Samurai Bringer is a roguelite action game with levels which change with every playthrough, where you cut down hordes of Samurai and Demons to collect combat techniques and polish your fighting style in order to defeat Yamata-no-Orochi, the eight-headed dragon of Japanese mythology.
Released on
Genres
Reviews View More
Dynasty Warriors but I enjoy it
A hidden gem! A very hidden one, as it appears almost no one bought this game. I don't even remember how it ended up on my wishlist, and even though it's under €10 even without a sale, I've been ignoring it for over a year and now I wish I hadn't because this game is absolutely fantastic! Do not sleep on this game if you enjoy a technical, if light, roguelite with deep build freedom.
The first thing that strikes you about this game is the graphics. At first, it looks like a pretty generic "pixel art but in 3D" type artstyle, which we've seen many times before and most famously in Minecraft, but I've never seen it done better than this. Samurai Bringer looks remarkable and, the more you look at the details of how they pulled it off, the cooler it is. I'm not sure I've ever seen any game do a sort of fake pixel border on all of the polygons, which I suppose is just the outline trick cel-shaded games use except with pixellation instead of a black line, but it looks very cool, and the artist has included a bunch of like PC-98-style dithering effects very tastefully. This game is an unassuming beauty that looks generic at first but becomes very pleasant with time and further inspection. The game also sounds very good, if noisy, with lots of satisfying sound effects and especially sound effects clashing loudly as you launch like 50 attacks at the same time, creating that wonderful cacophony only a gamer can love.
So, the game sounds and looks very good, but it also plays fantastically! The overall game is a progression-based roguelite where you make runs into a dungeon and try to survive, but with the ultimate goal being to never die and to continue looping the game so that you can keep your gear on further runs. At first, you gather scrolls to beef up your basic abilities, as found scrolls stay unlocked between lives, but once you've built up a collection of spells, the challenge switches to trying to stay alive by finding and improving gear, and beating the boss loop before time runs out. Oh yeah, you can also choose when to fight bosses and the game loops back to day 1 if you beat the final boss, while everything buffs up as time passes, making the game harder the longer you go without beating the boss. If you feel like you've gone for too long and the bosses are too hard for your build, you can save progress by paying some in-game gold in order to safely protect your found gear while you die and start over.
But the true core of the game is the customizable combat. This game allows you to build your own attack moves and combos, with a few interesting quirks and ideas. Not only can you decide if you want your attack combo to be horizontal slice, vertical slice and then a thrust (or whichever order you want, or you can do just one three-hit slice combo or you can build a very advanced 10-hit combo that incorporates all manner of sword swings and pirouettes and anime-style sword combat moves), but you can also manipulate the attacks in various ways, like how adding the "Power" stat makes you less susceptible to flinching (but raises damage taken), or how the "Enlarge" (I don't think that's what it's called but I forget the name) stat literally makes your sword comically large. You can even decide by how much! One point in "Enlarge" means slightly bigger sword, whereas eight points means Dark Souls boss. You can also bake jumps and steps into your attack pattern, and since jump and step are actual skills in this game, that also means that you can create a combo that's only ten level 8 jumps in a row, which does indeed mean 8 mid-air jumps, and you can also decide the length of your dodge roll by using the same logic. Step and Jump can also be combined with the attacks, so attaching a Step to your vertical slice will make you lunge forward and adding a jump will add maybe a little pirouette, depending on which attack and which other modifiers you have attached to that slot. The most interesting attribute is the one I have to admit that I never did figure out; the one called "Manipulate". I did copy a build from the internet that used "Manipulate" to change my secondary sub-weapons (as you can also carry more weapons on your back, and you can use the attribute "Sub-weapon" to make it so that your character switches weapons mid-combo) to projectiles so that I could swing my sword with one button and use another to shoot homing sword missiles that decimate the entire level, but I never did figure out how to build things with "Manipulate" by myself.
Oh, and yeah, another delightful aspect of this game is that it allows you to be a god of destruction. You start out weak, meekly fighting every opposing samurai one by one with your little dagger, but by the end, you will have so much power and flexibility that more or less any halfway decent build will destroy everything, and you've gotta love a game that begins as a struggle and ends as absolute, unstoppable triumph. The game begins as Dark Souls with you being afraid of even small squads, and ends as Dynasty Warriors with you jumping sword first into a hundred samurai and slaying them all with one strike as their pixelated bodies go flying in every direction. Actually, I should probably mention somewhere that this whole game is like a mini-Dynasty Warriors with roguelite elements and I like that a lot.
This game is a delight and while I don't know who the developers Alphawing are, I do know that this is an incredible second game (as their first game was apparently some tennis game I'm not interested in) and that the recently announced spiritual successor, Metal Bringer, is one of my most-anticipated games of next year. This game, and developer, is something special. Is Samurai Bringer perfect? No. It is perhaps a little too short at only about 10-12 hours, and I got stuck on a pretty irritating little mistake in that I spent most of the game not being able to figure out how to build combos, because I missed half the tutorial! About halfway through, the tutorial guy starts repeating dialogues that sound like he's stuck on repeating the exact same one, but it's just that they wrote one tutorial box for each element and used the exact same phrasing, so it only looks like it's the same textg again at a quick glance and all the juicy stuff in the tutorial come after that bit. My mistake for not reading, but using the exact same text and replacing "fire" with "lightning" to explain that element was also pretty lazy writing, and since the game is so short, this little mistake ended up having a massive impact on my enjoyment. But that was mostly my stupid mistake and a little oversight in the writing, and the rest of the game is absolutely fantastic. There is so little to complain about that I don't even know how to end this review. Oh yeah, the boss design maybe isn't ideal and I hate the skeleton one and really have no idea why the demon one is completely immune to ranged attacks, since that means gun characters straight-up can't beat the game.
If you like roguelites and techy, nerdy japanese games with a lot of depth, play this game immediately!
The first thing that strikes you about this game is the graphics. At first, it looks like a pretty generic "pixel art but in 3D" type artstyle, which we've seen many times before and most famously in Minecraft, but I've never seen it done better than this. Samurai Bringer looks remarkable and, the more you look at the details of how they pulled it off, the cooler it is. I'm not sure I've ever seen any game do a sort of fake pixel border on all of the polygons, which I suppose is just the outline trick cel-shaded games use except with pixellation instead of a black line, but it looks very cool, and the artist has included a bunch of like PC-98-style dithering effects very tastefully. This game is an unassuming beauty that looks generic at first but becomes very pleasant with time and further inspection. The game also sounds very good, if noisy, with lots of satisfying sound effects and especially sound effects clashing loudly as you launch like 50 attacks at the same time, creating that wonderful cacophony only a gamer can love.
So, the game sounds and looks very good, but it also plays fantastically! The overall game is a progression-based roguelite where you make runs into a dungeon and try to survive, but with the ultimate goal being to never die and to continue looping the game so that you can keep your gear on further runs. At first, you gather scrolls to beef up your basic abilities, as found scrolls stay unlocked between lives, but once you've built up a collection of spells, the challenge switches to trying to stay alive by finding and improving gear, and beating the boss loop before time runs out. Oh yeah, you can also choose when to fight bosses and the game loops back to day 1 if you beat the final boss, while everything buffs up as time passes, making the game harder the longer you go without beating the boss. If you feel like you've gone for too long and the bosses are too hard for your build, you can save progress by paying some in-game gold in order to safely protect your found gear while you die and start over.
But the true core of the game is the customizable combat. This game allows you to build your own attack moves and combos, with a few interesting quirks and ideas. Not only can you decide if you want your attack combo to be horizontal slice, vertical slice and then a thrust (or whichever order you want, or you can do just one three-hit slice combo or you can build a very advanced 10-hit combo that incorporates all manner of sword swings and pirouettes and anime-style sword combat moves), but you can also manipulate the attacks in various ways, like how adding the "Power" stat makes you less susceptible to flinching (but raises damage taken), or how the "Enlarge" (I don't think that's what it's called but I forget the name) stat literally makes your sword comically large. You can even decide by how much! One point in "Enlarge" means slightly bigger sword, whereas eight points means Dark Souls boss. You can also bake jumps and steps into your attack pattern, and since jump and step are actual skills in this game, that also means that you can create a combo that's only ten level 8 jumps in a row, which does indeed mean 8 mid-air jumps, and you can also decide the length of your dodge roll by using the same logic. Step and Jump can also be combined with the attacks, so attaching a Step to your vertical slice will make you lunge forward and adding a jump will add maybe a little pirouette, depending on which attack and which other modifiers you have attached to that slot. The most interesting attribute is the one I have to admit that I never did figure out; the one called "Manipulate". I did copy a build from the internet that used "Manipulate" to change my secondary sub-weapons (as you can also carry more weapons on your back, and you can use the attribute "Sub-weapon" to make it so that your character switches weapons mid-combo) to projectiles so that I could swing my sword with one button and use another to shoot homing sword missiles that decimate the entire level, but I never did figure out how to build things with "Manipulate" by myself.
Oh, and yeah, another delightful aspect of this game is that it allows you to be a god of destruction. You start out weak, meekly fighting every opposing samurai one by one with your little dagger, but by the end, you will have so much power and flexibility that more or less any halfway decent build will destroy everything, and you've gotta love a game that begins as a struggle and ends as absolute, unstoppable triumph. The game begins as Dark Souls with you being afraid of even small squads, and ends as Dynasty Warriors with you jumping sword first into a hundred samurai and slaying them all with one strike as their pixelated bodies go flying in every direction. Actually, I should probably mention somewhere that this whole game is like a mini-Dynasty Warriors with roguelite elements and I like that a lot.
This game is a delight and while I don't know who the developers Alphawing are, I do know that this is an incredible second game (as their first game was apparently some tennis game I'm not interested in) and that the recently announced spiritual successor, Metal Bringer, is one of my most-anticipated games of next year. This game, and developer, is something special. Is Samurai Bringer perfect? No. It is perhaps a little too short at only about 10-12 hours, and I got stuck on a pretty irritating little mistake in that I spent most of the game not being able to figure out how to build combos, because I missed half the tutorial! About halfway through, the tutorial guy starts repeating dialogues that sound like he's stuck on repeating the exact same one, but it's just that they wrote one tutorial box for each element and used the exact same phrasing, so it only looks like it's the same textg again at a quick glance and all the juicy stuff in the tutorial come after that bit. My mistake for not reading, but using the exact same text and replacing "fire" with "lightning" to explain that element was also pretty lazy writing, and since the game is so short, this little mistake ended up having a massive impact on my enjoyment. But that was mostly my stupid mistake and a little oversight in the writing, and the rest of the game is absolutely fantastic. There is so little to complain about that I don't even know how to end this review. Oh yeah, the boss design maybe isn't ideal and I hate the skeleton one and really have no idea why the demon one is completely immune to ranged attacks, since that means gun characters straight-up can't beat the game.
If you like roguelites and techy, nerdy japanese games with a lot of depth, play this game immediately!
Nothing feels good to do