Astebros

The concept is great and the art is fantastic. I really wanted to love the game but the reason I wouldn't recommend this is that I just don't find the game satisfying and intuitive to play. It's leaning very hard into old school hardcore action games where it's very easy to get damaged and very difficult to damage. The game has attack animations but that doesn't really matter because if you touch the enemy at all, you'll get damaged anyway. Attacks also come extremely quick. The difficulty in this game is very knowledge-based. It's very easy to dodge attacks if you already know how they're gonna come. Otherwise enemy attacks are almost undodgeable. The disconnect between giving the player fast movement, a dodge button, a parry button but the attacks can't be dodged unless you already know how the attack's gonna come makes the action unsatisfying to play. So which is it really? Is the game supposed to be action-based or is it knowledge-based? Good action games have a good balance between the two, but here the pendulum swung completely on the knowledge side. I feel like I'm playing an arcade game trying to rob me of all my tokens. Yeah, I could just play as the Ranger and make the game easy using guns, but I really wanted to play as the Warrior. Unfortunately it doesn't make me feel like a warrior. I feel like a guy walking in to a gun fight with a knife. The time window for parrying as a Warrior is brutal. He just holds up the shield for 0.3 seconds then has to wait for a ~6 second cooldown. And as I mentioned before, attacks come super super fast. You will find it harder to parry in this game than to parry the hardest bosses in Sekiro. Can I finish the game? Yeah. Like I mentioned, if you know how attacks come then you know how to finish the level. The rest comes practice. But I'm gonna be honest... in the year of 2026 where there are tens of thousands of alternatives for entertainment, I just can't justify making the time to practice just enough to fully beat the game. I think 15-20 years ago Astebros would have made a name for itself. It's not like the game has to change drastically. If I were to change the game, I would very slightly slow down the attack animations (maybe extra 0.1 second up to 0.2 seconds) and buff the Warrior's parry by increasing the parry window by 50%-100%. Then I would separate into Normal mode and Classic mode, where the former only damages you on attack animations, and in the latter you get damaged when the enemy touches you. I think with these changes, I can give this game as double thumbs up, and it'll even be in my top faves. But overall, I just can't see myself giving a recommendation. The gameplay is not inherently satisfying. it brings me back to the Mystara beat 'em up games. The art is amazing and the theme is interesting, yet the action is completely rigged against the player. That game was designed to burn through arcade coins. This one isn't an arcade game though.