My left nut thinks this is a very clumsy game. I tend to disregard that nut but I can see the merit in what it said. The cast features Hat Kid, and I think it needs to be said first and foremost, surely this is for a much needed trivalization of token white people and not using women to sell your game to gamers! Grossly exagerated, I find the inclusion very funny, and I bought the game solely to judge it and, if the stars align just right, enjoy it! There's been something of an obstacle in that regard, however.

If the catchy music, warm artstyle and straightforward mechanics try to clue us in, it doesn't take long to realize we've been played like fools. Beating up mobs is enjoyable, there's talks of bloated HP and whatnot but I allow some padding in indie games. These bosses? They're not padding, they're far beyond saving! The one with a fugly design is the first one, so it's already a barrier of entry because his ugly self is gonna show up first chance he gets. But be decisive dammit. Shield and bloated HP? You want to eat ur cake and eat my cake too, huh? Just the shield and changing phases once it runs out would be better. The surprise second boss fight in world 3 wasn't bad enough until I was completely stuck and lost a whole 200 HP in 2 seconds with no way of doing anything. This my post-work workout?

The comics used to tell the backstories of the characters are refreshing. The visual art part is, as briefly touched upon before, great! Animations and allat. The literary art is definitely there, somewhere in what I assume is a janky translation. The interactive part is... not there, and it's the most important art of a game as a piece of art. Satisfying aerial control can't be the core of the game. My co-op partner would tend to agree, since revival is limited and she becomes a spectator to my aerial prowess. I'd rather she just play with me because I start feeling lonely in these small samey hallways full of enemies overtime.

it kills me to not recommend this, i like beatemups like castle crashers, i like the art style, but there's just so much of the game that just kills it for me. i played with 2 friends and we were optimistic, but eventually it just got miserable. i think the real crux of the game is that the roguelike elements do not mesh well with the beatemup gameplay at all, making the game just feel very grindy, which you do not want out of a beatemup. i refunded the game, so bare with me as i only played an hour and 17 minutes before making the decision refund. it was a hard decision too, cause i do want to like the game
so let me guide you through my experience. you choose a character, you fight enemies that feel like they either have more hp than they should or you aren't doing as much damage as you could. you go screen to screen facing more of them as you go. you get a little variety in the enemies, fine for early game, but few enough that seeing them gets old quick. eventually they throw so many of the same enemies at you that the screen is just flooded with the enemies and you can't see what's going on. not so bad, but since you havent done much yet, you're stuck with mashing the x button to do your basic combo, with a slam-the-enemy-into-the-air button to spice things up. its not much. eventually so much stuff is going to clutter the screen that you'll take a hit from something you never could have seen or avoided and realize "hey that one attack took out 20% of my hp wtf" but whatever, you keep making your way through the game. sometimes you'll get an orb that serves as a minor upgrade, but its not much. for example, one is a better air dodge that makes you go further. sometimes rooms won't have enemies, but rather NPCs. maybe you'll unlock a cutscene, or use a shop or something. or maybe you'll find the llama and have to spend your in-game currency to do a special challenge, but the challenge is something dumb like push enemies into a grinder to damage them, which doesnt sound bad, but the hitbox on the grinder is so much smaller than you'd expect. it looks like you can push the enemy anywhere in the middle, but no, the hitbox is finicky and it just wasnt worth the effort, especially since you have to waste coins to even attempt it. i didnt bother with that a second time tbh, i know my limits. even with friends helping, it was too much of a pain. so after all that, you finally get to the boss. its a rather simple boss, avoid telegraphed attacks and attack any chance you get, but what makes it such a pain is its shields. see, it has quite a lot of shields. once you break the shields, the boss is knocked down for about 3-5 seconds or so before recovering with all of its shields. now then, the boss has quite a lot of health, about 2500 hp, iirc. with i think 1800 shields. i dont remember if these are exact numbers, but it was roughly in that area i believe. now, here's the problem, you do virtually nothing to the boss. each character has different damage numbers, but its not a high number either way. as hatkid, i was doing about 7-12 damage per attack i think, and my friends weren't doing much better. we spend a couple minutes on the boss then die, as the boss still has 3/4 of its hp left
back to camp, we notice a lot of the NPCs we encountered are now resting there, but we can't really buy anything yet, so its back to the grind. we do the same thing all over again but this time we die just before the boss. we get back to camp, we buy some stuff, now we have a couple more attacks. whoopee. back to the grind of seeing the same enemies in the same forest to get to the same boss. it's here that we really feel the trial and error. so we get back to the boss and do a little more damage to him before we die, so instead of 3/4. he had 2/3 of his hp left... progress i guess. it got pretty unbearable though since one of us died early on in the fight, and then i died a bit later, so i was just watching my last friend just solo this boss for like 2 minutes straight, doing virtually nothing to him, since i think damage numbers might scale in co op. back to the grind again.
we buy more stuff, and get back into it, but by now we're drained. we almost make it to the boss, we die, i alt-f4 and refund the game.

i don't really have anything good to say about this game, unfortunately. i find that it feels very lazy overall, there's very few attacks/combos in general, and that's not the biggest deal in the world but when the level design is as barebones as it is (it's just a huge rectangle with no obstacles or interactables whatsoever) I feel like you should probably have a bigger focus on the combat and making it more exciting or interesting. it also seems pretty poorly designed for multiplayer. only one person gets each orb so you have to decide who gets the best ones awkwardly. you also can't revive teammates in any way without finding a dedicated room or beating a boss, but the problem is that rooms/bosses scale to players so if like in our case your two friends die in a boss you do borderline no damage and kinda just have to die or sit there for way too long watching one person slowly chip away. the way orbs work after death is also frustrating, I think making the transform/equip option be a hold down for 2 seconds option so there's a sense of risk + you don't accidentally break a friends orbs would go a long way. ideally though reviving would be a traditional beat em up style where you can just mash a button on a friends knocked out body and they get a small bit of health or something, because otherwise it's a lot of just watching someone play if you die and it's frustrating. the biggest positive i have is the art, the game looks pretty good! hat kid is a funny cameo although comes off a bit weird and out of place especially in story moments but i think it's silly enough for me to not care.

i don't know, i feel kinda bad being so negative about it but i also just don't really like/appreciate a lot of decisions made and i didn't even mention some pretty frustrating bugs we experienced as well. i wish i liked this more than i do overall, and I'll admit I'm also not the biggest beat em up fan in the universe so maybe if you're a huge beat em up fan you'll find some enjoyment me here but even as a casual fan of the genre this is very far on the lower end for me.

NOTE: This review may not have my same views on the game after the final build is complete and launched to the public. This initial review is just my thoughts on the Steam Game Festival demo.

DEMO THOUGHTS (23rd March 2020):

I enjoyed it, thought it was great so far. The hand-drawn art style is beautiful, you get a good variety of playstyles despite only 4 characters, and the combat plays pretty good once you get the moves memorized after a long while. The boss fight was tough and satisfying enough of a challenge.

So far, I'm really liking it, and I'm ready to see what else gets added as the game reaches closer to its finished state.