Style is nice. It's the only positive thing I can say. Seems like every other aspect came second to selling this visually.
Terrible combat: janky hitboxes and aiming, the same 3 types of enemies all over, in the same kind of repetitive auto-generated dungeons, and horrible build variety, if you can even call it that. All the weapons work the same, melee attacks, just different speed. And the game pre-selects one for you in each run; sometimes you can find another and switch it. Spells and cards don't make a difference in your build either, so after a few dungeons you're basically repeating the same run every time which is laughable for a roguelite. Unlocking "new weapons" doesn't actually do that, it just adds some modifiers to the weapons that you find, like poison or crits, which also makes no fucking difference. You just end up with a bigger pool of possibilities that all play the same.
With combat and exploration being as horrible as it is, you'd expect the cult sim and management to be engaging, but it's also terrible. Despite being a cult simulator, you'll be the one doing everything at first, not only because you lack the upgrades for your followers to do stuff, but also because the AI is so bugged, NPCs stop doing work or change activities out of nowhere. After cleaning shit for a few hours you'll unlock enough stuff for tasks to be automated, at which point there's nothing for you to do there anymore.
You can find blueprints for new stuff on your explorations, but they're all for the 'decoration' section that serves no purpose, not only that, but you'll have wished that the chest had something useful for your run instead, like health or an upgrade for something. The actual useful buildings you need to unlock by waiting and waiting until your followers produce enough faith to unlock another but it all becomes unnecessary halfway through when you're almost done with the dungeons but still haven't unlocked half the buildings. It's very stupid for a game so short to have stuff is walled behind waiting longer than it takes.
Almost all the decorations you set up have no effect on anything and can't be interacted with, nor is there any real incentive to build them. Rather, they take up valuable space for houses, buildings, shrines... so in the end it's not even fun to decorate the base knowing you're just gonna run to the same 5 spots where you'll collect stuff before heading out again.
Unlocking some areas is tied to RNG when exploring stuff, meaning maybe you have to revisit the mediocre dungeons in order to find new NPCs. But repeating stuff over and over is a key aspect of this game, and not in a good way. It desperately needs QoL improvements, it's a waste of time talking to your followers each day, you constantly need to make food yourself, moving multiple farming plots is the worst...
There's no weight in the relationships between your cultists, and no depth to them that would make you invested when talking to them, gifting them things... You can customize any cultist and give them any appearance, and they have no personality. The quests they give are few and bland: they'll keep asking you to make them eat poop (???), gather materials, build something... and other stuff you do already without quest incentives. But the rewards aren't really worth anything either. And then they die.
But it's not only a mix of roguelite slasher where the combat is horrible and city sim that's as lifeless and grindy as possible. It's also a bug-riddled mess, from small stuff to various ways of getting soft-locked:
You may kill a boss and have the bullet attacks not stop when its death animation plays, killing you and making you unable to progress. You may have unlocked the offering shrine before having the alter up to level 3, also blocking you from unlocking more buildings. You may find invisible enemies. You may have cultists giving you a quest and it failing automatically upon accepting it. You can have enemies sometimes knocked outside the map. Cultists will not eat when hungry or work when there's tasks to be done; some may even die of hunger. There's too many to list.
To an extent, that's okay, all games have bugs. If you click on the roadmap you'll get is a popup saying: "free updates will be coming soon". That's the extent, which is not really a roadmap though. So in short they had the pre-purchase / day 1 dlc more thought-out than actual updates and fixes to a game that has released as broken as it has.
In short, it's a mix of different types of games, none of them done well. It's like playing animal crossing, and hades, and binding of isaac, and frostpunk... if they all sucked really hard. Plus, it's broken.
Terrible combat: janky hitboxes and aiming, the same 3 types of enemies all over, in the same kind of repetitive auto-generated dungeons, and horrible build variety, if you can even call it that. All the weapons work the same, melee attacks, just different speed. And the game pre-selects one for you in each run; sometimes you can find another and switch it. Spells and cards don't make a difference in your build either, so after a few dungeons you're basically repeating the same run every time which is laughable for a roguelite. Unlocking "new weapons" doesn't actually do that, it just adds some modifiers to the weapons that you find, like poison or crits, which also makes no fucking difference. You just end up with a bigger pool of possibilities that all play the same.
With combat and exploration being as horrible as it is, you'd expect the cult sim and management to be engaging, but it's also terrible. Despite being a cult simulator, you'll be the one doing everything at first, not only because you lack the upgrades for your followers to do stuff, but also because the AI is so bugged, NPCs stop doing work or change activities out of nowhere. After cleaning shit for a few hours you'll unlock enough stuff for tasks to be automated, at which point there's nothing for you to do there anymore.
You can find blueprints for new stuff on your explorations, but they're all for the 'decoration' section that serves no purpose, not only that, but you'll have wished that the chest had something useful for your run instead, like health or an upgrade for something. The actual useful buildings you need to unlock by waiting and waiting until your followers produce enough faith to unlock another but it all becomes unnecessary halfway through when you're almost done with the dungeons but still haven't unlocked half the buildings. It's very stupid for a game so short to have stuff is walled behind waiting longer than it takes.
Almost all the decorations you set up have no effect on anything and can't be interacted with, nor is there any real incentive to build them. Rather, they take up valuable space for houses, buildings, shrines... so in the end it's not even fun to decorate the base knowing you're just gonna run to the same 5 spots where you'll collect stuff before heading out again.
Unlocking some areas is tied to RNG when exploring stuff, meaning maybe you have to revisit the mediocre dungeons in order to find new NPCs. But repeating stuff over and over is a key aspect of this game, and not in a good way. It desperately needs QoL improvements, it's a waste of time talking to your followers each day, you constantly need to make food yourself, moving multiple farming plots is the worst...
There's no weight in the relationships between your cultists, and no depth to them that would make you invested when talking to them, gifting them things... You can customize any cultist and give them any appearance, and they have no personality. The quests they give are few and bland: they'll keep asking you to make them eat poop (???), gather materials, build something... and other stuff you do already without quest incentives. But the rewards aren't really worth anything either. And then they die.
But it's not only a mix of roguelite slasher where the combat is horrible and city sim that's as lifeless and grindy as possible. It's also a bug-riddled mess, from small stuff to various ways of getting soft-locked:
You may kill a boss and have the bullet attacks not stop when its death animation plays, killing you and making you unable to progress. You may have unlocked the offering shrine before having the alter up to level 3, also blocking you from unlocking more buildings. You may find invisible enemies. You may have cultists giving you a quest and it failing automatically upon accepting it. You can have enemies sometimes knocked outside the map. Cultists will not eat when hungry or work when there's tasks to be done; some may even die of hunger. There's too many to list.
To an extent, that's okay, all games have bugs. If you click on the roadmap you'll get is a popup saying: "free updates will be coming soon". That's the extent, which is not really a roadmap though. So in short they had the pre-purchase / day 1 dlc more thought-out than actual updates and fixes to a game that has released as broken as it has.
In short, it's a mix of different types of games, none of them done well. It's like playing animal crossing, and hades, and binding of isaac, and frostpunk... if they all sucked really hard. Plus, it's broken.