Sundered®: Eldritch Edition

Backer here. - Do you love to fight unique enemies? Too bad. The game cares about quantity, not quality. Player faces hordes of enemies from time to time and after 10 minutes you don't feel like grinding the same group of monster for the umpteenth time. - Do you enjoy gaining levels and improving your character? Unfortunately, the game uses a system in which leveling up doesn't matter due to the majority of updates which give you +X to attack / shield etc. - Do you love exploring? There is no reason to do so here, platforming is bad and the only reward you'll find is a bit of exp. Why should you even bother when you can simply kill another horde? - Maybe good combat system? Unfortunately, no. The game focuses on one aspect which is attacking hordes of enemies. Most of the time you'll be spamming evade and attack, from time to time an escape is ain order just to regenerate your shield. Boss fights look gorgeous but who cares when you are literally unable to see your own character due to zoom out and number of effects on screen? The game tries to be metroidvania (experience system, exploration, gain new abilities to enter different paths etc.) but it fails totally and unfortunately the devs still think they did good job creating a game in which fighting and exploring is a chore. The game allows you to embrace 'evil power' and this will affect your ending but all what you'll get is one different boss fight and a few seconds more in a cutscene? The game feels like Touhou with SotN elements. Horrible mix.

I cannot praise this game, or the Developers, enough. I backed the game on Kickstarter and have had the pleasure of being involved in the Beta and SuperSecretBeta testing phases, and in communication with the Devs to give direct feedback. For those unaware, about two dozen testers were directly emailed by the CEO of Thunder Lotus Games and invited to participate in a secret phase of testing, called the SuperSecretBeta, with access to the full game, for the purpose of direct final feedback for final game balance and adjustments in a Discord channel with the entire Thunder Lotus dev team. Special shout out to Med and Ian who always seemed to be around to talk to the testers! The entire experience has been amazing, the game itself has been solid all the way back to the Alpha, and has only become better and better as patches have come in to add content and rebalance portions of the game, on some days of the SuperSecretBeta we would have 4-5 patches within a few hours. The Devs are very receptive to feedback and are a fun, friendly group to be involved with. They value our opinions and took what we said to heart in their rebalancing all the way to the end of the Beta period. As for the game itself, it is a riveting, haunting tale of humanity, courage, desparation, temptation, corruption, and salvation. Your choices affect the way the game plays out, and there's really no bad choice to make. All the outcomes are well implemented and thought out, and provide a compelling story. The art is gorgeous, screenshots I've taken during my testing have become my new desktop backgrounds and lock screens. The music is hauntingly beautiful, I've found myself just sitting and listening to the haunting strings so many times. The minibosses are fun and challenging, while the region bosses are EPIC confrontations requiring skill and thinking outside the box, I don't think I've had more fun on boss fights in a very long time. Please, do yourself a favor and buy this game. It's already a masterpiece, and I am eager to see what plans they have for DLC in the future, more of this game could never be a bad thing. I've already played to 100% completion on both Resist and Embrace during the SuperSecretBeta, and I can't wait to do it again now that it's on full release and see the new content come!

The game is a strange metroidvania/rougelite hybrid. At first (just like many reviewers) I've hated it: the movement seemed clunky, I didn't felt progress and the world seemed barren. Then I've died for the first time, and realised the rougelite elements: after each run, you can cash in you collected materials, and the map is recreated (half true, the bigger blocks are fixed, but the smaller blocks inside them are random) To be honest the game is more like a rougelite action platformer with metroidvania elements (one nonlinear map, where you unlock new segments with harder enemies by getting new abilities) then vica versa: - since the map is partially re-generated after each run, you can't do the known locations by finger memory, you need to fight through them again (still easier though) - there are way less shortcuts/waypoint system then I'm used to in metroidvanias, probably because the worldmap feels smaller ( - the enemies are periodically created in the form of attacking groups. each location has its own set of enemies, but you can never be sure what will you fight on the next corner. - you can only improve your character between runs (by returning to the hub) Positive: - you don't need to grind at all, the leveling pace is simply perfect. I've only grinded 15 minutes efore the final boss to get the last few skills (I didn't need them, I just like 100% things) - if you like dark/horror fantasy, the world and the concept will be to your liking - you have plenty of options during action, and each enemy/boss needs at least a little different approach Negative: - maybe I'm old, but sometimes I couldn't follow whats happening on the screen. Mainly when there were so many enemies and projectiles on the screen that a bullet hell could envy it, but also during the final boss of the embrace path (detailing it would be spoiler) - a few more teleports/checkpoints would been cool - I would be more happier if the game keeps the current status of my run if I quit

While this game has a lot of graphical backing, that's far and away its strongest suit. The "roguelike" elements of the game do nothing to add to the formula. In fact, every "procedural" element of the game is to its detriment, not that there are many. But worse, since the game does do any kind of randomization, there is load time on the areas in the game. There's nothing gained for this cost. The game is also large enough that travelling is a chore, but the environments are cookie cutter so it's never new. Combat is generally a button mash affair, which isn't terrible until later parts in the game where you simultaneously are having to fight movement alteration over instant death. Bosses are an increasing annoyance, as the game progresses, as the difficulty of the game relies less and less on skillful execution and more and more about just being a confluence of annoying things, such as having to chase down an enemy to hit them. And then it does a hybrid version of Souls' collection and some kind of skill tree, in a way that doesn't benefit either. Since you do not lose your currency on death, A+ on the presentation of the game, but the game is lacking. It is, however, a Metroidvania, which is a term that is thrown around without a care in the world lately. I wouldn't say it's a great one, and it leans more on the 'vania, but absolutely is.

Didn't finish the game, got through the first few areas and few abilities but was unimpressed. It's not much of a platformer: while there's lots of platforms and vertical tunnels and spiky bushes the platforming is pretty simple. You get a double jump early and can jump off walls. Nothing was particularly difficult in the platforming department, little skill is needed to move through the world. Combat Is button mashy and enemies are spammy. The game likes to throw lots and lots of enemies at you at once. Generally as you move around there will either be nothing, or suddenly a smattering of enemies will filter in from nowhere. then you'll just hit an area and it will just keep throwing a horde of enemies at you. At this point it's mostly just get away and spam attack until you can use a finisher move for more damage. Fighting is unsatisfying since it's just a mess of enemies onscreen all at once so strategy and finesse really go out the window and you end up just mashing attack. though even that in itself is annoying; your character moves forward as you attack so it's hard to stay back away from enemies since your attacks draw you into them. On top of that some enemy types are just plain annoying. Not long into it these cannon-bots will spawn and they can shoot you through walls from very far away. The game likes to spawn groups of 3-4 of them throughout areas, usually behind you as you travel either forcing you to backtrack to kill them or move forward for a long time while they shoot at you through the walls, more tiresome than exciting.