Usurper: Soulbound

[quote]Visit SaveOrQuit.com for detailed game reviews, posted daily![/quote] An action RPG dungeon crawler with souls-like gameplay and taking place in a dark purgatory world full of undead and spirits. After falling for a trap in one of the dungeons, we find ourselves in this parallel dimension, where we need to fight our way from one dungeon floor to the next. Our naked spirit alone is quite vulnerable and limited on abilities, but we have something to mitigate that - we have an ability to usurp bodies of the enemies and to take control of them. Once we've brought an enemy's health down and if we have enough mana, we possess their body and it becomes our own. Each time we possess a new enemy, it gets unlocked at the vendor, so we can start in that body already if we have enough gold to afford it. This possession ability allows us to make tactical choices prior to facing the dungeon and the bosses. It also potentially provides us with free health bars, because if we run low on health, we can possess another enemy and have a new health bar, so long as we have enough mana that is. This is a pretty fun mechanic that adds an interesting twist on the standard souls-like formula. Since it was inspired by Dark Souls and similar games, its combat feels very much like those games. Heavy strikes that need to be timed properly, dodging, blocking, waiting for the right moment to strike, easy to get ganged up on and cornered, environmental kills, and so on. The main difference really is in the view angle, as here it's a bit more of an elevated angle, looking down, rather than directly behind the player. The gameplay is mainly a dungeon crawler akin to roguelikes. We need to take down the boss of the dungeon in order to proceed to the next floor. If we die, we return back to the hub world and will have to do the whole dungeon run again. Depending on how many enemies we killed in the previous run, we'll have some amount of gold that we can spend at the vendor to buy gear before tackling the dungeon again. However, any unspent gold is lost. This gameplay formula can feel somewhat repetitive at times as we go through the same motions really each time we retry and there's not much else to do in dungeons other than fighting and opening an occasional treasure chest. When we discover and interact with shrines guarded by miniboss enemies, we get a new skill point. These can be used to level up our basic stats. The game currently in its early access state has a good battle system that feels satisfying and a clear direction, so I think now it mainly needs to refine some aspects of the gameplay so that it feels less repetitive, and also to add more variety in a form of enemies, weapons, things to do in dungeons, and environments. Those who enjoy souls-like games, should feel right at home here. Aside from that, a few updates to the UI could be useful as well, especially when the player is navigating through the menus with a controller. For a more in-depth review, check here: https://saveorquit.com/2021/11/26/preview-usurper-soulbound/

Right from the get-go, every single action key — except for movement — stopped working during the second phase of tutorial, essentially resulting in a soft-lock. I get that it's Early Access, but such severe game-breaking bugs in the first 10 minutes make this a big no-no.

Ugly art that gives me a headache when trying to look at anything besides my character, and all enemies have tracking attacks so you literally cannot dodge because they'll do a full 360 spin during their attack animation and hit you anyways.

Honestly have yet to give the game much of a chance, Bought the game to try and play with my twin brother online together and honestly we hate "remote play" why do games do that just do real online co-op is that really that hard to do? 10 seconds in and 50% of both of our screens are useless because on remote play its still split screen we turned off the game and went looking for on game that doesnt do that...

The game is great in it's current state but it basically has zero replayability (once you finished the content) and roughly 3-4 hours worth of content, so keep that in mind when purchasing the game. The roadmap doesn't look too promising either as it states that only one more dungeon floor is being added but the design of the game makes it seem that there would be at least two more completely different dungeons are planned and also there's a huge door that cannot access right now. Anyway I mainly bought it to play with my buddy on couch-coop buddy and we had fun, tho only 3 hours that is then there was nothing more to explore. The idea is great, it's basically top-down mortal shell but not that extremely hard so it's comfortable to play too. The rogue-like let's you start a new run and you can play as any enemy that you have previously "overtaken" as long as you have the gold coins for it. But you can change the equipment you want to take with you too so you can create a mix of character builds if you want to. There are a few bugs in the game like one time enemies attacked us through the walls, another time my character glitched out completely, couldn't be killed and I couldn't move so we had to return to the main screen. But overall I'd say it's a fun couple of hours. What seemed really weird to me, I bought the EA version and after finishing the game it said something along the lines "This is as far as the demo can take you." signaling as if you'd just play a demo version of the game. I think there was a demo version of it so maybe it's a bug in the current version of the game.

A rouge-lite game with body snatching mechanics. Combat is very much souls like so you have to time you dodges and attacks and I found it engaging and fun. Also going from the crypt to the forest area was great and it added variety to the environment, weapons and the bodies you can possess. One thing that would be a great is the addition of online play as the game has only local multiplayer. But overall recommended for rouge-lite and souls fans.

_ clunky movement controls and even stuck with progressing dialogues (Spacebar) _ mediocre UI _ dumbstuck interaction objects + just wonder why this game's player base is such low and now I got the answer. (willing to change this review if any improvements really helpful... when release from EA..maybe)

The bones of a good game are here. The responsive to the controller is good, and the usurp mechanic is motivating. Gameplay is not quite there yet in the sense that in order to progress, you'll need to master the parry-timing mechanic (since the combat variety is lacking, there are few other ways to get an edge on a fight). There is some effort towards making spells to add variety, but the spells are difficult to use in combat because of the cast time and the enemies are relentless in their movement towards the player at a fixed pace. I feel like this game could be polished into a gem with a few months of work, so I hope that development continues.

Buen juego, entretenido, buen coop local.

слишком сложно :)