Have a Nice Death

This is a neutral "your mileage may vary", not an outright "don't buy". My TL;DR summary is that it has very snappy controls & the visuals are quite nice, but if you've played both Hades & Dead Cells then this game feels like a "can I copy your homework" combination of the two. I do really want to stress that I love how it [i]feels[/i] to play. Controls are responsive and movement is quick. It does feed an impulse to button-mash, and like Dead Cells you will be punished in small ways for doing that. I like when games give you a wide range of ways to make timing & precision mistakes, and HAND absolutely nailed that in my opinion. The powers and upgrades you get are themselves fun to play with. Again, not gonna blow anyone's minds, but it's executed competently and in a way that encourages & rewards experimentation. It would be nicer if the game made a clearer distinction between "this uses mana" and "this has cooldowns", but it's definitely not a deal breaker, and you can discover some really fun combos to play around with. And, for what it's worth, I really like the gibber-speak noise they gave Death. I'm usually ambivalent about such things, but his portion of dialogues was, audibly speaking at least, an oasis of niceness. Unfortunately, this game is very obviously a marrying of Hades & Dead Cells, in ways that only highlight where it falls short. For example, the levels are procedurally-generated chunks of platform challenges like in Dead Cells - which is fine on its own, but they're [i]also[/i] broken up into areas you choose based on room-clear reward and/or encounter type, like in Hades. This results in frequent repetitive re-use of floor chunks that, in a more engaging game could be ignored, but in this one make everything just kind of smear together. The storytelling is also Hades-style (i.e. story nuggets are delivered via a series of random encounters), but because of the Dead Cells style floors, you unlock them by inorganically running into NPCs at points when you'd be expecting more combat or some jumping puzzles. And with all due respect, the storytelling is HAND's weakest link. The characters trend more towards irritating than quirky, and the game gives the player no credit whatsoever, over-explaining its tepid sense of humor until at one point I was literally yelling at the screen "YES, I GET IT, I SAW WHAT YOU DID THERE". They had the nerve to make "wow we sure do hate obnoxious tutorials" jokes during the obnoxious tutorial, and then [i]gave that joke multiple callbacks[/i]. All of it being delivered by a genuinely obnoxious NPC. Overall I won't say "don't buy", maybe just "wait for a sale and set your expectations accordingly". It is neither terrific nor terrible at what it does, and if all you're looking for is Dead Cells gameplay with a coat of Hot Topic/Jhonen Vasquez style art, it delivers it in a Hades-shaped box. But I'm 5 hours in and already struggling to get myself to play more of it.