Watcher Chronicles

This is how you make a 2d souls. Great exploration, challenging bosses, mechanics feel great, easy navigation, easy to stay engaged, just straight forward well designed side scrolling souls. Early game still but I've throughly enjoyed what I've played thus far. I can tell the formula will stay tried and true. Love the art design, Air parry and dodge ability. Everything feels snappy. Enemies are rather unpredictable, sometimes thier cautious and other times will charge catching you off guard. Boss designs have been great so far, scaling at a reasonable rate.

Not a great game. Looks cheap, feels cheap and is way over priced unless on sale for at least 70% off. Clunky controls, frustrating enemy mechanics that just annoy you...challenge is not fun, just grindy and tedious to me. Controls feel unresponsive at times. Stamina is irritating to manage and is only there to interrupt the fun. Art you can see from the clip, is what it is. I bought it despite the lame lazy art because it was on sale for $5. The "town" area is also unnecessarily tedious by making you go to several different NPCs for stuff that are not conveniently close together and so far as I can tell there is no running mechanic at all. I make it a rule generally to judge games like this based on whether I would recommend it or not at regular price. This is a hard no from me. $5 bucks? If it looks interesting, try it. Only reason I am not refunding is because it was only $5 and because my friend called me right after I opened the game, and I accidentally left it idling 2 hours...

So if im not mistaken I could swear this used to be a flash game back in the day if not then it is remarkably similar to many flash games I played a long time ago. The game itself at the start is ok and takes a bit to kinda understand how the enemies work and all that but nothing complicated and I loved that as it reminded me of those games I used to really enjoy. This game has somewhat tarnished the love for those games now by being broken, buggy, and poor choices by the devs on how this game kind of went. The combat in the game is simple and not hard to learn but it doesn't work right. When fighting enemies it is extremely common even if you sneak behind an enemy for a 1 shot that they will snap hit you. Many enemies will always have to have the last laugh and many times it just isn't preventable and shows that your skill will only get so far. My attacks at times will pass through enemies doing no damage and vice versa on the enemy side and im not really sure why the game reads that way. The smaller enemies seem to be the more aggressive while the big guys alot of the time will stand there and just let you kill them without blocking or running away. I counted 23 seconds on 1 such enemy as I thought the game just broke but nope that is just how the game goes. Parrying for the first few areas is great and I slaughtered everything with no trouble but once you go beyond it parrying simply just doesn't work anymore. I even had a boss whom I beat due to parrying his attacks easily came back as a regular enemy in a new area and no matter what I tried none of his attacks were parryable anymore. This massive oversight nets your game an F alone as with this simple kind of combat all the little mechanics need to work. You can still beat the game fairly easy anyway but if it is broken then fix it. There is one boss in particular that can run into you and kill you in less than half a second if you don't level your health enough and even blocking doesn't help as it chews through your stamina to. This game has a plethora of weapons for you to look at and try out and over 90% of what you find is complete and utter garbage. It is all for looks. If your weapon doesn't have physical and also some sort of magic damage it is terrible the entire game. I tried out damn near everything because the damage numbers don't add up for alot of the weapons either. And almost every single one of the weapons especially the good ones are all shoved in the last 2 to 3 areas of the game. I mean you cannot walk 10 feet without running into a new chest with yet another cool looking useless weapon you have been looking for the entire game. Spells are few and only 2 of them are worth anything and the rest are trash. Leveling your character helps in some ways but for the most part your only leveling your guy to wield different weapons and armor for different bonuses. The easily most frustrating thing in this game is most of the time you will not die fairly as in most souls likes most of the time you can attribute your own death due to something as simple as a miss step, a poorly timed block, or maybe you just didn't see something coming. This game will not do any of that but instead uses cheap tricks in order to slow and kill you. Well over half of my deaths I can attribute to jumping from one ledge to another just to have a projectile come from off the screen the moment I put pressure on the jump button and being hit midair stopping me dead and falling to death. This game relies entirely on input reads to beat you. Platforming in a particular area was maddening as I kept jumping onto another platform just to fall straight through it to death costing me many Umbra for the games brokenness. None of this even speaks to the fact that almost every enemy you fight in the game are simply retextures from start to end. This thing is weak even by old standards. I would look elsewhere.

I enjoy smacking my balls against a wall for hours on end until it breaks, this feels the same

Recomiendo totalmente este juego, es mucho más de lo que aparenta a simple vista. Para quienes disfrutan de sacar logros, cada jefe derrotado te otorga uno, y el título es 100% completable, lo cual lo hace aún más motivador. Tiene una gran adaptabilidad: se puede jugar con mando y cuenta con cooperativo tanto online como local. Una vez que superás el breve tutorial inicial, se desbloquea la opción de sumar a otro jugador. Personalmente recomiendo disfrutarlo con un amigo o con tu pareja (este fue mi caso), ya que la experiencia multijugador resulta mucho más divertida y completa que jugar en solitario. El sistema de progresión es muy atractivo: podés crear tu personaje subiéndole estadísticas y desbloqueando armas para adaptarlo a tu propio estilo de juego. Tenés la libertad de ser un mago del vacío, un pícaro con dagas, un arquero, paladín, guerrero… o incluso inventar tu propia combinación. Las posibilidades son enormes y cada jugador puede encontrar el estilo que más lo haga sentir cómodo. Si tuviera que señalar un aspecto negativo, sería el mapa: es demasiado grande y no existe una vista completa en miniatura, lo que lo vuelve tedioso al momento de volver a explorar zonas para abrir cofres, acceder a puertas bloqueadas o visitar áreas nuevas. No arruina la experiencia, pero sin dudas podría mejorar. Otro detalle a optimizar sería el sistema de comparación de armas, ya que hay muchísimos tipos y en ocasiones uno termina eligiendo por intuición. De todas formas, siempre podés volver atrás y probar distintas opciones. En definitiva, este juego nos sorprendió mucho. Esperábamos algo más básico por su estética y nos encontramos con una verdadera joya de su género. Lo completamos al 100% en unas 20 horas y quedamos más que satisfechos. Si estás buscando un buen juego con mundo abierto, rol, hack and slash, al estilo Castlevania o Blasphemous, con combates desafiantes y la posibilidad de vivir la historia en cooperativo, ¡este es tu juego!

Desafiador

Fun little gem I found thanks to r/metroidvania a while back. Bonus points for the possibility of local coop, especially since a lot of the bigger names in the genre don't really feature this anymore. That being said, we had to look up online exactly how to allow a second player to join the game, as it wasn't really explained in-game (maaybe some update making it easier wink wink?). But alas once done, me and the missus had a good bit of fun with it.