot is basically suicide. Add to that the way you have to be right next to it to hit anything above ground level, and this is probably the worst attack in the game. - Chaos boomerang is incredibly difficult to catch even when not in a fight, meaning it's really just an okay projectile attack with no upside. - Ice I had a hard time blocking attacks, with so many coming from random sides, so mostly it just felt like a projectile attack, like Chaos. [b]Dashes + Jumps:[/b] Some are better than others (especially stuff that lets you avoid damage, i.e. Fire flight, Decay invuln, Lightning teleport), but almost all are generally fun or useful. [b]Rally:[/b] Really hard to use due to boss fights requiring lots of moving around. Generally when I used a Rally, it didn't impact the fight at all because it got left behind almost immediately. As a result I can't really comment on these. Kind of a bummer. I really enjoyed a few of the abilities (Wind quick attack, Void/Light/Air strong attack) and there were others that I didn't love but were fine to use. The problem is I felt like there were too many bad ones with no way to avoid them.

The slop mines are lush, 0/10 game 10/10 time

This is shovelware 10/10

the poeple yearn for the slop

Quite fun.

Good soup