Hollow Survivors

I'm usually okay with a bit of a grind but this feels worse than a chore. This game feels like wading through cement. I bought the game because I wanted to believe in it, but instead I feel like I need to warn people about it. There's no fun or challenge here, only grinding for useless upgrades. - The damage upgrades don't give you enough base damage to reduce the number of hits against the starting enemies. - The alternative weapons and spells are a GRIND to obtain and aren't any better than the starting weapon, only provide alternative gameplay. Some of them feel WORSE than the starting weapon. - There's only a few options when you level-up and MOST of them don't matter or aren't reliable enough to benefit the run in any way. - At the time of writing this review I'm at 4 hours of pure grinding for upgrades and after thousands of coins poured into the upgrades it still plays and feels exactly like the first 5 minutes of gameplay. I love playing games that offer upgrades. And, if you're the same, just skip this one.

The art is great, but that's about it. The gameplay itself doesn't feel exciting. The fighting isn't fluid, and the moves are all the same. Hitboxes on bosses are confusing. The skills you pick are generic and either do a stat buff or some simple trigger effect. The camp follows the Hades idea where you have to invest in stat improvements, which in practice is just artificial friction for progression. I played the demo back when it was released and hoped the full release would be more interesting. But it's not, unfortunately. I forced myself to play for a bit more than an hour, but it didn't grow on me at all.