Beautiful If Lightweight Fantasy Romp
Vambrace: Cold Soul takes an interesting approach, trying to meld a few gaem genres in different ways. There is exploration, some tactical combat ala JRPGs, and some basic storytelling and quest-filling, along with crafting and looting. Each of these elements if pretty light however, so players looking for a deep, gamer's RPG may be disappointed. It's also fairly hard, and fairly random.
The lack of depth is a problem mostly in the combat. What many people miss initially is how the core of combat is not really character attacks and abilities, but turn character position and sequence. Unfortunately, that's not quite enough to hang a whole combat system on, and there just aren't enough decision to make. Each character has on attack and one special ability, and items can't be used in combat. It's just a little too simple.
Beyond that, the game is also fairly hard, largely due to randomness -- hend the "rogue-like" designation. Some patches have eased up on this, but you may still need to retreat regularly, and restart a quest from scratch multiple times before getting through it. At least you don't have to frustratingly restart the game each time, as in some games (I'm looking at you, FTL!).
Those are the downsides. The good in this game comes largely from its beautiful art, and the atmosphere and charm this creates -- the world feels fun to explore, and reading about the lore is compelling to me. It's certainly not taking itself too seriously thugh. It plays around with stock fantasy elements, blended with a pretty modern-seeming culture. There's a certain amount of cheese-cake in its art, which I have mixed feelings about: a lot of cleavage and high-heels, and even school-girl uniforms on the cat-like race. If you can forgive that, it's a great game to look at. There's also something of a story to get through, which is more than a lot of rogue-like's can boast. Those two plusses have kept me going so far, despite the random number gods' hating me.