The action roguelite thread

Nice find, this looks pretty good and I’d never heard of it. I’m craving anything remotely like Hollow Knight lately, wishlisted.

Risk of Rain 2 update changelog, apart of the new Bandit, it has more stuff like new items, new boss, new alternate skills for some other survivors, reworked final level, and more.


Dandy Ace report.
At first it seems a very nice roguelite. It’s exactly what it seemed in the trailers or demo, a mix between Hades (perspective and controls) and Dead Cells (4 active items to use, health potion).
It has 4 difficulties, 14 levels (but there are divergent paths that you unlock like in Dead Cells, you play 9 in each run) .

Your character has 4 slots, where you assign four cards. Cards are dashes, attacks, or attacks with some utility or cc, from what I’ve seen until now,. There are 50 in total. Every card slot also has a upgrade slot. The interesting thing is that all cards are both normal cards and upgrades, each one has a upgrade effect in addition to the normal use, so a poison card can be used as a poison wave or as a way to add poison effect to any other card, if used as upgrade. For example you can add a brief charm effect or an aoe damage to your dash, or add status effects like stun or vulnerable, or magical shrapnel. It isn’t a system as flexible as Hades, but it allows for some builds, as interestingly you can swap them at any time, and from primary to upgrade slot or whatever.

There is some metaprogression but it doesn’t seem super strong. The enemy variety seems adequate, in the first three levels I’ve see melee enemies, ranged enemies, fixed enemies (turrets), teleporting enemies, enemies with spheres that orbited around, enemies that summon an attack on your feet, enemies that throw aoe waves that grow with distance, and a pair more. It seems there are 25 in total, and 4 bosses.

So… what’s the issue? The issue is the combat itself. It isn’t bad. But as an action game, it’s veers intro mediocrity. I’m talking of animation quality, feel of attacks, enemy reactions, special effects, etc. It’s far away from Curse of Dead Gods, Hades or Dead Cells. And it’s hard to grind the first levels getting the upgrades, repeating them, if the combat isn’t as sweet as it should be.

Apart from the combat feel, it’s also more difficult than it seems at first, because it lack dash invulnerability, brief hit invulnerability, you can’t interrupt enemies attacking, you don’t have the rally effect from DC, nor the 1 hit protection. All the little tricks good games use to make it feel more fair.

A video

Returnal, which might be the biggest budget of these to date, has gone gold

Playing Gods Will Fall. It’s a rogue-like, but where is the meta progression? Almost no loot, you can find some items in a level, but nothing big really.

If all of your clan members “die”, then you start with a fresh clan, the monsters are randomized. I was fighting the osseuss level. Enemies were placed pretty decent. In my next run, the same beach was packed with enemies, it became Normandy on D-Day. Took me 4-5 heroes until I got off the beach. Also huge crabs. No idea how to kill them.

I like it, but it is really brutally hard. So the only meta progression is to get good and occasionally to get a strength or life buff?

The combat is decent, if not even good, if you get into the rhythm. But you can get overwhelmed easily by the enemies. I wish I could turn off the narrator voice. I would have preferred something like Darkest Dungeon, you know, something witty, something you can quote. This
foreign language stuff does not work for me at all.

I wish there would be some push your luck element, collect items in a dungeon, but pull out if you don’t want to fight the boss. Anything. Send in weaker heroes, and prep your better ones. But there is really nothing. Only played a couple of hours, though

Oooh, oooh! I know this one!

image

There is a secret new survivor as well

Still playing Gods Will Fall. I understand now why some people think it is easy. Let me explain.

I had about 20 failed runs where I couldn’t even kill one god. Sometimes I couldn’t even go far into the level, too many enemies, and some huge ones, too. Really brutally hard. Then After 20 full games, where all my heroes died, I had a new game started. And infested areas with packed monsters, were suddenly empty, one or two guys, no more.

So the new seed of a run can be really swingy. In this run I could beat two gods so far, lost one member permanently.

The hard runs made me harder, more skilled. I know the fighting system better. Trading hits is usually a really bad idea.

I think I love this game now, after having a hard time for a couple of hours. The music is really, really good. The hits have the right umphf to it. And the gods are the final exam.

I am watching a lets play of it now, where the guy got a fairly easy seed, and he is stumbling through the early game. If he manages to beat all gods, he might say it was an easy game.

I am also relieved, that there is a bit of progression within a game. You get your clan members improved, get some improved weapons. A bit of loot.

I was going against a god, Krannus. The dungeon got 2 of my best champions with the same dumb trap. That hurt. With my last guy, an obese celtic, but with a sword I got the god down. That sword guy, Wynter, had no special stats, but the sword was really effective.

Strange, but one of my champions with Str+3 and Vig+2 did not make it back. And later I lost another champ, never to come back. Now I have a party of 6, 5 of them really obese, slow hitters.

3 gods to go. The deeper you get into the game, the better your guys get. But you have to kill 2-3 gods until your guys are leveled up enough.

There was a boss, where you could fight immediate when you enter the dungeon, but if you do he comes fully equipped with horns and armor. I didn’t know that, and that was the end of one of my good guys.

When I get to a new dungeon, I usually send the weakest guy. It’s better to scout the dungeon. Like in Dark Souls, if you know where the enemies are in advance, it becomes a bit more managable.

grafik

Dammit, my party of 5 fattys got wiped on a boss up in the north. I had 2 bosses to go!
The early game you feel life is a struggle, miserable. The mid game you experience how you get stronger, you own this game. The finale should give you a sense of achievement, but my run was interrupted by death.

I tried a new run, but wow, I almost forgot how hard it was. The stats mean something in this game. There is a huge difference between STR+0 and STR+1 … and the weapons with 2 or 3 stars make a real difference.

This game is like a fast moving train. If you fall of the waggon you have a hard time to get back on. I had my run with 8/10 gods. And now I have a hard time to even get the 1st one killed. I had a great guy with speed 30, but he was killed by some falling pillars (where I didn’t even know they could drop). Now I know. And it was a final blow for him, no coming back.

Also, I have a lot of spear guys in my party and no fattys. And the dungeons are really hard. Boss life bars doubled. I am looking for a way to get back on the train, but no luck so far in 2-3 new runs.

Gods Will Fall. but when?? I had this run where I lost 7 of 8 of my tribe. The last one went in, first boss (I already lost 2 other guy to this sea monster). She made it to the boss. With 2 extra health and +3 strength. And it was like in a souls game. Don’t get greedy! Don’t get greedy! I got greedy. Boss had 10 % of health left, but he finished Mathilda, or whatever her name was, before she could deliver the final blows.

And instead of a run where all party members were rescued by the last one, it was just another day in the office, where nothing exceptional happened.

Going Under on Switch just got updated, I think PC got this a while ago:

Major Features

  • Jackie’s Room can now be unlocked, allowing access to costume selection, an OST player, and the new gamemode: Impostor Mode.
  • Impostor Mode: Run the 3 main dungeons one after the other, and face down your Impostor in this “True Roguelite” mode. Beat the additional difficulty options to earn new costumes!
  • Rolodex: Capture your enemies in business cards to learn more about them! Complete your co-workers’ mentorships to unlock their cards as well.
  • Old dungeons can now be accessed in the latter half of the game by pulling the levers near the slides in Fizzle.
  • 25 new Skills to unlock and find in the dungeon
  • 9 new Curses for the Hauntrepreneur to challenge you with
  • 24 new items to wield, including the fabled Legendary Weapons
  • A new app — Cubicle Reverb
  • A new flavor of Fizzle??
  • Added your best time successfully clearing a dungeon to the stats card on the entrance slide.
  • Some new secrets to discover

New DLC for Binding of Isaac

KEY FEATURES:

  • 130+ new items (more than 700 items in total)
  • A full alternate path with brand new chapters and a new final boss and ending
  • 100+ new enemies
  • 25+ new bosses
  • 2 new playable characters
  • 5 new challenges
  • 100+ new achievements
  • 5,000+ new room designs

Lots of new content. Pity about the gameplay…

The gameplay has been completely reworked. I haven’t tried it out yet, but the dev (Edmund) essentially let an awesome mod developer completely redo the game, especially in hard mode. For the first time, balance is actually a main concern. Worth checking out.

What? What’s wrong with the gameplay?

A few of us discussed it a bit earlier in the thread, around here:

I’m with Turin in that I just didn’t like the action, and the feeling that ‘secret knowledge’ (as @Bluddy called it) was required to do well. My success felt very random compared to other action roguelikes.

The basic movement, shooting and killing isn’t exactly what I would call a tight, polished, flashy, engrossing experience.

Thanks for the replies!

Disagree. It was most certainly ‘flashy’.