Early Access review:
This game feels like it does everything right in terms of the musou genre.
The characters feel simple to play but individually different, the music absolutely rocks, the way each weapon plays differently instead of one being strictly better than the others and I could keep going.
Most importantly, it gets the one thing right that makes a good musou game great. The objectives! There are plenty of objectives to do, and you are often required to move mid objective to clear another one, keeping that great tension of paying attention to what is on the minimap as important as what is currently in front of you.
Game has some performance issues in the end areas on the steamdeck, though I am honestly amazed the devs got something like this running so well in the first place. Bugfixes are quick, I submitted a bug and it got patched within a day.
However, a big problem here is the roguelite aspects. Do not get me wrong, what is here is already a pretty solid base. Unfortunately several of the game's systems currently feel lacking.
First are the emblems (the boons of this game or whathever you want to call it). While they initially felt great, overtime you realize you are funelled into only a handful of builds. The builds certaintly have identity and that is great, but they lack impact. Anything my boon choices do ultimately feel like they just power me up slightly. I wish there was more variety within an emblem tree. If i take the poison trail dash, it would be cool if later upgrades let me choose to make that trail bigger, or let me combo with the vortex emblem to create vortexes inside the path. Imstead, all poison emblem paths just lead to stacking more combust, which by itself also feels lackluster as the damage even fully funneling into that single emblem feels negligable.
Let us get more broken and crazy, and leave the balancing aspects to the postgame difficulty tiers!
A similiar problem I have with itemization, though frankly this is more of a personal issue with this style of itemization in general.
The game takes after Risk of Rain in the sense that you get money for killing things, but only some things like captains. Each level has chests you can open with said currency, but its a completely random item. This means that you dont get to dictate what item types you are stacking. I wish the game had a system where I could reroll chest items once for a cheap cost, or if it at least let me see what item was in that chest. Risk of rain also has mitigations for full randomness, such as item duplication or a mode that eliminates the random reward entirely.
All in all, the game is very solid right now and is basically a genre matchup of my dreams. The roguelite parts are a bit shaky but the musou core is so briliantly executed that it only makes me wish for more content. Try the demo and see if you like it, and if you do, its pretty much more of the same.
