A Detailed Critique of the Game

[Equinox]

For the short version of my review, this game is a solid 6/10. It’s a hack and slash, dungeon crawler with a Dark Soul’s story and RuneScape graphics. For 3-4 hours, you can easily beat the game on your own or with up to 3 other people. I liked it, the combat was decent for what it was and the game did not overstay its welcome. For like $5, it’s worth a night or two to romp through with some friends or on your own. The game is pretty easy alone, but gets a bit tougher with friends since enemies deal more damage per player added.

For the long version of my review, this game is very close to being great, but it’s hampered by a lot of a few major issues. Most of them easily solved and even already acknowledged by the dev teasing a hypothetical sequel. Especially, if the dev is taking some inspiration from King’s Field 4 and doing an upgrade system.

By far, the most crippling issue is the stamina regeneration system. This game revolves around managing stamina. It’s for movement, blocking, parrying, attacking, running, shooting arrows, practically everything but magic. For a game trying to emulate the Dark Souls weight system, one of the key defining traits of those games is that if you’re going for an armor/heavy-weapon focused-build, you do so by leveling up your endurance/weight cap and strength to avoid being overburdened and have the ability to utilize heavy-weapons without drawbacks. The problem with this game is that there’s no real way to offset the weight (even with the buffs from the fish) and heavy weapons simply make the weight problem worse. This led to me using the Sunflower Cultic Robes for 90% of the game because of how light they were (not even to mention the final boss being magic focused so it actually was a really good set to fight the final boss in.) The only other set I saw/heard people consistently trying to use were the onion set and mage sets since they give decent physical and magic protection if you can handle the weight. The stamina becomes exacerbated with how slow the player moves if they don’t run, on top of the fact each weapon adds weight and consumes stamina, meaning if you use any heavy weapon, you’re taking like a 1/5 of your stamina away, which is devastating when you also factor in the stamina regen time if your weight is too high, alongside having to block, jump, kick, and parry. Overall, I think a stat/soul level system how dark souls handles stamina and encumbrance would easily solve this problem and enable more creative builds in the sequel. However, if there is ever a patch for this game, slightly bumping up the player’s stamina and decreasing the weight of everything by like 10-15% depending on the weight would easily make a lot more builds viable.

For the next major issue, I think combat was not as nuanced as the dev anticipated. I felt like there was supposed to be a rock, paper, scissors type weapon system where crush, pierce, and slash were supposed to be used interchangeably to beat certain enemies, especially with the ability to hold three weapons at once. Outside of early game, this did not matter. I felt that the crush-type weapons were extremely overpowered for 90% of the game. With headshots being available on most enemies, you could hit them twice and then they easily are defeated. Pierce weapons I rarely used outside of the dual pierce/slash weapons to cover my bases if there was a major difference with weapon types. The only other slash weapons I used were the Claymore (a ridiculously good slash weapon you get at the very start of the game) and the Espasota (the swordfish) at the end of the game (when you get it so its only useful for the final boss and Vesper Hideyoshi.) The swordfish is very good, especially since you can pair it with the beetle shield/leek shield for decent magic resistance and tank your way through the final boss. Finally, there’s spell-damage type weapons, but I genuinely had no idea what this weapon-type did and used the Carnivorous Spear the entire game without figuring it out. I assume it did magic damage to beat physical-resistant enemies, but crush damage made this irrelevant. Overall, I cannot really make a suggestion to fix this in this game since you would probably need to adjust a lot of armor and hp values to encourage weapon variety and usage. (A few early game explanations would also help to explain weapon type uses.)

Outside of weapons types, range and magic combat also had some issues. Genuinely, I used range weapons three times in the entire game to bait out some annoying enemies in the final area and cheese the giant carnivorous plant (the 1st boss) by not having to climb the upper arena as intended. The bows had no real purpose unless you wanted to role-play as a ranger while your friends played other “classes.” Also, the Mystical Twig is a complete downgrade compared to the basic bow because you never really need the attack speed and the basic bow has more range despite both the range being listed as the same for both bows. The basic bow’s damage outweighs any benefits of the Twig. Sure, I’ve seen some people mention that the bows have the highest technical dps in the game, but realistically, even with the plethora of arrows you have at your disposal, it’s simply easier to use melee and magic to get the job done. Overall, maybe making more situations where long-range combat is encouraged or an agility/dexterity stat that encourages a bow playstyle would make them more relevant.

As for magic, there are two major issues: 1. Mana is way too limited. Without the Ring of Lavender, you are easily out of spells after a couple casts, meaning not only did I keep that ring on the entire game, I also took a magic dps hit because of how the ring works. Sure, you could use the Sunlit Hoops, but since they depend on enemies to regain mana, it’s too situational outside of early game when you get both rings. Surprisingly, with how crucial the Ring of Lavender is, I could also use the Ring of the Red Thistle to overcome the dps loss of the Ring of Lavender while preventing the downside of the Ring of Red Thistle to get a net positive magic dps increase for my spells. 2. A good chunk of the spells are not good or have very weird quirks to them. The main three spells I used for the game were Nature’s Spit (a very low-cost fireball-esque spell), Twister, and Row of Roots for everything outside of early game (These two spells are very good for damage and usually function properly.) The main problem with most of the spells are that they are too situational (like Weaver’s Trap and Wind Push) or turn against you (Piranha Plant, Arachne Underling, Row of Roots, and Twister can target and damage you for some reason so they can easily become burdens if you cast them at the wrong time.). Overall, I think some tweaks to how magic spells respond to players, more situations where non-damage spells are encouraged, and an intelligence stat for magic damage/mana regen for a future sequel would easily solve the major problem. I think if there’s a patch, having a base mana regen (like extremely slow) would encourage more ring diversity and spell usage and maybe some spell targeting Ai tweaks would work wonders.

Finally, my last critique for combat is bosses. I beat each boss first try, but two out of three of them are not the most engaging. The biggest offender is the Carnivorous Plant. You can easily pepper it with magic and arrows and it will never fight back in you stand in the middle of the arena. The whole gimmick of climbing to the upper half of the arena is pointless unless you want to risk a death and speed up the fight immensely nor was it obvious until I was about to kill the boss did I realize the gimmick. As for the other boss that was not the best, Lunamoth is very weird. She’s like one of two enemies in the game that does magic damage so magic resistance easily removes her difficulty. I mainly just rushed her down and sidestepped most of her spells because of how slow they were. However, she is easily a challenge with friends though because of the additional damage amp against the player per added hero. Kalim is perfect though, the only issue with Kalim is related to stamina management. Kalim’s fight is very engaging and a good difficulty increase for players in the middle of the game. The use of the fire ring works wonders in overcoming most of Flyknight’s combat issues and having a duel that uses most combat mechanics is very good.

For item management, the system is very cluttered and tedious to find things unless you take the time to sort it yourself (which isn’t really worth it since the game is so short.) I think a very easy solution is to have an organization/sorting system option. (I.E. armor-set section, rings section, spell section, e.t.c.) That way, you don’t have to dig through your chest to find equipment you want to test out.

Due to the fact I already covered stamina and combat issues, I’ll keep my major gripe with equipment short. To put it simply, most weapons, rings, spells, and armors/shields aren’t worth the use due to either very strong weapon types (I.E. Crush), the mana problem (both rings I had were related to magic damage because other rings were way too situational and not worth the use), the stamina problem (I.E. never use heavy armor if you want to not be exhausted for a very long time), and spell variety issue (stick with the two big damage spells). There’s a good variety of tools at a player’s disposal, but a majority of them are only worth the use if you want to do a challenge run. Also weapon and armor placements seem a bit odd because most end-game weapons and armors are outright worse statistically due to the stamina and combat problems or are odd weapon side-grades (I never touched a fist weapon because the range loss wasn’t worth the stamina saved. This was mainly because the damage of these were way too low to justify their usage alongside their attack speeds being surprisingly low (the Cannonballs are the major perpetrator here) for how fist weapons usually are in most rpg games) that don’t encourage a player to adapt to their combat situations

Overall, despite my criticism in this review, I liked the game. I want the dev to succeed because they clearly have creative ideas. They just need to refine and adjust certain values and systems and this game would easily go from a 6/10 to an 8/10. At the time of this post, I will try out new game plus and the randomizer mode when it drops to see if any of my opinions change because the dev has alluded to some new challenges and the ability to edit our own playthroughs in these new modes. Dev, if you’re reading this, keep up the great work!

[MadConsular]

ngl i think the attack types are just copied over from runescape, probs not meant to be that deep