Demo Review

[Meyrime]

I'm late to the party but I will have to give my review. This is not going to be pleasant, this is going to be harsh, but constructive and objective. I'm not doing this to bash the game but to outline the many, many problems there is.

- The Intro
Remind me slightly of kingdom hearts, having small choices giving you a few perks from the get go that let you have some customization. A bit light but it's fine.

- Graphics
There is a problem here. Characters portraits need to be redone. Some of them looks very bad on the outline, like a poorly cropped jpg/png. Isometric choice for battle is... okay but it come with a problem where enemies aren't always aligned properly, making players always choosing on the tile rather than the monsters themselves. Other than that, visually the game isn't too bad.

- Sound Effects & Animation
This is very boring. Nothing has meaningful impact. Enemies dies and poof out of existence, hits have barely "oomph" behind it, sound wise the game is currently barebones. Animations are fine but hope they get more flair later on.

- Difficulty
Okay, I am forced to say it and make it a dedicated section. The difficulty of this game is overkill. Not only we are HEAVILY reliant on RNG (Starter team, drops, map choices), but enemies can still completely wreck your ass even if you try to be safe. I made some runs only going for regular battles and even there, enemies could beat me up easily. This is a serious problem because it gives little incentive to continue. Even more when your hero is basically way beyond everyone else but you still get brand newcomers trying to help you.
When common enemies (like 3 wolves) can do enough damage to down half your team, people aren't going to want to stick around, even more when some borderline elite enemies are considered in "normal battles". It's even more frustrating when enemies have a tendency to dodge every single one of your attacks.
Not only that but the final boss is borderline busted until you bashed your head enough to powercreep everything. A charged up skill that is basically a guaranteed OHKO, an instant skill that do enough damage to OHKO most characters, repeatable every turn if the boss want to. I know this is a roguelite, but that doesn't mean the player HAS to die to progress.

- Gameplay
Okay, another big one, even more than the previous part. If we omit the difficulty problem, the game still come with several problems that dampen the fun.

The intro. Choosing a perk is fun and all but most of the time, many are meaningless because choices are bad. Getting items is bad, getting +25% battle exp is not worth and "choosing" your allies is kind of a joke. The last one feels quite bad since you have to get 5 on a single screen. So if you wanted to keep one character from the first screen and reroll, you're out of luck. Most characters you get are usually quite terrible, especially after your hero basically powercreep the hell out of them.

Classes. I'm not against the squire tree though having a squire becoming a fist fighter is kinda weird, yet it's understandable. However, an Archer that become either a healer or a magic dps is incomprehensible. You need more classes and more fitting trees, because the Archer currently is very bad.

Battle system. Auto Battle is not worth it at all. You cannot setup orders to follow, they just auto attack/heal randomly until they die. Yes you can interrupt the combat but still need to wait for their turn to attack. Having your characters being able to follow simple orders would help.
Also, a turn order is MANDATORY. There is no way to tell who's going to act and when, which remove any point of strategy since you can barely strategize. Players should know who's going to act next.
The "hero death" syndrome. God this is an awful idea. Having the MC die resulting an instant loss is STUPID. A perfectly good run could end immediately if enemies just decide to rush the MC. Having the MC down SHOULDN'T mean the run is dead. The MC is a hero, sure, but that doesn't mean the team can't work without him.
This is more biased but so far, I never managed to make the dojo works. It's supposed to help promote your characters but never ever have I manage to use it. Each time the game said I couldn't do anything so it was a waste of a space.
SP System. Having potions giving SP is nice but being resetted of SP every fight is not good, especially if your "inventory" is limited to three items.

- General
For some random problems. First, and foremost. Needing an account to "play" is a NO-NO. This is something that no one likes or wants. While this was deemed "optional" currently, you need an account for a few things, like asking for "help" or keeping your blue crystals. No one want that. Look at Earth Defense Force 6. The game is amazing, silly, a perfect upgrade of the previous version but it got mixed reviews. Why? Simply because the multiplayer DEMAND that you log in, with an EPIC GAMES account! This was not necessary before! And people hated it! If you remember, Helldivers 2 also got that issue!
I'd also recommand putting a "run away" option or "Give up" for the run, because when a run clearly isn't going to win, you're still forced to play until the bitter end, which is a bad waste of time.

Currently as is, the game is a 5/10. Sure this is far from over and I think the game has potential to be fun, especially with classes paths and so on. But currently, the game boils down to "bash your head against the wall until the wall collapse". And that's boring.