Vambrace: Cold Soul

Taking the mechanics of Darkest Dungeon and giving it an anime sheen with a compelling story, main protagonist and extensive world-building. Vambrace has shot up in my need to complete. The strategy is just as compelling as DD with more interesting mechanics like crafting and more choices in your routes to the main boss. The design work is very eye-pleasing in both character and environment. If I could give a 1/2 star rating I would knock it down .5 for some of the clunky mouse hovering you need to do(my pointer is not showing so it's guess work) to know your ailments and enemy stats, but it's a minor gripe. Haunting music and juicy sfx make this a challenging and fun game.

The artwork, worldbuilding and original music are the strongest parts of this game, but are unfortunately dragged down by the uninteresting gameplay and story presentation. There is not much strategy in the turn-based combat as winning fights boil down to killing the enemy as quickly as possible. There are some resource management and random events to make exploration more interesting. The main character dying will send you all the way back to town however, with no way to preserve progress, and party members have permadeath, so if one of them dies during exploration your run is as good as done. This can get annoying and feels very much like a way to artificially extend playtime. While the world presented is interesting, the execution of the main story feels lacking in places. Most characters speak in a very contemporary and casual way unfitting of the fantasy setting. The progression of events or character dialogues also do not always feel natural. The protagonist in particular has a very generic personality despite her unique look. The general lack of voicelines for the vast majority of dialogue and the heavy use of what sounds like stock sound effects also undermine the otherwise great visual presentation. The permadeath mechanic does not feel as impactful as it should be, as recruitable party members seem to just be modified versions of the same splash arts with equally generic dialogue and abilities. To add insult to injury nobody in-game seems to care if one of them do die. In spite of all that, this is game with a charming and unique visual identity. Areas in the town area feel alive with each area offering insights into the setting. The gameplay, while mediocre, still feels satisfying when you overcome difficult odds. The collectible costumes is something I love in games and they put a lot of effort into those. The faults of the game also seem more forgivable when considering that this is the studio's first attempt at a RPG. Buy on sale.

Primero que todo, el juego me parece bueno, hasta ahi, no es muy bueno ni malo, es etretenido hasta un punto. Pero a grandes razgos es menos Darkes Dungueon y mas una novela visual glorificada, asi que en ese punto disminuiria el farmeo, lo hace tedioso. Una vez que sabes como jugar y conseguis objetos de daño, es mas rapido y facil. Bueno aunque mas que dificil es tedioso, vendria bien un combate automatico o algo asi. Aparte de eso el autoguardado es horrible, termine el juego y hubo un error de alguna clase lo que salto la cinematica final del juego, se guardo despues del final en la parte del prologo donde ves los objetos de tu habitacion. No pude ver la cinematica en el juego, supongo que tendria que re jugarlo y pasarlo todo denuevo para verlo. Termine mirando los finales en Youtube... First of all, I think the game is good, so far it's not great or bad, it's entertaining to a point. But overall it's less Darkes Dungeon and more of a glorified visual novel, so at that point I'd slow down the farming, it makes it tedious. Once you know how to play and get damage items, it's faster and easier. Well, more than difficult it's tedious, it would be nice to have an auto-battle or something like that. Aside from that the autosave is horrible, I finished the game and there was a bug of some sort, which skipped the final cutscene of the game, it saved after the ending, in the part of the prologue where you see the items in your room. I couldn't see the cutscene in the game, I guess I'd have to replay it and go through the whole thing again to see it. I ended up watching the endings on YouTube...

GAMEPLAY wise it is a dungeon crawler very simmilar to Darkest Dungeon, there is mixed changes to make the game more aproachable, to the general public, making the focus be more on the story part and keeping the engaging gameplay. Notable gameplay changes are: - The stats are more simple to build, most of the complexity and difficulty is from the lack of explaining of some statuses, all of them, except heath, vigor and combat are exclusively for dice rolls (not explained); - Equipments are mostly used to boost statuses, except the class exclusive ones, those mostly do a very simple and very weak "buff" to the special habilities; - Healing is very accessible if you have figured that overwatch stat makes camping heal everyone for free; It is a fun game to mindlessly play between dialogs and has a interesting story on the dialogs. After gameplay PROGRESSION is the place where many games falter, this one I still can be conclusive about, if you treat it like a casual game it is acceptable, but overall very short, allies cannot level up and do not upgrade, group this with the few classes available and there is a very short variety of compositions to try, every character of the same class is perfectly equal aside from its appearance, most of the progression is through the equipment, in contrast the heath of enemies and even the last boss is balanced to the low status of the characters making no cheap battles with walls of health, so progression isn't halted because of that. The VISUALS are, as seen on the story page, very different from usual games of the genre, everyone have a very kept and beautyfull appearance, it looks like a dating game, untill you se one of the die horribly. The collectibles of the game are costumes, some them are funny easter eggs, sadly you cannot collect all in a single playthrough, some of them are very detailed, changing the visuals and animations of the attacks of the protagonist, all cosmetic.

Fine gameplay, challanging enemies with different mechanics. I like a graphics style in this game and saundtrack is really nice.