This game is so f'ing good.

[Rex Smashington]

I'm already impatient about the roadmap. Burned through all the available content pretty quickly but it's realllllly good. And it was really cheap because I already owned Brotato so it only cost $10.19 in that bundle. Played for 17 hours on $10 so can't complain too much. But I'm dying to see all that extra content on the roadmap!

[wakasm]

I agree that there is something good at the core here, but IMO, it's still missing a lot, especially at the challenge level of the game. I 100% the game in about 12 hours, the hardest difficulty isn't very hard except on like 2 characters in certain setups (if you don't get any good items before the first boss),

Currently, there is no incentive to play on the hardest modes, and they don't challenge at all even if you do.

Again, to beat a dead horse at this point, risk of Rain of Rain 2, in comparison, I spent countless hours slowly trying my best to beat Monsoon on all the characters and the road to doing so felt like the right amount of slowly getting better, slowly learning the game, and not being impossible. It felt fun to discover new weird combos and interactions, and that was because it often took many more individual items to compound damage.

Even brotato (since you mentioned it) has more of a ramp up in learning, unlocking, and getting through a lot of the game on the difficulty 5 stuff.

Gatekeeper's strongest assets so far are:

⇝ Coop play is smooth
⇝ Core game is strong and not really many bugs other than some visual ones
⇝ Taken inspiration from some really good games


I still fundamentally believe some of the issues are:

⇝ The fact most things are a % damage effect, so there aren't enough interesting synergies to scale damage. Basically you grow linearly, with a few items exponentially, and there is never that weird ramp up period where you go from struggling and needing the right combinations to soar your damage from multiple damage sources

⇝ The monster spawning caps - just run around not damaging stuff and enemies WILL stop spawning. This limits the difficulty heavily as the game can never really truly overwhelm you

⇝ Some items are just too broken and attack speed, while super fun, is just the best main attack stat

⇝ Exploring levels is not super fun or rewarding,

⇝ Some characters unique hook is annoying to even use (like the cursed artefact one)

⇝ No endgame chase stuff - like unlocking skins

⇝ No fun achievements that are character specific (not really sure what would be fun here, but they'd be better than the die in 200 different ways achievements)


I don't really see anything in the roadmap that really fixes much of this, but I am hoping by the end, it comes out a lot more polished with some sort of stronger difficulty curve that feels more skillful and challenging without bring extremely brutal.

[Rex Smashington]

Originally posted by wakasm:

I agree that there is something good at the core here, but IMO, it's still missing a lot, especially at the challenge level of the game. I 100% the game in about 12 hours, the hardest difficulty isn't very hard except on like 2 characters in certain setups (if you don't get any good items before the first boss),

Currently, there is no incentive to play on the hardest modes, and they don't challenge at all even if you do.

Again, to beat a dead horse at this point, risk of Rain of Rain 2, in comparison, I spent countless hours slowly trying my best to beat Monsoon on all the characters and the road to doing so felt like the right amount of slowly getting better, slowly learning the game, and not being impossible. It felt fun to discover new weird combos and interactions, and that was because it often took many more individual items to compound damage.

Even brotato (since you mentioned it) has more of a ramp up in learning, unlocking, and getting through a lot of the game on the difficulty 5 stuff.

Gatekeeper's strongest assets so far are:

⇝ Coop play is smooth
⇝ Core game is strong and not really many bugs other than some visual ones
⇝ Taken inspiration from some really good games


I still fundamentally believe some of the issues are:

⇝ The fact most things are a % damage effect, so there aren't enough interesting synergies to scale damage. Basically you grow linearly, with a few items exponentially, and there is never that weird ramp up period where you go from struggling and needing the right combinations to soar your damage from multiple damage sources

⇝ The monster spawning caps - just run around not damaging stuff and enemies WILL stop spawning. This limits the difficulty heavily as the game can never really truly overwhelm you

⇝ Some items are just too broken and attack speed, while super fun, is just the best main attack stat

⇝ Exploring levels is not super fun or rewarding,

⇝ Some characters unique hook is annoying to even use (like the cursed artefact one)

⇝ No endgame chase stuff - like unlocking skins

⇝ No fun achievements that are character specific (not really sure what would be fun here, but they'd be better than the die in 200 different ways achievements)


I don't really see anything in the roadmap that really fixes much of this, but I am hoping by the end, it comes out a lot more polished with some sort of stronger difficulty curve that feels more skillful and challenging without bring extremely brutal.

Agree with pretty much everything. The attack speed and easily stacking damage multipliers almost regardless of what you choose being the main obstacles to the game being challenging.

Being able to murder everything almost instantly even on the highest difficulty almost makes the spawn limit a non issue as well. It should def be addressed but won't really be that noticeable until they bring DPS down a little bit. Or give enemies even more HP on higher difficulty.

The main things on the road map I found most interesting are:

"Additional arena mechanics" I think arena will probably be my favorite mode if they add more to it. Like you said, the planets aren't really that interesting to explore. If they just put events inside the arena, I would never do normal mode again. This coupled with the fact they're going to make an arena aesthetic for each planet almost makes the planets obsolete once you have the achievements.

"Battle phases against sirens" This sounds promising. If I'm understanding it to mean like boss phases in MMOs or other RPGs when they reach a certain % they use different attacks and get increasingly difficult as their HP gets lower.

"Final boss: Chaos" Interesting.

"New Game Mode" Could be anything. But I'm optimistic because I enjoyed the rest of the game.

[God'sJadeFox]

any chance you know how to "Find Juju"?

[God'sJadeFox]

Also, I agree, but I wonder if they would be willing to add a forge to the arena that changes each round, allow us the chance to change the items we don't want.

[wakasm]

Originally posted by God'sJadeFox:

any chance you know how to "Find Juju"?

We found Juju on our first play (assuming I am remembering the correct achievement).

I don't remember the map as the game was new, but they were like under a tree or something, my friend clicked on it, and we got the achievement. Maybe someone else can give better directions, but it's one of the few "environment secrets" in the game.

[God'sJadeFox]

Thx M8

[ominumi]

The game is good. I'm gonna wait a bit longer. See what else gets added into the game. I'm hoping for some different game modes. Mindless slaughter gets dull after a few hundred hours.