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.