Backpack Survivors

Being a big fan of the genre I had to give this game a shot. I downloaded the demo a day before EA and was instantly hooked. 200 game play hours later I've completed all the achievements and feel like I can give a solid review. The game is a lot of fun right out of the gate. The game has multiple vectors of character power scaling for you to explore. Movement speed, armor, health, avoidance, recovery are all here and all effective. You also scale up power wise by unlocking more backpack space, custom starting loadouts, and a talent tree. Also all effective. I would also point out that due to the limited difficulty scaling once you max out (or nearly max out) one or two of these vectors the game is very easy right now. There are ten Hellfire levels (the difficulty scaling) right now but your charaters keep scaling while replaying Hellfire 10 and pretty much become immortal under normal circumstances. I hit this point about 30 hours into EA and was a little disappointed...until I discovered a gameplay style that sets your hit points to 1 and gives you +300% damage. I went from an immortal god to being in mortal danger from literally anything that got close and this breathed new life into the game for me. Nobody likes a game that becomes too easy and offers no challenge. I routinely die on the first stage due to becoming overwhelmed having no choice but to dash away from a horde of monsters closing in on all sides. This tension makes succeeding and snowballing into a powerful build very satisfying and is what has kept me interested. All that being said, the game is clearly incomplete being in EA. This is obviously part of the deal right now. The devs are active in the discord and have given a roadmap of their plans for 0.9 and 1.0 and it looks VERY promising. They respond to feedback and are open about their design philosophies when people query them. I have seen them squashing bugs quickly as well as dealing with game balance outliers when necessary. All this adds up to an overwhelming value on steam imo. 10/10