Fun. A little simple, but there is enough weapon, armor, and skill variety to make a good number of builds. The main story is pretty short, but it has extra difficulties that add additional mechanics to fights, so there is a long tailed endgame there for those who want it.

Biggest complaint is that, even after the 'buffs', crafting and general prices of items are pretty ridiculous. When I reached the 'end' of the game, it would take almost half my total money to upgrade an item by 1/2 levels. 'Targeting' one item to increase its drop rates takes well over half my total money. And this is after I hadn't bought ANYTHING the entire run from the shop, and had done barely any crafting stuff outside of that. Its just... Too much, at least in my opinion.

Great game, kinda like borederlands but without the cringe 'humor'. Build variety is pretty good, with some standouts above the rest. Currently they seem to be buffing more than nerfing, which is a good start. Missions are quick and snappy, though you can stay and farm in one if you feel like it for a while.

More fun in coop, but still enjoyable solo. It even has multiple hidden secrets, including weapons, bosses, and some generally neat things even in the hub, which is a great sign for the future. It takes balls to hide entire weapons and bosses with the faith that those who care / look for it will find them.

I played for a while on another account, and the way its progressed since the demo is great. Has enough content to be a 'full' game (especially for its price) and should hopefully only get bigger and better.

Generally a good game, combat is fun and frantic (if a little messy). Platforming has a nice flow, movement with the long jump / ninja kick combo is fun for the time I played. Most of it is great (I actually played separately before this newest session).

Unfortunately, certain aspects of the platforming are tuned in strange ways. Mostly it comes down to the 'ninja kick' you can do in mid air. It adds nice momentum for moving around, and is easy and fun to use to jump up ledges (for the most part, sometimes even then its a little finicky), but at certain points where you have to 'kick' thin bars to move up to other thin bars it just kinda falls apart, specifically when there isn't a wall involved to slow / control your momentum and position.

First, the kick animation is too tight. It needs to be EXACTLY on the bar to function. Slightly too back? The entire animation could go THROUGH the bar and it won't trigger. Too far forward? Same issue. Too high by a pixel? Through the bar, no trigger. Same for below. It just feels bad. And then the air control AFTER a ninja kick is pretty bad. If you have the stick neutral as you land the kick you can slightly move your character, but that is usually not enough to get to the next bar consistently. If you have any direction selected at all (sucks if your controller has any deadzone issues) then your pretty much screwed. These complaints stem mostly from an 'optional' area you can find on the beach pretty much a minute after you start the game, but if it happens on THAT platforming setup, it WILL happen in the future, and that is a big concern for me. Maybe it just needs tweaking, but if this level of animation / timing / placement is the devs design vision, then I can see myself getting REAL annoyed with this game when it gets to a point where its no longer 'optional'.

Overall its still a positive from me, for now, but if I'd reached a point where I HAD to do this sort of platforming, then it would rapidly dip toward at the very least a 'meh' rating.

Every time I think of coming back to play this, I get back to the point of facing the absolutely ATROCIOUS augmentation system and just... I can't.

The actual augments themselves are... Eh. They're badly laid out and not very interesting, with lots of crossover for no reason. Their main issue is the straight up moronic system for actually USING them. You have to make a crafting bench to make a set of things. Sure. Whatever. But then you need to make clutter objects NEAR to the thing to 'unlock' the option to use specific augments. Okay... Annoying, but whatever.

Here's the kicker: Every crafting bench has a tiny limit of possible augments, and the ONLY way to swap them around is to either delete and craft new augments, or to mess around using the scuffed movement system for objects to shift them back and forth. Remember, each augment object is of a random size and shape. Oh, and they also give different augments to different crafting benches. And there is no way in the actual menus for crafting said augments to actually filter or even efficiently check them at all... I could go on layering the issues this badly designed system causes, but I think you get the picture.

Its just a complete and utter farce. It doesn't matter what the dev's 'vision' is, nor what chocolate-starfish licking level excuses people make up for this arbitrary, clunky, annoying, and obtuse system. Its bad, and if you like it BECAUSE its bad and clunky, that's fiiinnnneee... Just don't say it isn't bad and clunky. Because it is. And finding an awkward 'system' of your own to semi-work around the game's terrible system just doesn't count. Stop thinking that getting around a bad design decision is a 'skill'. It's not. Value your time better.

Doesn't help that the combat is super duper floaty while also being clunky, and that the movement can feel like you're dragging a magnet under their feet. Or the (still) glitchy and buggy enemy animations. Or the lack of anything approaching an interesting melee combat system. Or the fact that many of the 'effects' realms can have look bad or are just straight up scuffed.

On the last point, for my latest run I spawned with a bloodstar type effect in the sky, which looked good (pretty easy to do that with a skybox, but it was pretty cool overall). The issue? It dyed EVERYTHING in a dull red hue, which also made EVERYTHING super dark. Which includes light sources, which are ALSO affected. They aren't red (thank god), but they just look... Wrong. Even when it does something right, the game seems to trip over itself to show its ass in ten different ways.

Its a shame, as there is SOMETHING at the core of this, but the badly designed systems on top of the generally pretty bad base gameplay is just not for me.

Fun, but as a warning after the final boss of the demon (the second big one, you'll know it when you get to it) you cannot keep playing. Well, technically you can, but as the demo ends earlier than the previous betas you are locked into a small hub-ish area with a single old woman who says a single line, and the ladder is pulled up so... I guess that's it?

Can grind and play as much as you want before then, but again as the demo ends earlier than the beta you don't get access to any form of fast travel, so.... Kinda sucks.

The game itself is pretty great, I just think the ending left a sour taste because it FEELS like you should be able to keep playing in the previous area (or areas?) but you just can't because of the scuffed point it finishes at.

The game is fun. It's challenging, and the mechanics of (most) of the bosses feel fun and engaging. The problems pop up when you get to the faux-difficulty of 'Punishment'.

A mob drops a good item in the campaign but there's an after-death effect or just some other random oneshot? Loot gone, zone rest.

You want to get your ascendancy points but you hate the forced roguelike leagues of POE1? Well, first of all, screw you, and second of all, enjoy playing those unbalanced pieces of content with near Ruthless levels of mobility, damage, and defence.

You die at all to any of the multitude of overtuned one-shot mechanics in the endgame maps? ALL the ground loot is gone, the map is gone, your waystone to enter the map is gone, and ALL the bonus content (the stuff that ACTUALLY matters) is wiped, along with any currency you spent to generate or buff said content.

There are more examples, but NONE of the above are really related to the 'challenge' of the game. Being forced to play unbalanced content that I dislike for character power isn't challenging, its asinine. Losing drops after a monster dies isn't difficult, its just frustrating as it means the game has ZERO downtime. Losing so much progress in the endgame maps (don't even get me started on the atrocious setup needed for 'Pinnacle' bosses) is just taking the absolute piss when they layer oneshot mechanics in a fight where you have a SINGLE attempt from multiple hours of grinding.

These things are punishments that are unrelated to the difficulty of an encounter, and every single one of them lead to the same end result: Play a meta build, and read up on every piece of meaningful content before it occurs. Its fake half-Hardcore gameplay, and its Ruthless 2.0, two things the devs CLEARLY love but know the majority of their playerbase loathed. Comparing it to Soulsikes is stupid too, because losing Souls / Runes / Whatevers in those games is down to you deciding to take them on a run, and even Soulslikes usually let you try to get them back. Not here.

I'm an above average to good gamer with occasional bursts of higher skill gameplay. I did well enough, but losing progress due to massively arbitrary reasons just ain't it for me. So much of the endgame is just based around avoiding oneshots, and some of them can only be avoided through sheer luck or, again, a ridiculously cheesy meta build / out-scaling the issue. Which, ironically enough, is what most of these 'git gud' hardcore players end up doing, because THAT'S not cowardly at all, right? I mention this baseline hypocrisy just because the game itself is at its core semi-Hardcore now, which leads to this same mindset. Game design decisions dictate player actions, and all the actions I saw myself moving toward where just fixated around avoiding these 'Punishments' rather than having fun.

It sucks, as the game itself is a step up in many ways, but the devs have designed many of its systems around the belief that their players are masochists who enjoy arbitrary punishments and can't enjoy anything without a good kick in the balls every hour or so. I'd probably vote it a maybe (a useless rating tbh so its easy to see why its not an option), but after my experience in the campaign (I played a Blood Mage first, and that is some of the most horrendously balanced class design I've experienced where its actually a DOWNGRADE over the base class for a long time) and in the endgame maps, with many after death effects, oversized mazelike maps filled with dead ends, unsatisfying 'conclusions' (they removed the end boss from almost every map, leaving you with just a random Rare as the final 'boss'). And then there was the meh loot drops (Tier system for loot means grinding anything but the end tier maps is an absolute waste of time)..... There are so many small to medium issues that I just can't ignore.

Shame. Its Early Access, so maybe it'll change, but.... GGG is famously stubborn of their 'vision'. At the moment this is in the honeymoon period, just like early New World, but when all the gamer dads get to endgame I can see this taking a big downswing if they don't make some necessary changes to the underlying systems. Not the difficulty or the challenge (other than the usual GGG oneshots and after death effects) but the systems BEHIND that difficulty.