Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault

This game just doesn't have the same care as the first game. The shop system compared to the first game is worse because you can't stack the same item anymore so your stuck selling common garbage for barely anything and the trinket system form the first game is now involved in every customizable thing in the shop, the Dungeon system really sucks now because they aren't actually explorable and are a linear experience from room to room and the hardest part about all the bosses in this game is waiting out the immunity faze they they go into every quarter of their HP and the rush mode they added doesn't give any loot and is just the lols, and don't even get me started on how they removed 15 pets from the game and in return gave the player choice between 5 different guns, The player customization is completely trashed now in the first game you could have a heavy chest plate with a light helmet and medium greaves but in this game the armor is just a different sets that give you single perks. The whole goal of this game is to make as much money as possible instead of actually just exploring and clearing bosses, The Vender that would sell you potions has complete lost their purpose because Will always has Multiple potions on him and they removed all of the extra potions from due to the changes that they did else where. This game is fun to play but just isn't anything compared to the first game

Good ingredients, but somehow a worse game than the original Moonlighter 2 has the ingredients of a good game. The basic loop is still fun, the shop is still enjoyable, and the new perk system is actually pretty interesting. But honestly, it feels like they have taken a lot of the things that made the original Moonlighter charming and satisfying and replaced them with things that are just worse. The biggest one for me is the item gathering. In the original, most of your materials came from killing monsters, and they went into stacks in your inventory. It made dungeon runs feel really satisfying. You'd fight your way through, fill your bags with materials, then bring them back and work out what to sell or use. In this, so much of the loot comes from chests instead, and the fact that items don't stack makes gathering stuff feel like a massive faff. It's a much less satisfying part of the loop than it was in the first game. The shop is still fun, but I think that's also a step backwards from the original. There's something about the first Moonlighter that was just really charming. The visuals, the simple systems, the way the dungeon crawling and shopkeeping fed into each other. Moonlighter 2 feels like it's added more stuff without really making that core loop better. Combat is also pretty disappointing. It looks nicer, but everything feels very floaty and insubstantial. There's just not much weight to hitting things, which makes the combat feel a bit rubbish even when the underlying systems are fine. And then there's the performance. This game has absolutely no business making a PC sweat this much for what are, frankly, fairly mediocre graphics. 😅 The performance is bad enough on PC, and on Steam Deck I don't think it's really acceptable at all. It's frustrating because I don't think this is a fundamentally bad game. There's clearly a good game in here. The perks are interesting, the shop loop can still be fun, and I can see what they were going for. It just feels like they've moved away from a lot of the things that made the original so appealing, while somehow making it considerably harder to run. If you're interested in Moonlighter 2, I'd honestly just recommend playing the first one instead. It's charming, it runs well, the material gathering is much more satisfying, and I think it's simply a better game. I'd recommend the first Moonlighter and give this one a miss.

TL;DR: This game isn't really a sequel to Moonlighter 1. It's more like a Frankenstein-style hybrid between Moonlighter 1's lore and Hades' mechanics , but done really, really poorly. There is basically nothing in common with the first game, aside from a few bits of story and the fact that you still have a shop to run. In terms of gameplay, we go from a 2D dungeon crawler to a 3D roguelike with a boon/curse system similar to Hades. Unlike the first game, you don't discover the map as you progress or with the help of a potion. No, everything is revealed from the start, and it's up to us to choose which path to take. However, unlike Hades, the interactions between the different buffs are almost completely nonexistent, if not entirely absent. In Hades, the interactions between different elements created a huge variety of viable builds. Here, however, you will often find yourself taking the same element 99% of the time simply because it's the only one that remains viable for the rest of the dungeon. When it comes to equipment, we're a long way from the upgrade system in Moonlighter 1. Once again, in a way similar to Hades, you'll be choosing weapons/armor with gimmicks such as "protects against one boss hit." This means that the armor is basically useless until you reach the boss. The same goes for the other pieces of equipment, which are mostly focused on offering different playstyles rather than actual upgrades like we had in the first game. So we're a long way from the +10 health, +5 armor upgrades from the first Moonlighter, as well as the gradual progression that made the dungeons easier as you progressed. The difficulty therefore NEVER changes. Your progression doesn't get faster and faster like it could in the first game. There is no potion crafting either. You have a total of "1 potion" for the entire dungeon, and the only way to increase the number of potions is through upgrades that are extremely expensive and require resources from mobs/bosses. At the moment, the maximum is only around 5–6 potions per dungeon. The shop has also been radically changed. Here, you don't stack resources that you've farmed. Instead, you "fuse" resources together under certain conditions and with specific buffs/debuffs. Say goodbye to farming dungeons like in the first game. Here, every farming session becomes a puzzle where you have to figure out how and whether a particular relic can be placed in your bag. These relics can only be obtained from chests, and those chests are only available in certain rooms, not everywhere. I fully completed the first game and downloaded the demo for the second one, then decided to buy it after playing for about two hours. Honestly, I really regret this purchase, and I don't think I will ever buy another game from this developer again. I never expected the changes to be this drastic, or for this game to have so little in common with its predecessor. Now that I'm unable to get a refund, I'll simply go for 100% completion. But as I said before, I will never buy another game from this developer again. You know those mobile ads where they show you one game, but when you download it, it turns out to be something completely different? That's honestly how I feel about this game. I feel like I got completely baited. I was lured in by the title and the screenshots, but I should have done more research and watched some actual gameplay before buying it. Lesson learned.

TL;DR: If you want a Moonlighter experience, play Moonlighter 1 and don't buy this game. A lot of the reviews say this game is worse than Moonlighter 1 in every way, and this is one of them. Yes I'm technically writing an early access review, no I'm not critiquing it on how finished it is (the full release it next week but there will be a major update so it should be less buggy). I'm writing this on the aspect of the game that definitely won't be changing at this point, the gameplay. I can already tell I won't be finishing this game. In every way, this game is inferior to Moonlighter 1. I think the devs played a bit of Cuisineer (a game I feel falls well short of Moonlighter) and said "Hey this game is awesome lets make Moonlighter like it instead". The first game had some issues, yes, but this game abandons everything good about the first game. - The pets that were added in one of the later Moonlighter updates are gone. - Gone are any good combat upgrades, instead we have "generic potion with upgradeable uses" and "generic weapon a with gimmick" and I've seen mentions of armor but I can't even find the merchant for this, not that armor matters at all anymore. The game doesn't have some kind of damage given/taken progression anymore, now its just get gud and get lucky. - The worst change IMO is that this is not in any way a dungeon crawler. You don't explore dungeons with secrets, you teleport to the next arena that you get to choose on a Slay the Spire map. Combat gets boring fast and nothing is introduced to keep it fresh, which is really why it feels so much like Cuisineer imo. - The shop got some changes too, I remember the shop being a lot more enjoyable and upgrades being something I used, now I haven't upgraded my shop at all because it feels like money not put into making combat better is money wasted. And the upgrades aren't very good, at least not for a while. I think I might be about 60% done with the game according to the guide content, but it's felt extremely repetitive and boring. Nothing has changed since the beginning. - When I initially saw the move to 3D I was worried that they had messed up, but I figured they were just switching to a new perspective and would be smart enough to keep the combat as good as the first. They did not, this combat sucks and the 3D only hinders the experience. The Pixel art was good, this art is mid, the 2D top down combat was great, this 2.5D top-down combat is pretty annoying. - The hub world also is very annoying, it should be much smaller so that you don't have to walk around so much. - The inventory management is entirely different as well, this is probably something they can change instead of keeping, but Moonlighter 1 had strict placement of items and interesting effects. Strict placement is gone, and the effects are now basically limited to "Item 1 destroys item 2 but you get a tiny upgrade" with a small amount of variation. Idk I liked how moonlighter 1 forced you to fight over real estate on the edges or think through what your final backpack would look like. - The bosses are lame and no longer have exclusive drops. They have higher chances to drop better items.

This is definitely one of those painful reviews in that I like the art style, the basics of combat, items and the shop, progression, pacing, yada yada, but there's just one crippling massive flaw that holds me back from enjoying or recommending it. The enemy design, especially bosses and minibosses. (Note this is from exclusively playing on the highest difficulty - damage sponginess may be less bad on lower difficulties, but then I imagine the situations where I find the game too-easy-but-tedious would just be even easier.) Most bosses in this game have a design 20-30 years out of date, depending on multiple prolonged moves that make them totally immune to damage for like 5-20 seconds during which you just dodge stuff. There's some "normal" stuff where you can dodge their swings, sneak in a few hits, repeat, but if you have a strong build going the fast majority of a boss fight will just be waiting for it to stop being invulnerable AGAIN. For minibosses, this flips around the other way - they are 100% predictable. For most minibosses, if they finished their previous move and you are close to them, they will always do the same next move. So you dodge that move, then go back to being close to them, get a few hits in... you see where this is going? Partway into the Endless Greed Colessium I might have a miniboss where I just stab him 4 times, dodge his one move, go back in causing him to start the same move as I stab him 4 more times, and just repeat this for literally like 2 minutes while the stupidly unnecessary HP bar for a one-note enemy gets ground down. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single miniboss that doesn't work this way - as soon as you clean up the adds (not that you can't still do this while also dodging adds, it just makes stuff even slower) you can and will get them caught in a cycle of using whatever move they use at short range over and over as you keep avoiding it. Oh, and that's the enemies where the moves are quick and easy to doge. Some enemies go into a mode where they just chase you while dealing instant damage if you get near them, so you spend 70% of the fight just kiting around in a big circle waiting until they're between moves. You're 100% certain to win without taking any damage, and spend multiple minutes doing it, if your current build isn't wildly OP (say, because you're focusing on getting high quality chests instead of more combat perks). Not that OP builds are particularly exciting, they all really just amount to "some stuff triggers some other stuff and it makes your numbers very big" - it'll almost never involve actually mixing up your gameplay beyond perhaps slightly changing around your main damage combo. But yeah, like, when I have a good run going I dread the idea of "well I should do a few rounds of Endless to get extra loot" because I know the majority of my time will be spent just doing a dodge-loop versus minibosses that have no chance of hurting me once I learn to dodge their *one* move while I grind down their HP bar. If my damage was higher all that'd mean is I'd get through endless faster until their HP bars get long enough that it's back to taking ages. There are other combat issues - some enemies are prone to like "red projectiles aimed at red projections while red waves cover the ground" making it hard to tell apart different aspects of what's going on, but mostly the game is pretty decent about color contrast. What it isn't decent about, though, is visual effects - players burning, hexing, poisoning or such enemies have WAY too vivid visuals. If you have multiple status effects on an enemy it becomes significantly harder to tell apart their telegraphs - you can't tell if someone is glowing if they're already glowing super bright red while VFX keep spraying out of them. You'll still figure out over time what to look for despite this, but it's still a massive hamper on clarity, especially for enemies that are already smaller and have much less clear tells. For what it's worth I also found the game kinda crashy, especially since you can't continue a dungeon run from an autosave it randomly freezing after you open a chest can kinda suck. But yeah, it's a real shame. I remember liking the first game and was feeling really optimistic about this one the first 10 hours or so, and I keep playing thinking the combat will get mixed up, but now that I'm trying out the Endless Greed Colessium and such it's instead pretty much just turned up the everyone-knew-this-wasn't-fun-20-years-ago type of enemy design up to 11, where I spend like 60% of the endless time just doing identical dodge-and-damage loops vs the same handful of one-note minibosses. And that's when I'm lucky enough that their moveset isn't one where I have to spend 70% of my time on the "dodge" part as they just have an instant damage radius bigger than your melee reach... (Did you find my complaining about this repetitive? Yeah, that's kinda the problem, ain't it?)

I loved the first game, but I can't recommend this one as it is. I saw it was about to release so I thought I would start the ground work to get ready for 1.0. I absolutely loved the first one, even though it's not at all my sort of game, but it was such a cool idea that I tried it about a year ago and instantly bought the EA for the sequel. I didn't want to burn out before the 1.0, so I held off till now, and am just left disappointed. I wished I played when it launched so I could have given feedback before the development is mostly finalized. First of all, this feels like Moon Lite-r 2. They've "casualized" the shop to remove all friction. Now the game tells you within a range what is a cheap, good, high, and greedy, on top of massively inflating the money to make it "feel like more". So for example, in the first game, lets say a slim blob is worth selling at 20. You sell it as 15, it's marked as cheap, next time 15, marked as good, 17, marked as good, so on. Until you found the exact dollar amount to maximize profit, or you could just stop once it was "well priced", and that could take 5-10 sells depending on the item and range. Now, the relic equivalent of a blob is 10x, you price it at 150 and it says cheap, but when you go to price it again, it tells you a large range what is cheap and what is ???, so you aren't going up and down by small increments looking for the perfect price, you just keep going up until "cheap" turns into ??? and you know the next category is wll priced. You just adjust it by 10-20 at a time and the game gives you a "grace" price range. It eliminates the tedium, but way too much, so now you pretty much get the exact perfect price within 1-3 sales. It eliminates the give and take of selling too cheap, or missing a sale because you priced something too high. You also don't ever run out of customers. They flood in until you are out of everything, and leave instantly. So there are no "missing customers" because you opened a shop with 3 items. No storing good items to wait for the perfect sale of all your good stuff, while keeping your upgrades afloat by selling your cheaper items. Now, you just sell everything every time you come back, taking out the strategy of when and what to sell. There is no complexity to the shop now. You sell every time, sell everything, and have the perfect price on all the items after getting them a couple times. I definitely think there should be a "classic mode" and a "casual mode" so that people that liked Moonlighter can get the complexity and strategy of the shop, while those here to get in and out in a handful of hours can just speed through the game at their own pace. As it is now, it only leaves you the latter so the shop just feels boring. There are good things they did with the dumbing down of the mechanics, like being able to restart a run instead of going home empty handed. That just saves time, and prevents you from going back home with nothing and a day being wasted. Upgrades are more streamlined, and the economy (even though it's massively inflated with extra 0's on the end to make everything seem "bigger") is better balanced so you can get a couple upgrades per successful run instead of multiple runs just to get a single upgrade like the first game. I just think it was taken way too far to the "simple" extreme. The reason I can't recommend though, is the combat. It's wildly inconsistent. You'll get hit and be confused how, maybe an attack didn't do the wind up period and just instantly came out with no warning. Another big one is the verticality, which is great on paper, but different enemies have weird rules on what will or won't "go over or under you". I get hit by grenades that get stuck on something in the sky geometry, on the corner of the screen, and I die to it. The grenade is 100 feet away, but directly above you in the sky-box, so it hits you directly below. There are other attacks that have weird rules that are hit or miss like the large bug mini-bosses. The actual mini-boss version does a twirl attack, simple, you just get out of range and then go back in once it's finished. But sometimes you get sucked in like a whirlwind effect is pulling you from out of range, into range. Maybe 10% of the time, but there is no telling when or why sometimes you get pulled, and most of the time you are safe just out of range. Some enemies have a "stun bar", but sometimes you hit the threshold and they get to do one last attack before they enter a stun state, but the rest of the time their animations are cancelled once that threshold is hit. Most of the time you have i-frames, sometimes you randomly don't, sometimes you just can't dodge for no reason like it gets buffered by another input. Those are examples of specific things that are 90% of all hits I take on a given run. I'm not complaining that the game is too hard, I think the difficulty is spot on and the combat as a whole is actually really fun. It's just not consistent, and that is something mandatory for rogue-like games where death can mean your time was wasted. The timing of every attack needs to be exactly the same, and the rules of it need to be clear and repeatable. Graphics and art style are awesome, performance is great, no serious bugs to speak of (minus combat, but that isn't so much bugs as just lack of polish), all the other areas of the game are extremely well done and the devs have done great work importing this idea from 2D to 3D. I really like the Moonlighter series, and I see the vision here. There just needs to be some updates on the combat to make it consistently fair, and run ends be because of my mistakes or greed instead of getting screwed over by spaghetti code logic fighting itself as to the rules of any given combat. I understand why the shop was dumbed down so much, I'm sure the more casual or new to the genre players found it tedious and just wanted to fight stuff and buy upgrades, but it removes what makes this series unique and turns it into another in the massive line-up of rogue-likes. Polish up combat, I will change it to a recommend with a neutrally toned written review. Add a separate mode so the shop works like the first game and fix up the combat, then it's an easy thumbs up all the way through from me.

This is a mediocre game and a bad sequel. I’m not a fan of roguelikes, but the first Moonlighter was a pleasant exception. It was more of a roguelite, with well-designed progression and an interesting story. The sequel, however, is just mediocre. There’s a lot of grind, it isn’t fun to play, and the mechanics are either poorly explained or simply don’t work properly. The controls are awkward. The 8-direction movement worked fine in the first game, but Moonlighter 2’s isometric level design relies heavily on diagonal movement. You constantly have to move diagonally, especially on bridges, while enemies can move freely in any direction. This creates situations where an enemy can stand right next to you and still be impossible to hit because none of your 8 attack directions line up with them. Miss one of the direction keys while backing away in combat and you can fall off, which feels awful. Movement feels freer on a gamepad, but attacks are still limited to 8 directions. You miss a lot, and dodging isn’t very reliable either. Weird hitboxes and hurtboxes, a very short invulnerability window on dodges, and a short jump all make combat frustrating rather than fun. There’s also a weird stun issue where movement and attack buttons sometimes stop responding even though I haven’t taken damage, with no visual feedback at all. Once more than two enemies are on screen, it becomes hard to keep track of what’s happening, especially since enemies can attack from off-screen. When your character also sometimes ignores inputs, the result is just bad gameplay. The locations are boring and repetitive. Objects are scattered around randomly for no apparent reason, and enemies can spawn right in front of you. I also never figured out why some obstacles block ranged attacks while others don’t, or why some attacks go through everything while others get blocked. The UI and item descriptions are also often unclear or misleading. For example, during a dungeon run I picked a buff that should give me a chance to get spikes when hit, but I got a burning effect instead. Some buffs say they last forever, but apparently "forever" only means for the current run, which makes it unclear what "forever" actually means. I also couldn’t find anywhere to see all of the character’s stats. The system for items affecting each other is poorly explained too, and doesn’t always seem to work, especially with curses affecting vertically arranged items in the inventory. The shop system is different from the first game, and I think it’s worse. Even the same item can be described differently in the shop and in the inventory, which makes the UI more confusing than it needs to be. There are bugs too. I get squares instead of the actual button names in control hints. During the prologue, parts of the UI and some text were missing, which basically left me softlocked until I restarted the game. Enemies can also spawn inside traps or directly on top of the player and immediately deal damage. As a sequel, Moonlighter 2 is disappointing because it buries some of the ideas that made the first Moonlighter work in favor of following typical genre conventions. The first game also limits movement to 8 directions, but the controls feel vastly better. The convenient top-down view makes the character and the battlefield easy to read, inputs feel instant, and you can actually control what’s happening. You feel like you’re winning because of your skill, not because things happened to go your way. Moonlighter 2 doesn’t build on what worked in the first game or take those ideas any further. In some places, it even takes a step backward by breaking seamless gameplay into disconnected pieces. In the first game, for example, you could freely smash barrels in the safe village. In the sequel, what you can do and how you can move depends on the type of location you’re in. And it’s like that everywhere: either one step backward or one step sideways. Is this what a sequel should be? I don’t think so. P.S. I forgot to mention one small detail that really highlights the difference in how much attention was given to immersive details. In the first Moonlighter, we always start the game by watching Will wake up in bed and get up, then we have to walk from the bedroom through the shop and out onto the street ourselves. In Moonlighter 2, we just spawn outside the shop. P.P.S. And apparently, the "Endless" Vault isn’t actually endless either. The developer just confirmed that there is a limit to the number of thresholds, while the gold requirement keeps getting higher and higher. So in practice, it’s "endless" only because reaching each new threshold takes more and more grinding, until the requirements become so frustratingly high that you eventually give up. That feels pretty misleading.

I'll be honest, the first game is far better. Just go play that.

its a very fun game with alot of playstyles , was worried with the bad reviews but thats just people complaining that its diff from the first game