EA game review

[gienekman]

I loved playing Atlyss and wanted to share my experience playing current date version.

Main gameplay loop:
Combat feels better than anything i played this year. It's fast paced, blocking/parry feels good, getting new items feels great and variety of weapons to play with is amazing. I did everything to do got all cheevos and want more.

Graphics and sound:
Graphics are adorable, fun to watch and easy to distinguish everything.
Music fits the mood of the game perfectly and is easy on the ears so you can play for hours and sounds are the cheffs kiss, all that bouncing and combat sounds are great.

Classes:
I will not be talking about subclasses since the only ones available are not finished.

Bandit: perfection
Pros:
Every single skill and passive in bandit is useful and bandit can chain the longest skill combo in the game.
Vanish is an extra full heal and agro wipe, double dash does not interrupt charge attacks making bandit the best solo and most mobile class in the game.
Cons:
Nothing.
My only wishful thinking is to have lower cooldown on skills. 13 seconds cd on 1 second melee stun or 12 seconds on volley feel like way too much. Bringing everything down to 6-8 seconds would be perfect. Except for caltropos which should be something like 20 seconds cd.

Mystic: almost perfect
Pros:
Restora offers healing on short cooldown, prism gives an extra hp buffer making mystic a very comfortable class to play, blink is the fastest double dash and manaflow lets you spam a lot more spells.
Nova is a perfect panic button and flux spear means free damage for 3 seconds.
Wands are the most fun weapon type with a large and cool looking variety of charge attacks.
Cons:
1:
Bells are slow, clumsy, make you immobile when attacking and i could have sworn when i first bought and played the game they were better.
2:
Cross has a very awkward casting where you have to hold the button to charge it and then release it. When you combine it with a very short range and only 5 seconds magic defense debuff it feels like a waste of skill bar space.
3:
Flux claw has no use in the game. I tried hard to make it usefull for something but it only deals damage that can be matched by simply using wand auto attack. This spell has no redeeming qualities and my advice would be to turn it into a toggble self boon that uses mana to add flat damage to spells and its cost is multiplied by the amount of multihit of whatever spell you use.

Fighter: needs some work
Pros:
Reflect and bulwark are amazing passives and make fighting up close fun at the start of the game.
Stomp is a great debuff/aoe damage, shockwave is a great area stun on short cooldown and execute is an extra bit of damage+healing. It's a very solid trio of melee abilities.
Cons:
1:
Cyclone requires perfect positioning to do real damage and if you whiff it 12 seconds cd will punish you for it.
2:
Shield bash is pointless. 25seconds cooldown for a 3 seconds, short range stun is horrible. Compare it to flux spear.
3:
Blood gush deals tiny damage and adds tiny dot. It's a waste of a skill slot.
4:
Highest damage fighter skill is multi bash and that's a general skill that anyone can learn.
5:
Enemies that do ranged multihit projectiles. All other classes can just not be there for the attack. When in melee it gets hard to see or disengage when enemies use them.
Give bulwark and reflect skills extra abilities when using shields and melee weapons that let you reflect projectiles and stun on parry and increases damage reflected and stamina reduction on parry when using shields.
6:
Using anything that does not stun/debuff feels incredibly weak compared to just constantly using jump attacks. Swords/greatswords jump attacks mulch everything to pieces and don't have cooldowns.

Enemies:
Great variety and different combat styles for different monsters feel amazing. There are only three problems i could find.
1: Fire breathing Maws have a fire attack with almost no visible warning. Make them pull their heads backwards before they do that or something else since it just comes out of nowhere.
2: Barknaught and death knights have fast casting multi projectile attacks that are a nightmare to fighters. Mystic and bandit can easile dodge and do damage but fighter is kinda boned. Like i suggested in fighter review: make using shields reflect and stun projectiles using enemies on parry.
3: Death knights use ruin with no cooldown and i've seen one spam it 3 times in a row. I think that's a bit too much.

Weapons/armor:
They are all very fun to get. If new ones are the same quality it will be perfect.

Enchanting:
The random nature of enchanting makes it horribly tedious and breaks the whole pacing of the game.
Just make it 5x more expensive but let players pick which enchantmet they want and replace boss badges with monster materials.

Mining/fishing:
It takes too long to mine or wait for fish to bite and higher mining/fishing should enable getting multiple of whatever you mine/fish.
It's not an mmo and it doesn't have to be too time consuming.
Also: Ruka and Torta are adorable. Nuff said.

[Goataro Kujo]

What's your build(s)? A lot of your criticisms are build dependent, which can make certain skills feel way worse than they actually are. Blood Gush is the best example. It can be absolutely lethal, but it requires a character with low vit and high str to have high bleed damage.

Other things to keep in mind. Cross is actually one of the longest range attacks in the game. You have to hold the button down for while, which may be awkward on a keyboard. It's why I usually bind it to M4 or M5. Fluxclaw can also be combined with wands to achieve incredibly high DPS. And if you have a Magus with Haste, you burn through a boss incredibly fast by holding down M1 and spamming Fluxclaw. It also penetrates through enemies, making it great for ripping through groups.