GOG does not have enough characters. A very atmospheric and suprisingly dark little game. A decent indie title that suffers from lack of polish, mechanical skill and a few misguided ideas. It's got great presentation. Combo of Evangelion and Samurai Jack. But it does and says very little with them. It's just cool imagery. Nice when it occurs, but shallow. Functionally, the game has significant play issues. Mainly the controls. It drops inputs or queues them wrong FAR too consistently even on a brand new controller. When the gameplay heats up, which isn't often, coupled with some really bad hitboxes (eg. samurai boss), it becomes a really frustrating experience. I honestly think the alpha was smoother. Issues with getting stuck on corners and when you use objects as cover, enemy attacks can sometimes still hit you when they pretty flagrantly shouldn't. It happens enough to note. The flagship feature is the chain dash which is underutitlized and has really inconsistent timing. I've 100% the game twice so I know what I'm talking about (now and in 2016, even the unreasonable 800 dash challenge). The aiming of the dash is not as calibrated as it needs to be. Basically the game demands precision in it's big challenges but it doesn't mechanically give you those tools. But the game is easy so you probably won't notice until the challenges. The map is terrible. An aesthetic over function choice. Finding secrets is fun but can be frustrating thanks to that. The game can be extravagent with it's animations that take too long and make replaying annoying. But a first time play is generally fine. It would have been nice if the sword cosmetics were consistent. The menu and gameplay colors (hilt) don't match. Seems a basic thing to get right/fix. Didn't even know the outfits had effects. Too subtle to notice. Shame the final cloak can't be taken into NG+ and there's no areas to use it after getting it. I hope the devs got better with combat mechanics.
GOG reviews don't have enough space. It seems the updates over time, while adding a lot, changed a lot of important things on the backend for the worse. Skill has gone down and luck dependency has gone way up. This is a nice kickstarter game but the fact it is one shows. Most of these reviews only beat it once or never did. One reviews after only 1 hour. That's disgraceful to everyone. The game's sole appeal stems from all the relics, spells, cloaks and thus, builds, that you can make. They are creative and stylish. So while the presentation is good, the real gameplay, how you actually interact with game the most, sucks due to some core, opposing, design issues. There is too much. While it seems cool on the surface, with such a huge pool of offense, defense, misc, and cursed items, as well spells of 6 elements, the RNG makes it impossible to make a build you want during a run, let alone have enough gold for it. And that's on top of discovering your build probably won't be successful as the final boss is a mess requiring excruciating trial and error given how rarely you make it to him and how briefly he is vulnerable. The camera angle makes some things like attacks, distances, and platforming, inconsistent. There are some bad hitboxes/detection, instant attacks, no invincibility frames, and healing is hard. So it's easy to get spammed to death fast. So, naturally you will be forced to use the few items that actually work. Rogue RNG on a big pool ensures you won't get them. Every hit matters and with how often the screen fills up with SFX it's critical to have precision. Good game sense can only do so much. Tried an earth/armor/hp build because they synergize; game never gave me one earth spell, not even a bad one. There is nothing worse than suffering so much wasted time and effort when it's not your own fault over and over. Bosses are not hard except final; mobs in tiny rooms are the problem. Do you build for mobs or final boss? Can't do both. Too annoying. EDIT: GOG added more space. Wizard of Legend is cool and has great creativity, but suffers from some severe flaws. It's less about skill and more about the RNG like all rogue games. You either get good spells and relics or you don't. There are so many companion pieces that I have never seen show up in a run. NEVER. There is only one dash in the game with iframes, and gameplay is you get tagged once and stunlocked to death. So it's a touch of death game, you or them, nothing in between. The game is also almost only based around power. Kill them fast before they get you. And they will get you because you have cooldowns and are frequently locked in small spaces with enemies that are far too fast and attack instantly. Technically, this enemy power escalation only happens in the last third of runs where the speed and instant attacking wtih hyper armor becomes ridiculous. You simply are not programmed with the kit to deal with things skillfully when so much is coming at you and one tag equals death. Building to make it to the final boss is not the same as building to fight the final boss which is bothersome. It's also annoying how you can't save and quit a run and comeback to it. You must commit at least 45 minutes to a run. Looping more than once is out of the question due to this.
I was very excited about this game because the presentation looked very good and I'm intrigued by emotional narrative-driven games. I saw the demo and I was sold on buying this as soon as it came out on PC. Given the limited characters for GOG reviews, I will place my full review on gamefaqs.com and Steam. My first red flag should have been recognizing this is a port of a mobile game that already came out a year ago. After rewatching the trailers and rereading the descriptions here, I feel mislead. The trailers and demo showcase all the best parts; it doesn't get better. The atmosphere and art are both good. Simple and effective. The effects such as lighting and rain are very well done and I wish there were more instances of them. The music is very repetitive. Sometimes it does not smoothly transition between pieces. The technical issues are very bad. From the game's credits, this game had 52 people involved with its testing. 23 of those were direct QA testors. This is a 3-4 hour mobile game. The length of time it took to release on PC and the amount of bugs I encountered are shockingly unacceptable. Immediately, the game had consistent trouble scrolling right smoothly. I can run things like Skyrim and Hyper Light Drifter pefectly fine so I know it's not my desktop. I was able to clip through a roof. Animations would stutter or disappear entirely. There are pointless paper collectibles that vanished from my inventory when I picked another up. Gameplay is almost nonexistent. Puzzles are obvious. If you die, you'll respawn nearly exactly how you left it when you died. This means that, in combat, the enemies don't respawn and they retain how much damage you did to them. Tonally, the game is not consistent. The game is not so much horror as it is eerie. There is no gamplay climax and many things are pointless. There are 2 exposition-metaphor-dump NPCs. I have significant problems with the story and its extreme over-reliance on Metaphor. I'm out of characters.
