Loot River

Got this on sale liked the vibe and graphics. Started out fun exactly what I was expecting. Enjoyed it. Good balance of rpg, rouge lite, and light puzzle work, Really the only thing preventing me from recommending this game has been the ruined runs due to the game glitching. I have been on a run maybe 20-25 times at this point and I believe I am now chalking up my 5th restarted run from the game locking me down. First there are these enemies when you move platforms that lock all the platforms in place until they die. 4 of my 5 ruined runs have been due to their effect persisting after they die. The last run was stopped because a boss glitched when I landed a hit and it knocked them outside of the arena barrier. Sad that otherwise this was a solid game.

Nah, not for £20. I completed my 1st attempt and feel like I've seen pretty much everything the game has to offer. People will go into this expecting something different due to the recommendation of a certain souls YouTuber. It is not a souls-like. It's a rogue-lite with *VERY* shallow meta-progression. The Tetris gimmick is cool for a few minutes but it can make the game grind to a halt when you're stuck doing puzzles to try and progress. I tried about 10 different weapons and they all feel the same, just different element types and scaling. For a game called "Loot River", the loot sucks. It's a good concept here but there's just not enough content to ask £20 for it.

This is an extremely fun game with a steep learning curve. My recommendation is to go into the accessibility settings and turn on easy mode while you learn it. No matter how good you are at soulslikes, no matter how good you are at games in general, the controls, mechanics, and layout of this are different enough that you're going to need to learn it and you'll have a much easier time doing that if you enable easy mode. As you go you pick up modifiers that you can use to re-up quite a bit of that difficulty, or you can turn off easy mode when you start to get the hang of the controls, but if you don't it's way too easy to bounce off of this game and that does it a serious disservice. There's a fantastically unique take on the soulslike genre here and it's worth experiencing if that's something you enjoy.

Could have been awesome to me but they decided to take the most frustrating mecanics of dark souls which is stamina. So the game is, yet another, dark souls clone in a ways or another which is tiring. You can make the world move, most of the time you're not gonna do what you wanted to. I do think the game would have been a lot better if you just did a dungeon crawler where you can make the world move like a speedy game where you chain attacks somtimes parry and not this garbage which punish you for any of your choices. Art is great though but not enough to make it a good game.

Another great game that deserves better reviews. Yes, it's pretty difficult, but it has an easy mode. + Soundtrack is great and very intense + Combat is fun, engaging and well-paced + Every boss has unique mechanics and plays differently from the others + Beautiful pixelart + Multiple routes through the levels + Many different builds, spells, armor pieces and weapons - Some collisions are a little janky - Some Hitboxes could be cleaner - Story/Lore is rather boring - It's pretty short, 5-10h for beating it, 10-15h for 100% Easy recommend to anyone who enjoys difficult, intense games and can handle a bit of frustration!

This game is pretty okay! Not amazing, but it has some fun concepts and engaging overall look and feel. It's one of those games that reads very loudly as a first attempt, and sure enough, this is the studio's first outing. It is an inexpensive game that supports an indie studio, so it is hard not to recommend, just expect a little jank. I look forward to whatever they make next!