Been wanting to check in on this game, why is it mostly negative now?

[Cephalopod 1's biggest hater]

Like, I've owned it since way back when, and now it's been flipped on its rating?

[Cougard3]

I think it's price wise mostly. the mechanic is good. Given the one who made this game is not a big company is already an achievement. I think it need to be polished a little more, need more story line to make it more exciting.A better sound and music, Diablo 1 vibe, but need more eerie bgm..Had a lot of potential.

[Horror]

The game is not worth this price, genuinely. It was a mistake to raise the price.

Don't get me wrong, it's kinda neat, kinda simple feeling overall, and the bosses are really bad.

Better with friends for sure, but at this price it's not really a "get it with your buddy" type game IMO.

[Chillidoge]

Game's good, they redid the start so you're forced through a tutorial section. If you're OK with grinding that out for 15-30 mins max, you get access to the main game loop and off you go as normal with a brand new character.

I think it might have been the price hike though I bought it before that happened, to be fair to the devs they kind of need money to make the game, so it's up to you if it's worth it. I don't know if it goes on sale much either - that would help in my opinion.

Maybe try and catch some livestreams of it to help make your mind up.

[Jarilo]

Poor difficulty balancing that even an ape could fix. This game needs a custom difficulty like Into the Radius eventually added, so hybrid and more interesting builds can be viable. Yes, I can get through this game, but like only 2 builds did it.

[Masterdoddy]

I think the price is a factor, but in conjunction with the big overhaul it threw into question whether it was better or worse. I want to go back to it too, but I felt it became difficult at the expense of fun.

I had this before the big rework and a group of 4 of us loved playing it together. We were extremely excited for the big update and, although we played it for a little while, we drifted away from it. The large world I would say is excellent. The skill rework (with one caveat) was also welcome. Many of the new design and monster elements were really nicely done by a small studio working to a large scale world.

Now the 'however' section.
There is a major artificially imposed difficulty problem. The skill system is locked once you put something in and you can only do a skill reset at the end of a complete play through. If you make a poor choice, it hamstrings you throughout and can make it near impossible to progress. This prevents build experimentation unless you are prepared to endlessly restart the game until you find a suitable build.
Bosses are made needlessly difficult, negating any sort of real physical skill (blocking, parrying, ducking and dodging etc.) and emphasising the build dependence further. To some extent this is also true with regular monsters as well.

I don't believe the game is bad by any means, but it does need a party to make it enjoyable in my view.

[Jarilo]

Originally posted by Masterdoddy:

I think the price is a factor, but in conjunction with the big overhaul it threw into question whether it was better or worse. I want to go back to it too, but I felt it became difficult at the expense of fun.

I had this before the big rework and a group of 4 of us loved playing it together. We were extremely excited for the big update and, although we played it for a little while, we drifted away from it. The large world I would say is excellent. The skill rework (with one caveat) was also welcome. Many of the new design and monster elements were really nicely done by a small studio working to a large scale world.

Now the 'however' section.
There is a major artificially imposed difficulty problem. The skill system is locked once you put something in and you can only do a skill reset at the end of a complete play through. If you make a poor choice, it hamstrings you throughout and can make it near impossible to progress. This prevents build experimentation unless you are prepared to endlessly restart the game until you find a suitable build.
Bosses are made needlessly difficult, negating any sort of real physical skill (blocking, parrying, ducking and dodging etc.) and emphasising the build dependence further. To some extent this is also true with regular monsters as well.

I don't believe the game is bad by any means, but it does need a party to make it enjoyable in my view.

There it is, as many have said. Heck, even a difficulty setting that locks out achievements is fine, but have one. Many solo fans were forced to search for a multiplayer party to just get through the Goblin Paladin, and always play the same min/max safe builds.

[Donoghu]

The change in review is mostly due to 3 main reasons:

1) The game direction and gameplay style changed quite a bit suddently

Originally, this game was closer to what you would experience with Diablo 1 in VR with a dungeon with floors getting harder, hidden content and leveling + equipment driving you into returning into it. It lacked variations and there was a lot repetitiveness, but players were hoping for more content being added into the quite simple yet efficient base. For years, the "additional content" that was previewed seemed like something added onto the existing content, but it wasn't...

The game was changed from that kind of game into something that feel a LOT more like a Souls-Like game, but not exactly on the good side. The original dungeon-like environment was scrapped for a relatively linear world that might reminds you of a heavily simplify Dark Souls game. The difficulty is all over the place and the items drops is inconsistent at best (it doesn't feel like a loot-driven game anymore, but more like a gatcha because you will always get crappy drops with few exceptions.) A few system were added, but feels kinda cheap.

• Quests were added, but they are quite A-to-B-kill-C and forgettable.
• Smiting was added, but the results are so randomly all over that I felt like it's better to just look for chests in the world and hope for better gear.
• Potions and restorations was changed from something that was quick and fast (you could chug lots of potion and buy a tons) to something where you're lucky if you got even a couple of potion to heal from. (Basically, to get a healing potion, you need to find 3 shard-like thing in the world, get to an alchemy station and put those 3 shard into a funnel. Sometimes, you find a lot of those shards and, other times, you find none.)

2) Once the game drastic change was released, the devs basically told everyone "That's it. We're done"

Long story short, the project was poorly handled from a professional perspective. While the game wasn't making a fortune, the money it made was thrown around aimlessly for the most part or, at least, from what was shown. And then once the game was updated with the change that not many people asked for, the devs basically told everyone that there's no more money to push the game further and asked, through a poll, to the players if they wanted to pay for a DLC for additional content or if they wanted the devs to move on.

To put things in perspective, the game has barely evolved for over 2 years before the drastic change from Diablo-like to Souls-like in VR. Even the tools the devs put in place to allow people to follow/vote for updates was basically ignored along the way.

3) The raise in price following the while the content is quite lacking.

The original price prior to the major changes was okay-ish with the kind of vision and concept that shared back then, but with the aimless development that went in, the higher price kinda feel bad. If the game kept its original development road and more content was added onto the original style of game, I would have say that a higher price was okay, but when you consider how the game was mostly just metamorphosed into something else, it feels like a gimmick.

As such, many who bought the game because of its original idea/concept feels conflicted between the "It's not bad" and "it's not what I wanted".

[Angel-itis]

price still not good, the initial 1.0 release was good but the removal of the old stuff removed a lot of replayability. Plus zero updates in like 8 months