TL;DR at the bottom
Before I get into the myriad of problems this game has, let me first say I thoroughly enjoy the gameplay of Vicious Circle. I think it's a unique idea, with fun mechanics and a good art style reminiscent of Overwatch. I've had plenty of fun in the 10 or so hours I've played at the time of writing this. Don't get me wrong, I bought this game. Then I bought it again for a friend of mine. So I'm not against this game at all. I want it to succeed, it's just that there are some things that definitely need looked at before I can recommend anyone else pay their hard earned money for it.
The premise of this game is to run around the map and shoot deposits of nuggets, picking up 75 of them, and evacuating with them, all while avoiding the attacks of the (only) monster, peggy, and your "team". It's not really a team, because the rounds are too short to have any sort of teamplay and the backstabs start before you even pick up your first nugget. I don't mind that part of the game however, it's all in the spirit of the game itself. What I do mind is when they suggest that you play as a team at all, because nobody in their right mind is going to, and it only turns off the less aggressive players.
Now, lets get into the mercs.
I play mostly Blitz, the fastest character in the game. He has a blink ability, much akin to Tracer's ability from Overwatch. However, it has only one charge and it essentially doesn't work. Sometimes when I activate the ability, It'll teleport the full distance. More often, though, It will send you two feet forward, the complete wrong direction, or nowhere at all. There are many occasions where you'll clip into walls, terrain, objects, or the monster/other mercenaries.
I've encountered more problems with Blitz than any other characters, the only problems I've noticed with Cpt. Boom, Zella, or Cr4sh, are that they aren't balanced particularly well. Boom has an invulnerability shield and an automatic rifle. The shield protects you from the monster's attacks, stage hazards, enemy mercs gadgets, and the dippers' attacks. It's cooldown is way too low for how good it actually is, and his gun has too many bullets for how much damage it does. Zella has the ability to turn invisible, hiding her from everyone's sight and giving her a slight speed boost for about 3 seconds. The only changes I would suggest to Zella is lowering the amount of damage her attacks do, or raising her reload time. Cr4sh's escape ability is called eject, and as you could assume, it ejects you forward a good distance, while lowering your movespeed until your body regenerates a few seconds later. It's important to note that you lose hp when you eject, but it doesn't subtract a percentage of your hp or anything like that, it sets the current hp to a predetermined amount. Usually, this isn't a problem, but when you're the monster and you damage Cr4sh to say, 1 hp, he can use eject and actually GAIN health from it, and by the time you catch up, it's off cooldown already and he's probably regenerated it back already.
The monster, which at the time of writing is only Peggy Sue, has been balanced into a much better place than she was at on day 1. She's slower than she was originally, and her charge ability has a higher cooldown. The charge can be used to instantly break down locked doors instead of having to hit it four times with the regular attack. or rather, it can be used to instantly break down locked doors sometimes. The game seems to have problems with realizing the door was hit by the charge, even if you hit it dead center. I've had multiple problems with the charge, whether it's the aforementioned door bugs, or when I'll charge someone, get a confirmation of a kill (the screen turns a bit red and a skull appears), and when I check the killfeed, it's empty and I turn around to see the person I "killed" running the opposite direction. She has another ability where she spits an egg at mercs, which breaks on touching the ground and creates an AoE of damage while slowing. Again, this only works sometimes.
Another problem holding this game back is the servers. They have their own dedicated servers, which is always nice in a multiplayer only game as opposed to peer to peer, but they aren't particularly good. I've had MANY occasions of lag for seemingly no reason other than I jumped. I know it's not my internet, and it seems that it's not anyone else's either, because you'll rarely see anyone with a ping of over 30. So it's either displaying the ping incorrectly, or it drops packets constantly with no indication or explanation. I've had instances where I've been hit by a shock grenade, or hit someone else with one, and the server seems to not notice, and nobody drops any nuggets. Hit detection is iffy at best most of the time, and you'll often have swings that were right on target miss.
Overall, Vicious Circle has too little content to justify the price. 4 maps, 4 mercs, 1 monster, 20 dollars. some half-baked cosmetics that are just recolors. In other games with cosmetics, the recolors are usually the lowest tier of skin, costing less than any other skins of higher quality including changes to the actual model.
I admire the decision to have free battlepasses, but the "Coming soon! Store!" button doesn't leave me enthusiastic about what is to come. Free games have stores. This game isn't free.
I don't mean to be overly critical of this game, again, I enjoy it. Devs, before you give me the typical canned response of "We're sorry you're disappointed in the game! we recommend you experiment with new strategies! we hope you give it another try!" Please understand that I'm not saying that the game is bad, or that I hate it and I'm never going to play it again, because I plan to keep playing it and watching it grow and develop. I believe in your project and truly hope it will live up to my expectations of it. But if you were to ask me what I think the biggest thing that's missing from the game right now is, my answer would be an Early Access tag.
TL;DR
A plethora of bugs stop this game from achieving what it sets out to do, and I can't recommend buying it in it's current state. Grab it on sale.
