So I've played for about an hour so far and I really want to like this game but I feel that it falls short in a few ways that impacts my enjoyment of the game. I am giving this a positive review because I'm sure there's a decent handful of people out there that will enjoy this in it's current state, and I also feel like this could eventually be a really good rogue-lite. But right now the main issue I have is I just really don't enjoy the combat all that much.

Overall the game is pretty solid. The combat is definitely quite challenging, albeit a bit slow, especially when you're up against multiple enemies. I don't mind the art style either. The game feels a little old school which I think was the intention.

I do however have a couple small complaints. First thing, menu navigation with controller is a little slow because you have to use a slow moving cursor to select your options, so I end up just using my mouse when I'm visiting the shop, changing settings, etc. But I do think the game overall plays better with controller personally. The 2nd thing that comes to mind that really, really drives me nuts, and really I hate when games do it, is the slow-mo effect when you finish combat or defeat a group of enemies and exit combat, please remove it. I feel like it just unnecessarily slows down pacing of the game play. One last gripe for the moment: I wish that it was possible to get enemies to fall into certain traps. Whenever I try to lure an enemy onto a trap door they get close enough to make the door fall then they take a hard turn and refuse to fall in, might just be a path-finding thing, but it would definitely be fun to get them to fall into the pits, or back into spikes etc.

Overall though, fairly solid game with a cool body snatching mechanic. It is only early access so there's a lot of room for improvement, but I do somewhat enjoy what I've played so far and this could definitely be a gem, but right now it's quite the rough gem. I hope to see the dev's take our feedback to make the game even better than it already is.

All in all, I am considering refunding this game for the sole fact that I don't feel like it's something I'd personally enjoy enough to continue going back to and putting countless hours into. I really want to like this game, I really do. But the way the game play feels just makes it difficult for me to enjoy. Some might like it, some might not, perhaps the game just isn't for me despite my undying love for rogue-lites/likes and dungeon crawlers. Maybe in the future I will return to the game and give it another go, but for now I think I'll put my copy to rest.

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An action RPG dungeon crawler with souls-like gameplay and taking place in a dark purgatory world full of undead and spirits.

After falling for a trap in one of the dungeons, we find ourselves in this parallel dimension, where we need to fight our way from one dungeon floor to the next. Our naked spirit alone is quite vulnerable and limited on abilities, but we have something to mitigate that - we have an ability to usurp bodies of the enemies and to take control of them. Once we've brought an enemy's health down and if we have enough mana, we possess their body and it becomes our own. Each time we possess a new enemy, it gets unlocked at the vendor, so we can start in that body already if we have enough gold to afford it.

This possession ability allows us to make tactical choices prior to facing the dungeon and the bosses. It also potentially provides us with free health bars, because if we run low on health, we can possess another enemy and have a new health bar, so long as we have enough mana that is. This is a pretty fun mechanic that adds an interesting twist on the standard souls-like formula.

Since it was inspired by Dark Souls and similar games, its combat feels very much like those games. Heavy strikes that need to be timed properly, dodging, blocking, waiting for the right moment to strike, easy to get ganged up on and cornered, environmental kills, and so on. The main difference really is in the view angle, as here it's a bit more of an elevated angle, looking down, rather than directly behind the player.

The gameplay is mainly a dungeon crawler akin to roguelikes. We need to take down the boss of the dungeon in order to proceed to the next floor. If we die, we return back to the hub world and will have to do the whole dungeon run again. Depending on how many enemies we killed in the previous run, we'll have some amount of gold that we can spend at the vendor to buy gear before tackling the dungeon again. However, any unspent gold is lost. This gameplay formula can feel somewhat repetitive at times as we go through the same motions really each time we retry and there's not much else to do in dungeons other than fighting and opening an occasional treasure chest.

When we discover and interact with shrines guarded by miniboss enemies, we get a new skill point. These can be used to level up our basic stats.

The game currently in its early access state has a good battle system that feels satisfying and a clear direction, so I think now it mainly needs to refine some aspects of the gameplay so that it feels less repetitive, and also to add more variety in a form of enemies, weapons, things to do in dungeons, and environments. Those who enjoy souls-like games, should feel right at home here. Aside from that, a few updates to the UI could be useful as well, especially when the player is navigating through the menus with a controller.

For a more in-depth review, check here: https://saveorquit.com/2021/11/26/preview-usurper-soulbound/

After playing for around 5 hours (multiple playthroughs) I've gathered some thoughts.
It's an okayish game right now. It needs more content and a good amount of polish but I've encountered no bugs that made it impossible to play. Also I'm giving a positive review because I like the concept and I hope, that there is more to come (more enemies, different locations, and I am especially looking at you Roguelike-mode!)

I hope to come back to this game and find a solid and polished game but for now, here are some things that I would change or improve a little bit and some bugs I've encountered.

• make health globes despawn slower. those few seconds are a joke if you are in combat because you are kinda slow and may not be able to grab them because of other enemies.
  
• make the map a little bit brighter and add more descriptions as there are weird red dots all over the map and I have absolutely no idea what they are all about.
  
• better controller-support while in a menu
  
• Tutorial misses some things like kicking or what the "Skill Orbs" in the top right mean.
  
• I would rework the weapons a little bit. I like that you equip the weapons of the enemies you usurp but this also adds some problems. Right now there is not really a reason to buy weapons in the shop because you will lose them when usurping and you need to usurp because of 2 things: it's the only real way to heal and your weapons break after like 2 enemies which means you're mostly using the dagger to fill up your energy to either heal, get a weapon or be prepared for a boss. I would experiment with things like 3 weapons: Main Weapon of the enemy you usurp, secondary weapon which you can buy in the shop or find (gets transfered when changing bodies), and Dagger. And increase the durability a little^^
  
• Combat is okay but some enemies attacked a little bit weird or got kicked, fell down and instantly attacked me again
  
• Slowmotion is not needed in my opinion. It makes the game way slower than it needs to be.
  
• Usurping or getting kicked out of a body can be realy bad sometimes as enemies still move and can (if they are timing it right) hit you in the face 0.01 secs after becoming vulnerable again as you can't move. This makes you feel like you're getting punished for usurping. I'd remove enemy movement in these phases and just make them freeze completely.
  
• Usurping can be very frustrating when the quicktime-event is super fast and the "usurp-area" is far to the right. Maybe a circular system would be a little bit less frustrating (it goes round and round but for every miss you lose usurp-energy)

• missing healthbars for enemies (mostly mini-bosses)
  
• was able to level up to 150 as I could collect all 4 Skill-orbs in the dungeon when there should have only been 2 left and by putting all my gold into the bank, removing 50 gold, adding 50 gold (get a skillpoint), remove, add and repeat.
  
• rooms that were on the map but were unable to access
  
• I saw chests under the floor or way out of the map

VIDEO REVIEW: https://youtu.be/pltGf6Fyvso

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TL'DW:

I love the mechanics,ideas and Roguelite Loop that Usurper has going for it, however the combat is so clunky and slow at the moment that it heavily detracts from these ideas and mechanics instead of adding or elevating them.
I firmly believe that the Devs will look into the feedback and fix/change things, so I'll update this review when more updates/content comes out. This game has A LOT of potential, but right now I sadly can't recommend Usurper.

An interesting isometric RPG with roguelike elements in which you, like Vettel from the FEAR series, play as a spirit that can take over your enemies! Reliable top-down adventure, clearly inspired by the "genre like Souls".Unique "USURPING" ability to Possess enemies and gain new abilities.Mix of hand crafted and randomly generated environments.

If soulsbornes and roguelikes had a baby.
Yes, soulsbornes already have a lot of roguelike elements, but this one takes it up a notch: you can't grind. You keep the gold you earn after death, to re-equip yourself for the new run, but everything you don't spend gets lost.
The only way to get more powerful, is to defeat mini-bosses that guard special orbs, that give you a skillpoint. Aside that, you can ursurp better bodies, but in order to do that - you still have fight and win.

You'll almost never fight a single enemy, and sometimes you'll be facing 5-6 at the same time, depending on how unlucky your run is. Given that there's no real meta progression - player skill is your total ceiling. Sometimes you'll miss a single parry and that'll send you to the spiral of death.
If you can live with this - moment to moment combat is fun and engaging, and weapons are different enough between each other to matter, however there aren't many of them at least in the first dungeon level. Then again, its an EA game.

One of my favorite things - runs (at least mine) usually take very short, 5-10 minutes max, and sometimes just 2 minutes :-D This means, you can jump in, play a bit, then just leave.

All in all - worth the money!

Ugly art that gives me a headache when trying to look at anything besides my character, and all enemies have tracking attacks so you literally cannot dodge because they'll do a full 360 spin during their attack animation and hit you anyways.

The game is great in it's current state but it basically has zero replayability (once you finished the content) and roughly 3-4 hours worth of content, so keep that in mind when purchasing the game. The roadmap doesn't look too promising either as it states that only one more dungeon floor is being added but the design of the game makes it seem that there would be at least two more completely different dungeons are planned and also there's a huge door that cannot access right now.

Anyway I mainly bought it to play with my buddy on couch-coop buddy and we had fun, tho only 3 hours that is then there was nothing more to explore. The idea is great, it's basically top-down mortal shell but not that extremely hard so it's comfortable to play too. The rogue-like let's you start a new run and you can play as any enemy that you have previously "overtaken" as long as you have the gold coins for it. But you can change the equipment you want to take with you too so you can create a mix of character builds if you want to. There are a few bugs in the game like one time enemies attacked us through the walls, another time my character glitched out completely, couldn't be killed and I couldn't move so we had to return to the main screen.

But overall I'd say it's a fun couple of hours.

What seemed really weird to me, I bought the EA version and after finishing the game it said something along the lines "This is as far as the demo can take you." signaling as if you'd just play a demo version of the game. I think there was a demo version of it so maybe it's a bug in the current version of the game.

Game review - Usuper: SoulBound

I played Usuper: SoulBound and initially I really liked the dungeon proposals and the way the game developed, I started playing alone, but soon after I realized that it would be more fun to play with a friend.

Split screen is usually a challenge nowadays in computer games, but during gameplay it didn't present any inconvenience to me. The tension of each room and the danger that awaited us just outside the door added an extra thrill.

In addition to being a light game, the option to play together made me want to explore the whole game even more... because playing with a friend is clearly more fun! The quantities and art of the enemies were excellent too, I believe that more varieties will be added according to the development of the game.

But after a while of exploring, we started to find some bugs in rooms where the Boss wasn't and we got stuck in the dungeon forcing the game to restart.

Problems-

Body possession issues, when possessing the same body at the same time, a player is out until the game is restarted.

Player recognition issues.. when the player died while possessed, there was a chance that the killed player would not be revived by his teammate.

And problems also when reviving the dead player, having the chance to fall in a place outside the map where all the Monsters of the stage were. With nowhere to go, the only option left was to restart the game again.


Prós,

Great game, very fun for those who like to explore with their friends.

Against,

the excess of bugs can demotivate the player to continue.

A rouge-lite game with body snatching mechanics. Combat is very much souls like so you have to time you dodges and attacks and I found it engaging and fun. Also going from the crypt to the forest area was great and it added variety to the environment, weapons and the bodies you can possess. One thing that would be a great is the addition of online play as the game has only local multiplayer. But overall recommended for rouge-lite and souls fans.