[h2]"But the moment the crown touched her hair — Her blade pierced the king's heart"[/h2]
[hr][/hr][i][b]Preface:[/b] while the review is negative, this is only my personal experience with the title as it is now in EA in 0.6.11, as alternatively and at best, or at most, I wish I could've left a neutral review.[/i]
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This quote from the intro's animation makes me relate to the king, with my experience playing Cinderia. Seeing it across social media, indie gaming resources sharing it quite often, and looking at the store page at a quick glance, of course I got curious!
The game immediately just feels unpolished, patched together. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie and say I can't see any potential in it, because it had some fun moments, but not something worthwile in this state. Just from the time I tried it, hitboxes feel too unprecise and unreliable, the game starts you off as a normal run, but without offering a good resemblance of balance to the players whereas other games at least have a scripted intro sequence (while I'd like to point to CoTL, this isn't necessary, similar to Hades) or balanced and tweaked enough base experience to make a fresh clear possible, enemies mostly feel like either fodder or mindless projectile fountains, bosses feel unfun and wonky, and all in all just an incomplete, messy, disregarding of game design or balancing, alpha experience, just off the top of my head.
Furthermore, it doesn't feel so much inspired by, but moreso a copy of Cult of The Lamb, Don't Starve, and Darkest Dungeon, without any of the polish or charm. Cult of The Lamb has a good flow state in combat, despite it making part of the whole experience, Don't Starve has so much going on for game design and risk/reward, and Darkest Dungeon is fairly unfair, with all of these having an extraordinary degree of polish and balancing, great game design principles, mechanics, combat, artstyle, audio, and so on. In comparison, Cinderia aims for the same price range as an unpolished Alpha "launch", without enough substance in terms of own content or level of polish to feel like it has an own identity. Oh and just adding a character which straight up looks and feels like Tristana from the toxic title and community that is League of Legends just adds more to the feeling of it not being its own title.
I know that this review really went at it, where I have been extraordinarily critical, and I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Cinderia has been sitting in my wishlist for a while, and I believe that these kind of titles deserve to be more than just copies of existing and well established titles. It has potential yes, but it needs a lot more to grow into its own identity, and I genuinely hope for the development to head in that direction in the future, even if just at launch. So take this review with a grain of salt, because the game can still be enjoyable to people, obviously, but for me, it's mostly just been something I tried to get into, and had to drop due to too many conflicting feelings and with all these realisations not sitting right with me.
