Now that ive cleared the game on every difficulty and unlocked everything i feel like its time to review this game. Il start by simply saying that for the price, this game is well worth it - but i will probably never return to this game again, and the reason for this is that the devs have no idea how to handle difficulty.

I wont get into the sounds and looks of the game since frankly, you can judge them for yourself in the trailer above here. I personally found the look really neat, but the music boring and standard - you make up your own mind.

Let's start with the good stuff;

The combat during the first 3 difficulties feel smooth and fun, something akin to a faster-paced Hades where the attackspeed is counted in nano-seconds instead of attacks per second.

The ability to have 6 different "classes" or builds or whatever you wanna call them with 2 variations of each at the beginning feels great aswell (the first 3 difficulties)

The different items or "relics" or "elixirs" (depending on where in the game you read about them. Their translation isnt up to snuff yet.) have a really cool feature of doing different things depending on where you equip them - giving the same item different uses with different builds. They also vary between synergising with a specific build or with itself in some cases - so having 4 of the same item isnt always a bad thing.

The weapons, or "excaliburs" as the game calls them, are also pretty nice with cool random buffs and each weapon having a synergy with either one passive skill or item in the game, making it feel really neat when you just happen to find a weapon that synergises with your items or choice of passives.

The meh stuff;

The bosses.
The ones that dont just run up to you and hit you or put down the big "Dont stand in the fire" attack instead have these invulnerable states that pose no threat and merely adds to sinking you down. The last boss on the final difficulty is a nightmare due to him going invulnerable every 10 seconds and doing this "dangerous" super attack that you can literally always walk away from with no threat to you whatsoever, all it does is stop the game for 20 seconds and then allow you to keep hitting him - more on this particular bastard below.

The enemy variations.
The enemies are fairly few and where there is some difference you quickly realise they are just skins. and later in the difficulties all enemies are showing up in all different locations causing the variations to become even more repetetive.

The really really really BAD;

The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ difficulty.
Jesus H Christ the difficulty.
This game is NOT a hard game, its just a VERY taxing game. il try to explain - The difficulties dont really add more difficulty, all they do is beef up the enemies hp and armor.
The bosses gain no new mechanics, just ALOT more hp and armor, making you able to easily evade everything they throw at you but instead deal 1% damage every few seconds or so ending up taking time and not skill to beat.

The regular mobs gets the same treatment and in the last difficulty just clearing an area can be you permastunning every single mob on the map and doing thousands of damage per second to them with no threat to your life whatsoever - you will just feel the slog as you slooooooowly drain away their hp.

Then you will have the CC immune mobs that wont stay still when you hit them and jump around making it take even longer.

They also add some demon-fish tentacle that spawns every 30 seconds or so, on the 4th difficulty 1 pops up and the last difficulty 3 of them pops up at the same time - this once again IS NO THREAT. it merely forces you to run around for abit wasting even more time to an already EXTREMELY slow gameplay pace that wont threaten your run in the least.

And the final nail in the coffin and main-reason to why im so burned out on this game. The final, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, boss.

The only reason i stuck around long enough to kill him is that Roguelikes and roguelites is my cocain. I need to clear them to move on - and boy, i HATED the last couple of hours in this game due to the fact that i knew this guy was coming up.

The first 75% of his bar isnt a problem, he stands there and you swing at him, unmolested for about 10 minutes.
then he reaches his 25% mark and decides that enough is enough.
He then starts calling down aoe attacks on the ground, basically all the time - these in turn occasionally turn into poison pools that apply a debuff to you that deal more damage the longer you fight him.
Then every 10-15 seconds he turns invulnerable, teleports to the middle of the arena and teleports you in there with him, he then begins charging some doom-attack which you can easily walk out of and then he continues to rain down poison pools and rince repeat forever.

Doesnt sound so bad, the thing is - these pools NEVER go away. so pretty soon the entire arena will be filled with this extremely damaging aoe fields. and youre still doing 1% every few seconds with him going invulnerable for his attack every 10-15 seconds. Btw, this whole thing clocks in at about 10 seconds - so thats you not being able to hit him in a field of poison every 15 seconds for 10 seconds.

This boss is only a DPS check and this wouldnt have been a huge problem if it wasnt for the fact that the devs went haywire when it came to adding armor/hp buffs on the enemies. were not talking x10 or something, more like x50 (im not even kidding).

Killing this guy was not fun. I didnt feel "yeah, take that you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, now to try another build" - i felt "finally, now i can play something fun."

Ending this slog of a difficulty with a boss that essentially is only a dps test is the worst idea imo.

This coupled with certain items just not working against bosses makes you really have to plan your builds instead of making do with what you get - and that goes against what i like with Roguelites. All together with the difficulty only being artificial to certain builds just not working at all, to boring harmless meatwalls called bosses standing in your way to the only real threat which is the final boss (or possibly the tiger-lord in the room before him) just makes me soured on the whole game.

Im sure there are some people with more addiction than me that loves this aspect of hitting the same target for an extended period of time with no threat to themselves, but personally i prefer the difficulty of games like Hades that add things other than just massive HP to the enemies.

In Hades ive unlocked and done everything and I still come back to it just cos the gameplay loop is fun, its challenging and im still enjoying it.
This game? Ive gotten every unlock and cleared all the difficulties - I cba to get the secret ending, I just dont want to play it anymore.

I still recommend it for the price though, seriously good price.

This game is like Hades, but they replaced 90% of the story and character interactions with blazing fast sword gameplay and fun build options.

It's a very standard dungeon roguelike: kill all the enemies in a room, get an option to pick between two rooms with different rewards in them, repeat until you hit a boss or miniboss (both are guaranteed to have a shop before them). What sets it apart is the mechanical depth and the extreme speed and fluidity of gameplay. Cutting through swathes of enemies in each room is satisfying, fast, and visceral; the ability to swap your items between four "slots", changing their function, as well as a "distill" option that provides a stat bonus that you unlock early on, means that finding loot is always useful and it's hard to get screwed by RNG. Additionally, you get to pick a "style" at the beginning of each run; you start with one, but unlock more as you kill bosses and do other things (there's one you can buy in the hub shop, for example). These styles are very diverse, allowing you to specialize in a variety of elements, forgo your ability to shoot flying swords altogether, or even get a parry option that allows you to do devastating sword dashes if the parry lands.

As far as meta-progression goes, there's a lot. Three passive skill trees that you get with Red Souls (a currency you earn by killing bosses in runs), with one that culminates in letting you pick a Legendary-tier piece of gear to start with every run, another that gives you a Hades-style death defiance, and a third that massively boosts your attack. Unlocking more pieces of lore gives you small, but noticeable, passive boosts, and even after you've bought out the shop you can still spend your meta-currency on "sealing" items to ensure that you don't see them in your next run (you can seal up to 26 items at once, but unsealing them doesn't refund you the currency, so it's a later-game option). EDIT: when you spend the currency on sealing something you buy the ability to seal it, so you can eventually buy out everything and tweak your runs to exactly what you want, both for artifacts and armor. At the time of writing, I did not know that.

In terms of content, there's plenty. Each of the "combat styles" has two variants, and even though some are very similar (plenty that let you sacrifice your projectile attack for a boost in elemental damage) they're all distinct enough that doing a run on each will feel unique. There's a boatload of different relics (gear) and swords, so if you're going the completionist route, you'll have lots to look for. Beating the game on the normal difficulty unlocks progressively higher ones, as well as the Ash of Nightmare mode, which has its own meta-progression. Apparently, the developers recently added in an endless mode, but I haven't found it or how to get it. It's a good sign that they're still patching stuff in for free, though.

A word of warning, though; the voice acting is entirely in Chinese, and the text is very Google Translate-y. It's still readable, and it hasn't interfered with my ability to understand the game at all, but if you're coming into this game expecting to be able to engage deeply with the characters and lore, you may find it frustrating.

Overall, Warm Snow is an excellent roguelike for people who have already played through games like Hades, or just prefer a faster-paced version of the gameplay and don't mind giving up some of the story to do so.

For $18 USD, it's absolutely worth the price, and with a free demo on offer, there's no reason not to give it a try if you think you'll like it. If you like the demo, you'll like the full game.

Did you like Hades but thought it needed more sword-throwing? More throwing wine at zombies and setting it ablaze? A frankly preposterous amount of dashing? Then this is the game for you

Warm Snow is a fun take on action roguelike, as mentioned kind of Hades-esque but both more diverse and less diverse in builds somehow. Instead of different weapons at the start of a run, you choose a buddha (kind of like stances? Maybe?), which can significantly alter your playstyle. The "default" is you can slash your blade, throw flying swords into enemies (no aiming, they just find the nearest goon), and do a "sheath" (also called blade call in the translation randomly) to pull the flying blades back, doing extra damage and usually an effect. This combines to be very flashy but simple combat in modestly sized rooms and a bunch of semi-random elements.

The buddha stances range from "normal but you do ice damage" to "you can't throw swords but you can parry" or "your swords are now wine and don't do damage until ignited", there are a ton (oh, let's not forget the infinite-flying-swords that are sometimes lasers one), and there are relics to complement those and many other builds. These are where a ton of the randomness per run comes into play, as you have 4 relic slots and each relic has an effect depending what slot it's in. Also you can have multiple of the same relic.

The other big factor are skill tomes you find, which give you various passive bonuses, usually to damage or defense, but also each buddha has unique ones that crank up the builds.

There are also weapons (excaliburs?) which basically just function as stat sticks - they look quite different but don't change anything besides your damage, and whatever passive effects they give. Again some have unique effects if you have certain relics, or skills, or even a specific buddha, so they can be a big difference, but they feel less "required" than the right relics + skills to compliment your build.

You have to beat the game multiple times to unlock the higher difficulties, and find all the lore to get the "true" ending. There's a meta currency thing (actually multiple), a between-stage camp with bonuses, and there's even a free DLC which adds a new area and nightmare skills and an optional endless mode.

Overall, it lacks a little polish and refinement, but it's a ton of fun once you figure it out (taking a look at some of the guide helps if you struggle). A lot of the game is just trying to get so much offense you kill stuff before it can hit you, so it's debatable how "hard" it is, but you still have to react and play around some stuff, especially in boss fights.

think hades but with easier fights between the bosses, higher variety of builds and surprisingly a lot of replayability.

a bit scuffed around the edges especially with english translation and UI, but thankfully nothing that affects gameplay

I've only played one run so far, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Fundamentally it is a roguelike (roguelite) dungeon crawler along the lines of The Binding of Isaac or, more accurately to its clear inspiration, Hades. The gameplay feels very much like Hades, in a good way, and with plenty of tweaks to make it stand out as its own game. The combat is tight and responsive, enemies generally have good, clear telegraphs for attacks, and the upgrades are uniquely versatile.

To speak on the upgrade system, any of the upgrade items you pick up during a run can be applied to one of your four "inventory" slots. Depending on which slot you choose, that item will bestow a completely different effect. In one slot it might grant you an active skill which allows you to poison enemies, while in a different slot it will buff poison damage from other sources. This means that you must not only choose which items you want to bring with you, but also exactly which of their effects you want to apply. Even in only one run I have already seen the intricate web of decisions this can lead to.

As for art, the game looks wonderful. The enemies, characters, and environments are all beautiful (or hideous and horrifying, when they need to be) and I very much enjoyed just looking at the game. It's colorful and creative and all around fun.

The only real criticism I have so far is that not everything is fully translated. I don't expect English voice acting, but I would like to know what the big shopkeep lady is rambling about, just with some subtitles.

Do you like Hades? Are you bored of Hades and you're waiting on Hades 2? Well, this game has gameplay that's like Hades but it is still different enough to be its own game. I do recommend it and while the lore is nowhere near in-your-face as Hades - especially as the main character is the only one capable of realizing he died -> there is quite a bit of lore going around. Collecting the lore is the gateway to alternative endings and stuff too; there are some non-random specific things you can break -> which drops lore so that's a thing too.

Flying Swords are like casting; relics are like ability boons; skill books are like passive boons; Weapons are "Excaliburs" and there are only swords and one attack pattern for the most part; dashing is the same; and "sheathe" is a dedicated skill that varies. And you can fall down for a few seconds in some situations, usually getting hit, and like Monster Hunter fashion, you're invincible until you get up.
Also, there are "Sects" which is the closest thing to selecting a weapon in Hades. More on them later.
Fun fact: There are BUILDS you can make based on falling down. They're pretty good. lol


The biggest problem in this game is the inconsistent translations leading to silly things. For example, there's an achievement that tells you to "get both "Indomitable" and "Hurricane" skills at the same time" - but in-game, the names of the skills are "Immovable" and "Galestorm." You can still get the achievement just fine, but know that this extends to the wiki too. This leads to the next problem about this game: information about it is kinda scarce. The wiki has no info on the second DLC and suffers from the inconsistent translation mentioned.

On the topic of the DLCs, the first one is free and introduces new stuff to play through with new mechanics that adds depths while making you monstrously strong. The second DLC, the one you pay for, does the same but adds more. I do recommend them as they also alter the base game too.



So, what's good about the game? Well, it plays and handles well and has a decent amount of variety going for it. It's got nice music, a variety of enemies that you can learn to recognize and avoid all their attacks. It's got quite a lot of bosses and minibosses as well as harder difficulties that update boss patterns to make things more interesting - as well as make other things harder in other ways. It's not just number inflation against you.

Generally, you have your weapon and your flying swords behind you. "Excaliburs" can completely change up how the run is going to go. Along side them, you get Relics which are similar to boons in Hades but a major difference: you can swap them around as you please, including dropping them and refining them to boost your stats (mainly: max HP and damage). Then there are "Skills" which can serve as minor little buffs (like, +5% Damage) and go all the way to major game-changing skills - which is usually relevant to your sect.

Oh yeah, there are a whole bunch of "sects" represented by statues -> and you pick one before you get started. Each sect has two styles and some of these are fairly similar but some are completely different. The first sect you start out with is a basic one where you use both your weapon and flying swords without much in the ways of gimmicks. This might sound basic or weak but it is one of the most powerful sects because the lack of gimmicks means one thing: you get stronger by just doing bigger damage. The two weakest sects, in my opinion, are the thunder and ice sects (the fire sect is a bit stronger than them) because you don't start doing bigger damage but instead you do stuff which eventually results in big damage. The early game is a pain for almost all sects but for these two, even the mid-game is a pain for some sects, unless you get lucky.
The thunder sect is more powerful than the ice sect. One style in the thunder sect has end-game where you just dash all the time and killing everything which is crazy fun.

On a cooldown, you have the ability to "Sheathe." You can reduce the cooldown as your progress to a maximum of 90% reduction (so, most sects will have around 3 seconds total when you max that out). Sheathing is one of the biggest differences between sects as well as styles between the same sect.
For example: the sect with the biggest variation is perhaps my favorite: the Shadow-Walker sect. You lose your flying swords for both styles of this sect but when you sheathe, you summon a flickering shadow that helps you if you pass through it with your ability.
One style gives you the ability to parry attacks and upon a successful parry, you get some lovely invincibility times and enter "Sheathed" state - where your next attack will be a powerful dashing attack that deals major damage.
If you sheathe, you enter this state without needing to parry - and if you grab a specific skill -> doing this attack through the aforementioned flickering shadow -> puts you right back into "Sheathed" state. Grab yet another skill and this will also respawn the Flickering Shadow -> meaning you can do it infinitely. End-game here is just hilarious invincibility time while you dash around killing all enemies all the while you make sure you go through the flickering shadow. Dropped it? Sheathe again. Here we go again.
Meanwhile the other style does not have a Parry. Instead, you have a dash attack that deals large damage to enemies along the path and around the area you stop. You start with just 2 dashes that come back after some time and Sheathing gives you a "greater dash" (that isn't effected by the limit of 2) if you go through the flickering shadow -> and the end game is constantly using "greater dash" through the flickering shadow infinitely, killing all enemies. It is the easier of the two and more flexible, but no invincibility.

The closest thing to easy mode are the two sects: "Infinite Arhat" and the (paid) DLC's "Soul Blade Shura."
Infinite Arhat one has a style called "Sunburst" replaces your flying swords with just one that you charge and fire. With proper timing, you fire a "Sun Piercer" that travels far, pierces through enemies and deals a lot of damage. This allows you effectively kill all enemies before you see any of them. (note: I use controller so unless I'm manually aiming, my flying swords auto-aim at enemies). The sheathe is 5 seconds of guaranteed Sun Piercers, so you can mash to win and by mid-game, you'll have enough sheathe cooldown to have it permanently.
Soul Blade Shura has a style called "Myriad." To simplify it: you sheathe and then you hold down the button for flying swords as you dash through the area. Once you kill all enemies, wait for the cooldown and repeat. Once your sheathe cooldown is low enough, you'll be holding down the buttons for both sheathe and flying sword at the same time as you dash through the game. Forget timing or mashing, just hold them down and keep running.

What about an example for Excaliburs? Well, Sunburst has one called "Fallen Sun" that causes an explosion on a successful Sun Piercer. The explosion hits the enemy and the ones around it for 70% of the damage of Sun Piercer itself. If you hit 3 enemies, that's 3 explosions so each enemy gets hit four times.
Furthermore, If you have the highest quality (Mythic) Excalibur, then you get a bonus effect. Fallen Sun's bonus effect is to double the damage of the explosion and increase the size of the explosion by 50%. As I said, easy mode.
There are sect-specific Excaliburs -> and then there are generic ones. Some generic ones work with specific relics and others work with specific skills.

I didn't even touch on a lot of things, such as unlocks as you progress and the lore. Oh well. In conclusion, I do recommend this game and it's DLC. If you think what I typed up here sounded like fun, give it a go. Have fun.

I've invested a bit of time into the game, tried out all weapon variants and the different sects, as well completed all the difficulties. So at this point, I feel like I've got a decent enough understanding for a review. We'll do some Pros, and some Cons.

Pros -
• Gameplay feels very nice. Fast and nimble, very similar to Hades, which a lot of people have been comparing this game to. And I'll say, comparison isn't too far off. You can really feel some of that fast dodge into, hit them with your attacks, dodge out, that you feel in most Hades runs. Positive in my book.

• Meta progress. It's not terrible, not at all. Meta progress being the skill tree you work on after every run to improve yourself for future playthroughs. After beating a couple bosses, say getting up Crane boss, you probably have 4-6 upgrades available. And since most of the tree requires 1-3 investment, usually only 1, you can get through it pretty fast. Especially since difficulty doesn't really increase the amount of upgrade points you get.

• Builds are unique. Almost every run I've had, I've had a thought of "Can I get this to work if I find this?" and sure enough, it ended up working. Example, starting weapon melee sect. Took a new weapon which had synergy with tricolor crystal, so I could apply any element damage with swings. Tricolor made it so if I applied one element, it would boost the others. I then combined that with an item that made fire damage deal true damage, and another that any fire damage I dealt would also poison them. I ended up with a really nice rainbow build, seeing lots of colorful damage numbers.

• Higher difficulty rewarded. When playing at higher difficulties, the game actively tries to improve your chances of getting good runs. Specifically at Blizzard, the highest difficulty, where the game ensure you will only get Epic or Legendary items, or Legendary and Impossible swords. Both are the best rarity for their respective items. It helps you get a much better chance at completing these difficulties, although their are still issues of said difficulties.

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Cons -
• Enemy health scaling. It gets, real bad. At the final difficulty, Blizzard, enemies just get too tanky. To the point where to clear one level at the end of the game, can take you about 5 minutes depending on what enemies spawned. It's to the point where one risk reward skill, Damnation, is essentially required to kill things in a reasonable amount of time. If you don't get it in the first few levels, good luck, because you better hope you got some other good skills to make up. But even then, upwards of 4 minutes a stage.

• Terrible translations. It's bad. Like, real bad. Up until the most recent update of 1/31, all but two bosses had untranslated dialogue. Pig and Tiger were the only ones to receive a dialogue box that showed what they were saying. Crane had a box, but it was untranslated until this update, meanwhile Turtle is still out any box what so ever.

• Runoff text. Text will just go off the box, and you'll be unable to read what other things do. This is a common occurrence with mostly swords and skills, as the ui available for items is much bigger, but you'll still see text running off into the other area below it, melding together words.

• No player agency. Now, this is more so dependent on player, then game itself. But you don't really have many options to get the build you want. If you've played RoR2 or Skul, you know that you have some way to get a run you're looking for. RoR2 with Scrappers and Printers to fine tune items you want a lot of and ones you want none of. While Skul lets you do something as basic as rerolling the shop for a chance at getting an item you're looking for, or selling your own items for a boost in quick boost in gold. This game has nothing like that, meaning what you see is what you get, with the most you're getting is a single time reroll on every skillbook. You can go an entire run without finding that one skill I mentioned earlier to get your build to the point of working, or could just not find the one item you needed to boost your damage to what you were looking for.

That's about where I can list pros and cons. Overall, the game is good. If you can deal with a little jank, it's certainly worth a pickup. Some of the most fun I've had in a Rougelite in a while, and one that I would highly recommend for some good fun.

Once upon a Hades in China.

It's fun, it has potential, but damn it is unpolished, and i have a lot of criticism for it.

You can read up on other reviews for pros, I'll elaborate on criticisms here.

Here you build your characters using Relics, Sect Skills, and Excalibur(weapon). You can only equip max of 4 relics, but you can keep on piling Sect skills, and equip only 1 excalibur.

In most roguelike, you constantly build your hero till the endgame, every upgrade is additive and gives you the incentive to look for a certain build, not here. The problem with relics is, there are tons of variety, probably 15+, but they don't sync with each other, and here's the deal, everything you get is totally random. So essentially you get your 4 relics very soon but in the later stages, they keep on giving you relics as upgrades, which is totally useless.

So imagine in Hades, if you get Zeus boons, you know they'll have more Zeus boons later on so that you can build it up and hopefully land that ultimate Zeus boons, and that they limit it so that you have only 4-5 gods' boons appear in 1 playthrough. But here, imagine you get Zeus boons, but there's 15+ other gods' boons that appear that doesn't sync with Zeus, and that you might get Zeus once....and never again.

Imagine in Hades where you can buy different boons, but any boons you buy adds to the character, here the shops sell you 4 relics, but if you have equipped 4 of them, essentially all the shop items are useless, because you have to replace your existing relics.

Then you have your weapon. Some high tier weapons have bonuses if you have 2 specific relics, but the stupid thing is, those 2 relics may never appear in you entire playthrough, so you can't prepare for any build and rely purely on luck. The only thing that keeps on upgrading is Sect skills. I have tons more criticism but I'll probably write it on the discussion forum.

Also, some people say there's tons of playstyle variety...I tell you honestly..NO, there's only 2, close or range. There's no animation differences to all the weapon, no length no width differences. All the different builds amount to the starting area where you can choose whether you want your weapon to deal fire/ice/lightning/poison damage etc, or you can choose that your range is now more powerful. Don't expect anything like Hades or Devil Slayer:Raksasi where you have different weapons and they work differently.

It's still fun, and I want to support the developers, but it's so unpolished. If Hades is diamond, Warm Snow is still carbon.

I have played this game for 46.9 hours. Is is a problem? Yes. Have I been stuck on Snow Storm mode? Yep. Do I know Chinese? Barely. Did I bug out the game with my insane melee speed? I did. Do I love this game? Absolutely.