One of those roguelikes that would've been better if it wasn't a roguelike. All its faults could be forgiven if you had the sense of making real progess each session but instead its a slow and pretty easy experience until it gets a bit hard then 2 hours is wasted.

Commits a lot of the sins of the genre in that it starts out as pretty barebones and you have to repeat multiple times to unlock more interesting items. It doesnt hold up for multiple runs though and each time you play the slowness and clunkiness gets more annoying.

The moments I enjoyed just reinforced to me that this would have made for a pretty great 4-5 hour linear game instead of being a 3 hour game stretched out by half arsed roguelike ideas

Batshit nutty
Rolling little dudes, army dudes with guns, ninja dudes sprinting in from offscreen, so many birds and bats, witches throwing sticks, zombies, everything you'd expect from a ninja game.

Moving and attacking feels real good when youre not sticking to walls and dudes arent respawning as soon as they die. Its very easy to get knocked off a platform and die to enemies you dont have time to respond to so you often just need to know whats coming ahead of time.

Its kind of a relief getting to the bosses because theyre generally easier than anything you'll face in the levels. The two bosses before the final one are pretty insane though and I don't know how you'd get through them legitimately. You definitely feel some of those dark soulsy relief/triumph feelings when you beat levels and the cutscenes were a strong motivation to keep going, theres some really cool art in them.

I don't know why i wanted to play this but its not too long and I'm glad i finished it (using savestates ofc) even if i can't really imagine the kind of person I'd recommend this to

Janky cool. Really just liked everything about it except for the balance.

It uses a very annoying level scaling system which reduces damage you deal and increases damage you take based on the difference between your level and enemy levels. Its very lame since it makes your choice of abilities to invest in pretty meaningless since level is the only thing that matters, I had capped out health upgrades pretty early on but enemies still just deck you in a few hits if theres around 10 or so levels difference between you. You end up investing in levels to make enemies weaker not to make yourself stronger.

You cant really grind for levels either since experience is mostly gained from bosses or citizens you decide to drain to gain experience. The citizen draining idea is cool and it fits with the theme of the protagonist having to resist his urges for blood and power but theres a few points where youre gatekept into draining a citizen just to not instantly die and deal piss weak damage against a boss.

I did play on hard so Im not sure if that changes the scaling system but I think that was just a bad idea in general. I still recommend the game tho just its probably better to play it on normal.

Goofy fun, occasionally very bullshit but mostly enjoyable.

The larger outdoor maps are usually the better ones giving you a fair bit of freedom in how to approach them. The indoor maps against humans are mostly fine but cramped in with the mutants is never fun, especially the spongey ass rocket ones.

Sprinting is hilariously useless a lot of the time since its barely any faster than normal speed and doesnt last anywhere near long enough to help.

Theres also no quicksaving which gets really annoying with how spaced out the checkpoints are. Until you learn about the command to manually save (press ` to open console then type in \save_game 1) youre gonna spend a lot of time doing the same thing over and over when you suddenly die to an enemy you missed.

It did scratch a bit of that Half Life 1, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Halo 1/2 itch and I would recommend it if youve played those and are looking for more of that feeling. Its definitely not less than 3 stars