Sundered®: Eldritch Edition

I really liked this game at first and had a lot of fun with it. It has baeutiful graphics and gameplay with balanced difficulty and fluid movements you can almost feel. I enjoyed how relentless the enemies are and how they force you to fight in impossible places. But at some point the graphics became stale, as I started to notice the lack of animation. Some enemies barely have any movement in them at all. The backgrounds and environments are sterile, without any detail, probably due to the randomized maps. Only the bosses are a bit better, but they are annoying to fight. Some of them take ages, without posing much of a threat. Even the gameplay became a chore after some time: Fighting is repetetive as hell. It took longer than I thought, but at some point the hordes of spawning mobs got on my nerves. Exploration is not rewarded - it's punished. You run into a dead end, persued by endless mobs and face an endless way back. And all the running you have to do! This is a game that should not have had a central hub. All in all: It's good fun for some time, but don't try to finish it.

Short review: If you love metroidvanias and are eager for a challenge, go grab this, Worth e'ry penny. Long review: If you love metroidvanias this is THE metroidvania you wanted. Rooms are generated procedurally, so are encounters, and, although the map layout is the same in every game (map is going to come in handy, believe me) runs are not. There are times where you are not going to see where the blows are comig from, so you're going to need some skills and handle your resources carefully. The graphics are SO DAMN GOOD. Designs are out of this world. Seriously, gorgeous. Storywise, you are going to need to make some choices that affect not only how your character develops, but the story itself and how it develops around you. It's got this Lovecraftian vibe that makes it wonderful and unfathomable... up to the point that, at the end of the game you may find yourself thinking that you might have rooted for the worng side... This is serious triple A material. Go for it. I've purchased this game three times (gog, ps4 and steam, not counting games), no regrets.

The title says it all - the game has some things really going for it. The soundtrack and sounds in general add a lot to the game and actually manage to create something like an atmosphere out of very little else. And this "very little else" is a problem; the procedurally generated rooms are very same-y, there are very few types of enemies (at least at the point I am, which is about 4 h in) and the fights generally aren't all that interesting. And this is a bit of a bummer: A roguelike that is mainly combat with combat that is just... meh. When I say it's "just attack and dodge", I am describing most of the genre, so I won't do that - I can't exactly point my finger at a single problem (to name a few: combat (or movement and honestly pretty much the whole game) that is responsible for me not having a good time playing it. I've played many roguelikes/lites and am no stranger to frustratingly hard combat or slow progress. Sundered has all that (if you chose harder difficulties at least), but I do not feel statisfied, I just feel a bit bored. I wish I could articulate why I feel that way, but I really just can't, which makes this review a bit pointless - but if you read this, you are probably extremely critical yourself and just need a push in one direction or the other.

Sundered has a carefully tailored game play, a daunting atmosphere, and a flawless implementation. The choice to embrace or resist adds a lot of weight to the player, and is decisive to keep them involved in the development of the story. Either choice dramatically alters both the game play and the outcome of the game. Congratulations for such an exceptional title, Thunder Lotus!

What an amazing Metroidvania game! I actually wasn't sure what to expect from this game, but it ended up being one of the best games that I've played in quite some time. It's very reminiscent of Hollow Knight and others games of the genre and is well worth the price (too cheap if you ask me). Do yourself a favour and buy this game!