Mandragora is a side scroling souls-like RPG. With great artstyle, good story and gameplay. That is untill you reach the middle of the game. When that happens the gameplay start to crumble bit by bit, and by the end is simply ridiculous. Let's start with the rifts you encounter and are mandatory to continue the game. They require to finish them in certain time and perfectly, otherwise you start from the start. In order to have more time, you need to find certain ingredients, which some are hidden or behind optional bosses, and make you to look behind every nook and crany like it or not. Then came the death of the character. Every time you die, you leave your acumulated experience to be collected and resurect at a spawn point, which is ok as in any other souls like game. The annoying part is, when you die at a boss fight, and then do not ressurect at the boss but at the other side of the area, and then have to trek and fight all the way back to the boss, for just another atempt. Next comes the characters themselfs. All martial classes are useless. For fighters if you decide to block, you do not block the entire damage, you always get hit, and considering especially by the end all attacks carry status effect, makes the block pointless. If you want to play rouge like character, you are simply on hitted. On top of that the damage these classes are doing is nothing compared to the magic users, which can spam fireballs and kill things even outside of the screen. And the last thing is the end of the game. Where all of the enemies are the same as before, with the same move set and skills but their armour, health and damage is simply multiplied without any comparison to your character level or skills. They are buffed just because. I really wanted to like Mandragora. The style, the world, the story are really intriguing, but all of the above short comings did leave a sour taste. I would advise to wait before all of the above things are fixed.
