Death's Gambit: Afterlife

It's an okay game is about how I'd sum this up. The game is pretty short and compressed, you can beat it in less than 10 hours even if you grind around a bit and the in game regions are all pretty small. It feels like you jump almost from boss to boss in quick order. The game is also fairly linear, there's not a ton of backtracking involved. There's very little platforming that you need to concern yourself with except for a short segment at the end of the game, but it's very easy to get by. That said combat is pretty decent and there's a cool mechanic where you can refight revamped bosses where they have new movesets and are generally a lot tougher. All in all it's a decent game, not bad but not amazing either.

DISCLAIMER: I am only about 4 hours into the game, but since this game is supposedly about 10 hours long, I feel safe reviewing as I essentially finished about half of it. A lot of the criticism I see in the other reviews of this game point out that the game is a "bad Metroidvania game"... That is because this game is not a Metroidvania game, nor does it represent itself as that (read the game description). If you play this game, expecting it to be a Metroidvania, you will be disappointed, and as far as I am concerned, that is on you. The reason I rate this game 4 stars despite it not being a Metroidvania, is because I don’t like Metroidvanias and despise platformers in general. I don’t like backtracking, I don’t like complicated jumping puzzles, I don’t like enemies that can damage you just by touching you, and I don’t like fighting bosses that don’t have health bars. The absence of all of the above in this game is exactly why I like it. Add to that a decent combat system and you got a winner as far as I am concerned. Essentially, if you are looking for a game like Hollow Knight, this game is not it. What this game does right: the combat system is good, each weapon type has his own set of abilities, which in my opinion, gives the game the same replayability as games in the Souls series. I am currently using a scythe to go through the game, and I can definitely see myself going through the game again with a spear or a greatsword later. This game also allows you to refight some of the bosses you beat - which is a feature that I really appreciate and wish were implemented to more games, especially games were beating bosses is the main objective/draw. As you all should know, opinions are subjective and hard to predict based on reviews, I know some games that sounded great based on the reviews, but playing made me want to stick a fork in my eye out of frustration. My final advice to anyone interested in this game is - DON'T COME IN EXPECTING IT TO BE A METROIDVANIA

At the current time Im closing in on 100h "vanilla" and Afterlife combined, and well, it's a bit complicated. The game is a metroidevania soulslike, think Salt&Sanctuary, but with a completely different, more vibrant and colorful, atmosphere. The initial release was decent, but lacking in many aspects. Afterlife feels more like a finished game, but knowing the initial release, some of the design decisions feel weird. It's like they removed difficulty from your standard playthrough and put everything in the optional content, every single halfway challenging platforming passage has been removed, but most of the heroic boss challenges are way way, .....way harder. Most areas became smaller, but there are more of them. ..and, at least at the current Gog patch (see date of this post), the game isn't quite there. Some of the talents are broken and do nothing, or just give you the donwsides. The descriptions from pre-afterlife are still there, while the functionality has changed. Abridged, the story is your standard anime plot: Help Death and use the power of friendship to kill a god, or death (and someone really seems to have a thing for zombie girls in combat gear). So why still 4 out of 5? The basic gameplay loop and the world itself are really good. Your char always does what you tell him to do, when you do. Normal bosses never feel unfair (different story for some of the heroics), the pixel art is beautiful, and it actually managed to build the 4th wall into the story. You have fun playing and exploring, entering "toss your controller through your neighbours window" territory when trying some heroic bosses (the difference between old and new heroics really really shows). Absolutely worth the 20 bucks,

Old school gamer and RPG player here.. This was one of my top three games for 2021, and one of the best RPG's I've played in a long-long time. The story is surprisingly deep and compelling. Game play is challenging but rewarding. Lots of secrets and twists, fun humor, great art style, doesn't follow convention but tries to show you something new. 100% recommended.

There is a good game hidden in here somewhere. The graphics are pretty and the voice acting that is there is actually good. Unfortunately the voice over is incomplete as a noticeable amount of lines from conversations are missing. The story is forgetable but there are a few nice ideas in the way how it is told and the world design is ok. But... As of now, one month after release, 2 patches and a hotfix later, although playable the game is still riddled with bugs, poor UI and localization. The combat system feels slugish even with the fastest weapons and some of the mechanics make no sense. It's almost as if somebody looked at Dark Souls, took some parts from it and changed them just enough to make them worse. Like loosing feathers (=Estus flask equivalent) on death. Other systems feel underdeveloped, like the horse or the weapon upgrades. Maybe with 6 months of extra development time things would have turned out differently. If the bugs ever get fixed you'll get an ok game that could have been great 3/5. Currently it's just 2/5.