One of the biggest surprises of the year for me. The weirdo RTS meets auto battler gameplay is so fun, and I had an absolute blast constantly tweaking unit compositions and orders and equipment loadouts. The game has absolutely fantastic visuals and music. The battle maps just being sections of the regular map is so neat and really endears the world to you. A lot of the writing for the character relationships is fun. The overatching story is basically nonexistent, but that kind of works as it allows the game to focus on smaller stories in each region. Or is just entirely ignorable if you want that.

I should have reviewed this earlier, as I know I had some minor grievances but at the moment I can't think of many. I did find that the game does a bad job of having satisfying story choices. There's one character in particular who commits awful acts and is sent away unpunished in an incredibly unsatisfying end to their story. I wish there had been some more QoL options when building units. It's got a really dumb name.

I didn't end up finishing it, but I felt I had pretty much experienced every major system the game had to offer. Given that the main story didn't feel compelling, I don't mind leaving it unfinished. I may pick it back up later, I may not.

I got in and out after two runs, so take this less as a well developed review and more as my first impressions.

Firstly, I think the parkour stuff is the most interesting and well implemented aspect of the game (as of the initial Early Access release build). Longer sections without enemies got me into a groove, and I'd love a platformer with this movement in mind. It's not perfect, I had some issues kinda magneting to things I didn't want to magnet to, although it's a pretty minor gripe about what is otherwise a quite fun element. But beyond that, it's a pretty mixed bag.

The obvious point of comparison is Dead Cells. It's a little unclear to me what the percentage of people who worked on the core combat of Dead Cells at Motion Twin ended up on the Evil Empire team working on The Rogue Prince of Persia. I bring that up because Dead Cells has this really fluid combat and combat-related movement that Rogue Prince of Persia just entirely lacks. The parkour flow state ends entirely once you run into an enemy. The combat-defining roll in Dead Cells is replaced with this weird dash/vault combo that looks and feels awkward and works horribly whenever you fight more than one enemy at once.

The boss fight I reached felt pretty one dimensional, I wish there had been more movement objects and a need to use them. It was mostly just a big health sponge. I don't remember bosses in Dead Cells being terribly fun either, so I guess I'm not surprised. Coming off of Hades 2's early access, it feels like a major weak point, though Hades 2 seems to be much much farther along in development so I don't want to hold that against RPoP too much.

The roguelike elements also feel pretty underbaked at the moment. On my second run, I unlocked two things. The first was four slots that I could put badges into as I found them. These seemed interesting enough, though most of what I found seemed very focused on regular stage gameplay and not much on boss fights, which makes me think boss fights are gonna feel a little vanilla. But it's Early Access, and I didn't see an exhaustive list of the badges. The other thing it introduced was Spirit Glimmers, a meta currency to upgrade things. In Dead Cells, you didn't keep the Cells you had on your person on death and only got to make use of the Cells you spent on upgrades during the run. I hated this, as it felt needlessly punishing (especially given that Dead Cells had SOOOO many things to spend Cells on). Spirit Glimmers appear to work the same way. Which immediately made me roll my eyes, exit the game, and request a refund. It's a super feel bad mechanic to players early on.

Some miscellaneous thoughts to wrap up. Weapon variety seemed pretty limited, I kept being offered a pretty small selection of weapons. I don't know how much of that was a lack of content due to the game being in EA or simply the game slowly rolling out its weapon selection. Either way, it felt kinda disappointing. I kinda go back and forth on the graphics, sometimes I like them and sometimes they look a bit wonky. The skin tone choices is a bit odd to me, I don't understand the reasoning. Maybe it was from a concern that some players wouldn't want to play as a dark skinned protagonist? Maybe they wanted to inject more color into the world? I don't know. Finally, the music reminds me of something I'd hear during a break in a Counter Strike tournament or something. It's not great.

It's Early Access, plenty can change, but I'm not sure I'd be interested in checking this out again until a 1.0 release and seeing what gripes of mine have been addressed.

Helldivers 2 takes a core concept (killing hordes of bugs or robots) that could be very easily feel incredibly dull and nails all the component elements such that it feels fantastic. The way you move and dive out of the way of incoming missiles, frantically inputting the command to call in reinforcements, the delight of watching a giant space laser just obliterate an outpost before your eyes.

And the best compliment I can give is that I actually enjoyed the little things you need to do when you reach an objective. It's never just hit a button and wait. It's input this code, then find these missiles, load them, and input another code. Your reward? You have missile strikes you can call in that have effects based on the shells you loaded in. Each objective feels good to accomplish, not just something to check off a list.

Unfortunately, I think the core gameplay gets hampered by the live service-ness of the game. Lots of grinding for new weapons and armor, teammates can easily grief you (sometimes accidentally, sometimes not), and technical issues that led to crashes, long queue times, and as many bugs as you might kill in a Terminid mission.

Enjoyed my time with the game, but the pain points are gonna stick with me longer than the highlights, so I don't see myself coming back soon.