It’s junky, but can be a stupid fun.
First of all, turn off Inga, really. Now that’s taken care of…
This game is often described as Arkham combat style roguelite, and I could see that at first glance the way Morgan, the protagonist of the game, zipping across the map to kick some mooks in their face 50m apart. But actual gameplay is nothing like Arkham’s precision combat, if you get into this game expecting that you will be thoroughly disappointed.
Unlike Arkham, you manually lock-on to an enemy by holding a button. The problem is lock-on behavior is so junky that you really don’t have control of whom your target should be prioritized. Instead of locking-on to closest or prioritize ranged enemy, it locks-on to literally the enemy closest to the center of camera. So, you are often trying to hit a guy on your right, who is about to fire a rocket, only to end up flying across 25m into pack of giant robots. If there is no enemy present on the screen, it will automatically search for enemy to lock-on to, but even then, it’s not very consistent exactly how it works.
Even if you ignore that, the game is generally plagued with a lot of junkiness. Stuff like, you can’t lock-on to an enemy standing at the very corner of the map because it’s slightly out of geometry, standing close proximity to item pick up prevents you from performing circular attacks because it use same button for item pickup, stuck in a corridor in between arena, stuck in a weird leg stretching pose, etc.
It’s hard to play this game like a brawler or beat’em up, but I think it’s not meant be. This can be quite fun when you successfully assemble an insane room clearing op build and watching a bunch of elite mooks melt away as they enter the arena. Sometime effects get so insane that you don’t know what you are looking at but YOU KNOW things are dying. You would need fundamental skills like memorizing certain attack patterns, what combo would trigger the bonus attack and so on. But it’s really less about typical raw skills or tactical decision making you need for beat’em ups, it’s more about what kind of crazy build you can assemble, especially further you go high up the difficulty. It can be stupid fun, but it’s also shallow fun.
I was sort of expecting the Arkham with roguelite going into, so naturally got disappointed. You can try to play like a beat’em up and have some fun despite its junkiness. (There are builds for pure melee combat.) But it’s clear that the game is balanced for aforementioned room clearing builds in mind. You will eventually need to move away from raw skill to build strategy very quickly.
I love the soundtrack (Street Law, Midnight are quite banger!), love the art design, there is clearly something unique that stands out, but ultimately incoherent implementations prevents it from achieving cult-classic status that it could’ve been.
Do I recommend it? Yes and no. It’s reasonably cheap, so try the base game, maybe during a sale. But you should manage your expectations before going in.
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