Most of the reviews of this game only played the first couple stages. I have played it all the way through. The idea that it's a warm tale about two brothers with strong family values is a complete and utter misrepresentation of the game's events. It starts off that way, but then it turns into a depressing and freakish tale of gore and death. It is NOT AT ALL appropriate for children!
This game is sort of a mixture of Wing Commander Privateer and Silent Service. You'll spend a lot of quiet time staring at the nav map hoping that it stays quiet. Unfortunately the game has quite a few issues in its current state. The dialogue is loaded with unnecessarily vulgar language and typos, it crashes often. Also, although the NPCs speak a variety of languages and appear to come from a mixture of all of Earth's backgrounds, every NPC in the game I've seen in hours of play is dark-skinned. Not sure if that was just an odd design choice or if it was meant to convey some kind of message. The trading needs to be rebalanced. Docking fees and jump fees quite often wash out your profit, and where to taking particular types of goods to sell high doesn't seem to have a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it (e.g. some space stations need water and oxygen, some don't). It needs a lot of work, but I wish more games of this kind were made, so I hope they stick with it.
It's a pretty good game overall and probably comes closest to that SOTN spirit. It does have a few bugs that are actively being worked on (make sure you patch it), and there are a few points in the game where there is absolutely no direction on what you're supposed to do next where the answer is something obscure such as having a shard from a particular normal enemy. There are also some missing features that are kickstarter stretch goals that aren't implemented yet, so be mindful of that. A far as aesthetics, it looks good, sounds good, and plays well, and if you like Symphony of the Night, you'll enjoy playing it.
I thought this would be fun to play with my son, but then this instakill ghost comes after you in every level if you don't rush, and he's terified of it. Also got stuck when a block landed on the exit and there was nothing we could do but wait for the huge creepy ghost to come through the walls and kill us. Poor quality. Not kid friendly. Not recommended.
This game from a design standpoint is almost a carbon copy of Diablo 2, minus the multiplayer. For the most part, that's a good thing. I found the difficulty reasonable for most of the game. Near the end, I very suddenly started getting one-shot a lot, so there's a balance issue there. Unfortunately my character wasn't able to complete the game because the final boss looks to take a couple hours to whittle down, and due to a bug the final battle reset one of the times I died. Had to knock off a couple stars for that, and at this point I probably won't finish it because I would have to grind quite a bit and then grind the battle itself, and honestly the story is pretty thin and cliche and not very engaging.
