Once you've beaten 1 mission of this, you have, far as I can tell, seen everything it has to offer.
Up to map 7 or so it effectively has 4 types of enemies, 2 of which were only on map 7:
Dudes who walk at you and swing once. This is almost every enemy, they're functionally the same enemy.
Ninja. They're the above but spend the majority of their time invisible and invincible and if not juggled or killed go invisible as soon as they exit hitstun. Absurdly annoying.
Jiggle witches, who just spam fireballs at you. Serious spam. Like 1 ball every half a second per witch. Its pretty obnoxious.
Golems. They swing at you once then let you hit them for like 10 seconds. And die. What is the point of these?
Maps are absurdly repetitive. And stages are too long. You spawn in, kill 3 waves of enemies, all of which take too long to die for how many the game throws at you. Occasionally you get a message from a cat about events like totems... which you just hit and move on. Or the floor is covered in an absurd number of traps. But there's only like 3 events. And you have to do what feels like 10 areas per stage. 30 waves. With, until near the very end of the game, only 2 functionally different types of enemies, one of which is just annoying.
Once you reach the final are you get to fight the bosses. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ are they trash.
Some examples:
- Man who dashes past you with a sword then heals ala Master Yi or Juggernaut. And does so a random number of times. And moves so far its hard (especially for Templar, who can only walk) to punish him at all, nevermind beat out the regen.
- Man who spends 90% of the fight invisible and invincible then pops up and shoots a screen wide laser that half the time ignores block for no reason, who even if you DO block it, immediately just shoots you again, somehow hitting behind him, so even if you play perfectly he just punishes you for free anyways. So you have to tediously tap him 1 hit at a time.
- 3 men at once who spam giant fireballs that juggle you and do way too much damage while also spamming aoes on the floor. Which, again, screw over the templar, who doesn't have the mobility to deal with this and still have time to fight back.
All of these bosses are entirely, 100% immune to hitstun. All have giant hp bars. All do far too much damage. And summon allies, infinitely, for free.
So if the enemies and maps are bad, what about us? The dudes we play as, progression, etc?
Its... not too good. Bad. Not sure what the devs aiming for here.
It has an rpg like progression system based around items; level up to gain capacity, use that to slot items for stats/to add effects to your attack and level up a skill tree.
But it doesn't tell you what any stat does. And the skill tree is just boring passives like 'fill X bar y speed faster'.
So the only interesting part is adding effects to moves.
You can add a missile effect and stike effect to your attacks. Spawn fireball, lighting, etc on moves. Amount of stuff summoned goes up from Light>heavy>ability>meter using move; ie basic strike summons 1 fireball, heavy 3, meter using 9, that kind of thing. But these attacks do practically no damage. So I don't get the point. And they're so expensive to buy you can't really try them out to see which feels like the best combo despite the spawn having infinite hp enemies to try stuff on.
Hitting for over 100, add fireball, gets less than 10 more damage. What? That wasn't even worth slotting in.
It also has items to dump your cash into but a good 1/2 of the shop needs to be unlocked and doesn't seem worth the effort when the start items are so meh.
You can buy ai allies, but seem to have no control on which one you get, and they vanish after 1 map.
You can buy bounties to get bonus cash from running maps but... that's just boring. I'm just running the same map. You didn't make the map more fun or anything. Its paying for busy work.
And most confusingly, you can pay 5k credits... for a token you can sell for 1k credits. What? You get tokens in maps you can trade for bounties or these for free but then you are getting an item to trade for an item that's worth less than killing the first screen in the game. Why is this even here? Why is any part of this chain of trades a thing that exists?
Now all that leaves is the characters movesets and... the other issue.
Your character has:
Basic attack combo. Tends to feel bad. Poorly animated. Also really imbalanced between characters; engineer, for example, gets a giant 1/4 screen aoe as his basic move. While others struggle to hit 1 dude an inch in front of them.
Jump attack. Also feels bad, very stubby.
Heavy move. You can charge these for more damage... except for Templar. Who just can't for no reason at all. Tend to feel alright.
Dash attack. Again, not everyone gets this.
Special move, which uses a recharging meter. You get 2 of these per character. Usually like a dash and another move. Near universally a dash and other move. This 'other move' is usually the most unique part of a characters kit.
Super move which takes a meter that fills when fighting. Templar aside, very underwhelming, usually just a burst of damage in an aoe or a line. Not that much better than just attacking and almost certainly worse than using the meter for the haste powerr.
Holding super mode gives you a haste power.
There's also a grab but its so funky to use it may as well not even exist.
So characters have 7 moves, tops. And 1 is just a dash. To try and carry this grindfest of a game that has you grind for items to add to these moves to make them do nearly no extra damage.
That's... not enough. It maybe would be enough if the addon items weren't jokes. Or the game wasn't incredibly poorly animated so they felt satisfying to use. But neither of these things are the case. Combat feels bad and very spammy.
The game has 'costumes' listed in its updates, but don't be misled, those are just pallete swaps. Visually the only character I find appealing is the Templar and she's by far the most half-assed character in the game so its wasted; she's missing nearly half the moves the others have and her non-dash special and super are both the same move: hitting the enemies on the entire screen with a dot. Which feels really good so I don't hold it against her too much.
She is, in fact, more or less the only part of this game I like, damned shame she's missing so many moves. Great design visually.
So what's the 'other issue'?
When you get to the 7th or so map, the game forces the difficulty to 'nightmare' to continue. Which makes enemies almost instantly kill you and take even longer to kill. And they already took FAR too long. I just dropped it here to make this review.
While it had its issues up to this point; the lacking enemy variety, movesets, absurdly imbalanced bosses, unclear UI, underpowered and boring progression, etc, as a 'turn off your brain and grind' game, it was fine. I was having fun. I was playing a cyborg Templar and deus vaulting things so hard my presence alone was killing them.
But then you get to this. And its like... no. I'm not grinding the boring maps 20 times to buy stats I don't know the effect of in the hope the stat I bought makes these enemies not nearly instakill and not take 20 years to die, per wave, 3 times per area, 10 times per stage, only to end up at a boss that's completely immune to hitstun, knocks me back every hit and either heals or spends half the fight invincible, again.
Fix this stupid forced nightmare crap and I'd rec this if people literally only want a mindless, basic brawler to see numbers go up in (even if you have no idea what the numbers do). As is I wouldn't rec it at all. Its no longer fun even as a mindless grindfest when enemies suddenly gain so much hp and damage.
