Sundered®: Eldritch Edition

I rarely leave reviews, which i acknowledge is a personal failing of mine. However - I loved this game so much that seeing it somehow have a "mixed" review status over the past 30 days compelled me to leave this. My favorite Metroidvania of all time. The roguelike elements enhance every aspect, though they did take me a little "getting used to". The abilities feel incredible wihthout ever trivializing a room or section. Traversal is amazing and a delight. The story and lore are evocative and captivating. The quality of the art, visuals, and animation, remain top-notch from beginning to end. A true work of art. Not sure what else there is to say. I think back to time spent with this game often - and always positively.

Please play Spiritfarer. This game feels like an early game from a studio figuring out ideas. A rougue-like metroidvania is a very interesting concept, that makes the game feel very samey. Although the 20 hour for full acheivement playtime does circumvent this by having difficulty and ability modifications (Until you spend 2 to 4 hours doing the same pathing looting for perks and shards across two saves). Roughly half the bossfights feel very satisfying once you learn to dance the dance, others feel like tanking hits during the quiet and dashing repeatedly when not. It is a very interesting and honestly fun game, but only if you like the mechanics/are generally interested in rougue-likes/metroidvanias as ideas that can be experimented with.

This game is not particularly bad, it's just pretty mind numbing. The art it's what i enjoyed the most, the style is quite unique and it makes some aspects of the game more bearable. The story is kinda cool, but it's not relayed well and if you do not pay attention well you'll miss it. There are 3 different endings, which is cool, if it wasn’t that to expirience all three you need to make 2 separate playthrough, and you’ll not wanna play this again after the first. The gameplay is really off, expecially at the start. There are some cool parkours and puzzles but they don’t save the rest. Some bosses are interesting and they can be really hard. basically you go through a map which is half procedurally generated half not and you get the drawback of each while getting the pros of none: you can’t go quite in auto pilot but it’s not challenging or fun either as there are very few curated parkours and obstacles. Enemies arrive in BIG swarms randomly wherever you are, there are around 5 variants of enemies which get reskinned and powered up for each biome. The fighting can be somewhat fun but only in the later parts where you unlock some more movement options and abilities, …

There's a lot to like about this game, but there's a few issues here and there so I hesitate giving it a thumbs down. I will say, I'm still going to be buying games for you guys cause you have good ideas, and I know you can execute on them. My 3 biggest gripes on this game is: 1. Mob fights. They're so random, and there are parts where they are literally endless. I spent 5 mins in an area killing every enemy on my screen, only for 10 more to pop up. It's so much, and combat isn't hard per se its just a lot going on at once. 2. Map needs some work. There's no way of knowing if I can get through a certain area or not. The map doesn't do a great job telling me when a path is blocked or not. 3. At some point you unlock a heavy variant of your normal attack. This attack when done to the left or right triggers a dash attack. This is totally fine on it's own, and I would use it in game a lot. However to trigger it you push a direction and attack at the same time. This fully kills combat in a 2D world where I very much have to turn around and attack incoming monsters. It randomly triggers while attacking and ends up pushing you into hazards. Otherwise game is pretty cool. I look for…

I don't know why the recent reviews are so negative. My husband and I played through the whole game with no issues. I tend to find a lot of bugs in games without trying, and nothing game breaking ever happened for us. I'm also TERRIBLE at platformers but I still had a good time. The art and animations were fantastic. The backgrounds and designs of the enemies were a 10/10 for me. Gameplay wise.... the smaller enemies are a little less memorable, and some a little annoying to deal with. They are endless so you really can't just sit there, you have to keep moving. The bosses on the other hand... were SO much fun. Overall, the game is 7/10, maybe even a 7.5. It's not the most ground breaking game in the world, but it's still fun. The art and the boss fights definitely carry, but it was still a unique experience that I think about from time to time.

I'm not really sure what the point is. The enemies aren't a threat, so I basically just ran around hitting random things until I got bored. The only time I was even at risk of dying is when they locked me in a room and spawned a bunch of enemies at once.