General feedback

[mondomau]

Mostly enjoying the game so far, but there are some very frustrating elements & design decisions that I am hoping will be addressed for release.

Things I liked:
- Art design and animation are great
- Hub world is a nice addition to the genre and is well done, looks good
- nice variety in special skills
- Love the fact the loot shows up on the avatar, wish more of these games did this

Would like to see:
- More impact when attacking: the main attack and several of the special attacks feel completely insubstantial and unsatisfying when they connect. More visual impact (like a split second stagger) and audio cues would help here
- key re-mapping
- some sort of in-game screen that shows you your current stats and skills. It's a bit mad you don't have this tbh.
- more variety in player avatars, gear, enemies, skills, main attacks etc (assuming this is all coming as part of a full release)
- Mini-Bosses with more interesting attacks
- pets / summons / henchmen
- breakable barrels & crates. Why have them if they do nothing?!
- A stash. I am assuming this is missing form just the demo but it's a huge omission


Minor annoyances:

- Movement speed is really slow and there's no dash: if this is a design decision for combat gameplay, could you either speed up movement in the hub area or move the vendors closer together? It's tedious enough having to walk between the three current interest points, once you have all the others available it's going to be a slog.

- Maps feel empty and pointless as there doesn't appear to be anything to find so there's not much point moving around much

- lack of a minimap: related to above - please add in some sort of map function even if it's very basic and only shows you things you've already discovered (e.g. gear drops)

- Enemy spawning feels a bit off. I get that grinding for upgrades give you the ability to deal with tougher waves, but sometimes they come in following a pattern that you can work round / dodge (which feels good and rewards skill) , sometimes they just rush you from all sides which isn't fun - there's no skill, you are boxed in and either so ridiculously OP that you just obliterate everything (in which case why bother having movement at higher levels ) or you die. This is particularly frustrating when you resurrect, wiping the screen, only to have enemies spawn from all angles and rush / projectile spam you before you've had a chance to break out.

- The thieving goblin is still bad UX. I get what you are going for and the tweaks you recently made make it less frustrating and game-breaking, but it's still a mechanic that feels bad and punishes the player for 'failing' when they didn't necessarily do anything wrong (the game has a blatant and unforgiving meta / gear check element). Perhaps you could consider making this a risk vs reward modifier instead? i.e.
a) You can choose to do a run with goblins nearby and that increases the loot quality but also incurs a chance for them to rob you.
OR
b) it is the price for resurrection in the level - a goblin wizard raises you from the dead but steals some of your stuff as payment.

- forcing the player to ID and sell their gear between runs feels like pointless busywork

- Targeting of some of the special skills (e.g. corpse explosion ) is a bit off - it will often shoot targets miles off screen instead of the huge mob in front of you

Major / game breaking annoyances:
- Only one thing here but it's huge and will genuinely be the deciding factor on whether I buy this at release or not: The meta progression is waaaay too grindy. Increments are priced way too high and the increments are far too minor and meaningless for a game this limited in scope and content. I am over-emphasising this because you are making the same mistake as so many other games in this genre and it will severely limit your appeal to the hardcore rogue survivor sweaty crowd (and even they are getting a bit bored of this - I know, I am one).
It feels really uneven, too, which exacerbates the problem - you break through a wall after a few runs where you start getting better gear and you really feel the difference. then the gear level kind of plateaus and you have to rely on tiny fractional increments, which cost more and more until you are having to grind 1000s of coins with basically no return on investment, so the cost of progressing your stats rapidly outpaces the benefit of doing so, so you have to grind even longer. It's tedious AF. Please, please re-consider this.


Looking forward to what you do with the EA release!

[NANOO]

Wow that’s a detailed feedback - thank you! We’re actively gathering user input like yours and making improvements for our early access launch. Many of your points are already under consideration.