Dead Estate

yeah, i bought the game because of cordelia, im not lying nor tryna deny it.

Twinstick action shooty pew pew roguelite not entirely unlike something like Isaac or Enter the Gungeon. Unfortunately, if you haven't played EtG yet, you've no real reason to choose Dead Estate over it, especially considering how similarly priced the two games are. I'd say the only thing Dead Estate does better is its great variety of run modifiers. Dead Estate also comes with a Resident Evil-like game mode called "Assignment Anya", which I didn't much care for. But if we pretend the alternatives don't exist, Dead Estate is still a fun game that has some things to love, but more things to hate. I can't decide if a thumbs up or a thumbs down would be more appropriate here, so consider this a neutral review. [h3]Things to love:[/h3] [list] [*] The variety. You've got ten characters, different endings to go with every character, then a bunch of run modifiers on top of that -- some generic, some specific to the character, and then a separate challenge mode on top of all that too. If you enjoy the basic gameplay loop, the game gives you reason to play it over and over again. I liked how the ending credits suggested what I should go for next after I've completed a run. [*] The, uh, character design. And all the cutscenes, too. You get a new cutscene for every character unlock and for every completed run with that character. Lots of character art thrown in, a lot of artistic effort has been put into this, even besides all the cleavage. [/list] [h3]Things to hate:[/h3] [list] [*] The perspective. The first time I tried this game, I got put off by the isometric view plus the perceived time pressure and shelved the game for a while (the time pressure turned out to be a non-factor after I learned the game a bit, at least on lower difficulties). You do kinda sorta get used to the isometry eventually, but it never becomes enjoyable. Sure, it might allow for jumping and vertical gameplay, which is something similar games don't have, but maybe they don't have that for good reasons. It can be difficult to tell whether you can hit an enemy or not without having to jump, especially on your first couple of runs. [*] The visuals. Visual clarity was clearly not a priority for the developers. Even if you disable all the visual effects in the options, the game is still impossible to look at sometimes. All the floor effects and blood splatter and explosions flying around everywhere and the stupid static on floor 3-B make it very difficult to tell what's going on, where your character is, and whether there are enemies that are about to drop right on top of you with just a tiny circular shadow as a tell. [*] The balance. There really isn't any. This is more of a "let's see how broken your run can get" kind of videogame. When you reach the last floor, you can choose to loop your run, which means starting from the beginning with all your items and a slight increase in difficulty. But then thanks to the guaranteed basement on a looped run, you can repeat floor 1 forever and keep getting more and more items without increasing the game's difficulty any further. There are other questionable balance decisions that feel cheap, like "let's just make the speed of this enemy scale with the character's speed". Despite all the different items and guns you get, the gameplay inevitably degrades into "get high enough dps, then point in the general direction of enemies". There's a loading screen tip that tells you to get as many items as possible, which is awful advice -- some items are just bad and you'll never want to touch them, and the inability to get rid of the items you don't want discourages you from experimenting and taking risks. The skill ceiling is low, which means it's a quick and easy game to git gud at, but once you do, you'll just be doing the same things every run, and even the highest possible difficulty stops being a challenge and turns into tedium. [*] The achievements. There's a lot of them, which is a good thing. But Assignment Anya's achievements are not separate from the main game's, and some of the achievements are just "luck into x with y character", which killed the completionist drive in me. For all the run variety the game offers, it sucks that the challenges are locked behind achievements I didn't care to get. Why should I need to finish a normal run with a character when I've already done a much more challenging max difficulty hardest ending run? [/list] tl;dr had fun, wouldn't really recommend, get on sale if you want some quick shooty rng action and you've already played the other shooty roguelites