I can't get into it.

The game's world is beautiful and dripping with style, the atmosphere is cool, the lore is doing some fancy ideas and the plot doesn't seem all that bad, but the game itself is just... bland.

The combat is so unbelievably bland it ceases to be believed, so shallow and easy that I put 0 points into might and still clubbed enemies to death with a sword because it was still MUCH more effective than spells, the enemy variety (in terms of gameplay) is practically non-existent, and the character building has nothing to chew on.

There's just this... lack of sauce to the game. It's all kind of there, looking pretty, but there's no bite to any of it. It's all so surface level, toothless. Maybe I get bored too easily, but I sadly can't find the motivation to turn the game back on.

This is really a game that just constantly has you improving every few minutes so the urge to keep playing becomes dangerously high. There's no down times or pace-breaking story, it's just pure arcadey fun but with a huge progression chain, so unlike large amounts of arcade games you still feel like you're aiming for something beyond a high score.

It's actually quite impressive how much content there is (of course I am playing a few years into the games life). It looks very empty at first, only 4 characters? Then you unlock a new one and it brings up many more. Then you unlock a secret character and it shows all the other secret characters. You're constantly unlocking new weapons and stages, the former of which is always fun to try and experiment with and see what evolves with what. While most of the stages are fairly plain, there's some fun gimmicky ones, like the newly added minecart stage, a stage based on Green Hill Zone with blocks similar to the special stages in that game which break after a certain amount of hits etc.

There's a lot of player-selected difficulty and challenges to be made by turnign on and off certain settings - no matter how much you upgrade, there's always an option to turn it all off to play as if starting a brand new game. But at the same time you can break the game in half by working out how to effectively farm golden eggs to create a character so powerful nothing can even touch you.

I found out this was supposedly made by someone using gambling psychology, except of course without the whole debt part. I'd love to see more vices be made into things that don't have their downsides, how about video games without the extreme time loss? 🤭

I guess as far as issues go, there's not many bosses that really do anything. Most of them just float around like any other enemy and try to overlap with your sprite to take you out. Towards the endgame there's definitely a sense that progression has slowed down - you're just playing to play now. While there's still stuff to unlock, you've already discovered the perfect item combos and can make a build to get you through pretty much anything, so a new item is at best worth a try or two, but lacks that excitement you get early on.

Very fun and massive amount of content for its price. Also a pretty good soundtrack.