Before really getting into why I don't recommend this game, I want to note that there is a lot of things done well in this game. At its core, Vambrace has an excellent soundtrack, fantastic artwork, a well written story, and decent characters to enjoy. I also even like some of the game mechanic Ideas. However, despite all these positives, it can't overcome everything else wrong with the game and unfortunately - it is everything that really matters in the end to whether the game is recommendable or not.

So first things first, Game Mechanics, starting out with at least a couple of things I liked:

One of those aspects of praise I'll give to the developers is 'not' having permanent companions that accompany the heroine in the game level; which might seem odd, but works quite well in allowing the player experience the distinct differences and abilities of the different comrades you can play with. It also allows you to rearrange your party if you think you need a different composition to overcome whatever task may be at hand.

Another thing that I liked about the game was that every ally you could bring along felt unique in their own way. Organizing and arranging the different characters actually felt meaningful - with the player having decide what composition of stats their party should focus on while also paying attention to what everyone might bring to the table. I'll note that while I didn't think much of 'some' classes, ultimately I did feel that each class could be useful in some instance.

However, not everything regarding the game mechanics was good. Take something a simple as the resource management for example. Each character in this game will have both a Health and Vigor resource and if either of these resources go down to 0 then the character dies. For the most part, Health is fine in this game - you'll lose health in attacks on your characters, sometimes from traps, and the odd time from events. However, Vigor for the most part just feels like 'another' Health resource; just that it goes down a bit different. Vigor primarily goes down whenever you enter a new room and encounter traps, sometimes from events, and the odd time from attacks on the character.

In many ways, Vigor just feels like 'another' Health resource for the character, which really begs the question of why is it included? If it was included for the reason of it being a 'hunger clock', then it isn't really a good one as you can heal up your Vigor with items much like Health - and the game has a 'Mad Wraith' system which acts in a similar matter as the Rebel Fleet from FTL: Faster Than Light.

I'll give a mention here to Lyric's 'Leveling' system as another thing that I can't say I enjoyed. In game as Lyric progresses through the story, she will gain 'perk' points, which can be used to improve her various stats. However, Lyric can only improve any specific stat by 2 and her base characters will start with extremely low stats in everything. What's more, the stat upgrades are permanent; so while Lyric can be pretty versatile with her party members, she can't be as versatile with herself. In my game, I simply dumped all my points into Combat, Health, and Vigor since I knew all of those would at least be useful to me.

The second thing I think I'll touch on will be the Gameplay of the game.

Before I jump into gameplay though, I will have to briefly talk about the game design of this game. Specifically, the meat of this game comes from exploring the various 'districts' of the frozen city your character is exploring. Each district is comprised of several zones you'll travel through, and each zone is made up of various rooms forming a path from the start of the zone to the end of it. Each room will have one encounter with it, and may or may not have some traps or chests for you to loot.

Okay - so, far, so good. Unfortunately though, nothing really praiseworthy, and I'm just about to get into the 'bad' here.

The first problem I'll note about the gameplay is that one of the encounters you'll deal with isn't all that interesting. Event encounters are instances where a situation will pop up and you'll have to choose how you will resolve it. After first choosing if you will ignore the event or not (assuming you can choose to ignore it), you will have choose one character from your party to trigger the situation; which will have a negative or positive outcome. This sounds fine but honestly it is really boring as when you know what the outcomes are, you can really shore up your bets by using characters that won't be affected as much (or at all).

And then there are the traps. As you walk around the various rooms, sometimes you'll trigger a trap. Traps will generally affect the first member of your party (unless the traps specifies that it hits everyone), unless you successful avoid them. That makes thematic sense of course, but generally the traps will have rather bland debuffs that won't really affect your lead character anyway.

Speaking of the debuffs, there are several items that can be used to clear those permanently affecting your party; but generally you will only really have to worry about having Splints on hand most of the time. This is due to the fact that generally the only debuffs that will matter to your lead character can usually be healed by a split; you won't need to clear the other ailments most of the time as you probably won't be using that character for that specific stat.

If you do need to cure some debuff though, don't worry! Between each zone in a district you'll find a shelter where you can craft items from the resources you'll find in the game. Better yet - not only can the resources you've found be used, but also those you've stashed at home! And if that isn't just grand, the shelter counts as a same place to use said items; so not only can you craft something for that debuff, you can cure it there too. Oh, you can also craft items you heal your Health and Vigor so that becomes rather mute once you have all the items you need to do that too.

Okay, enough about Gameplay. I'll note I could perhaps talk about the Combat but, the Combat was just basic, not bad. Now granted, being that this game was 'inspired' by Darkest Dungeon, it really should be better, but I don't necessarily consider it a negative so I'll just skip over it.

That said, I will note that one thing about Game Design that really should be mentioned. And that's the maps in this game.

Okay, so first, this game calls itself a rogue-lite (which is better then most developers who call their game rogue-likes when they clearly have nothing to do with rogue-likes), but the maps in this game aren't randomized. The rooms you can enter might be randomized, but the zones and districts will always look exactly the same each time you look at them. Now, this isn't to say that it is a bad thing to have preset maps and such - and it is somewhat a result of the heavy artwork focus of the game, but I think it is a hard sell to call this game even a rogue-lite.

Anyhow, the above is more about semantics and definitions; but one thing that can be said as a negative about the maps is navigating them. Simply put, trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B is confusing in this game as you'll have to take into account where you entered the room and how that specific room is oriented on your map. Worse yet is when you get to the later levels of the Temple Distract, that map will show connections between rooms but have a question mark; perhaps indicating there may be a link between rooms or perhaps not. Ultimately, trying to move around was a huge chore and there were times where I would lose my bearings due to the frustrating maps.

Finally, I will note that there are a lot of Quality of Life features that one should think would be included but ultimately don't seem to be. However, I'm running out of space for this review so I'll just say a lot could be done better here.

Before really getting into why I don't recommend this game, I want to note that there is a lot of things done well in this game. At its core, Vambrace has an excellent soundtrack, fantastic artwork, a well written story, and decent characters to enjoy. I also even like some of the game mechanic Ideas. However, despite all these positives, it can't overcome everything else wrong with the game and unfortunately - it is everything that really matters in the end to whether the game is recommendable or not. So first things first, [b]Game Mechanics[/b], starting out with at least a couple of things I liked: One of those aspects of praise I'll give to the developers is 'not' having permanent companions that accompany the heroine in the game level; which might seem odd, but works quite well in allowing the player experience the distinct differences and abilities of the different comrades you can play with. It also allows you to rearrange your party if you think you need a different composition to overcome whatever task may be at hand. Another thing that I liked about the game was that every ally you could bring along felt unique in their own way. Organizing and arranging the different characters actually felt meaningful - with the player having decide what composition of stats their party should focus on while also paying attention to what everyone might bring to the table. I'll note that while I didn't think much of 'some' classes, ultimately I did feel that each class could be useful in some instance. However, not everything regarding the game mechanics was good. Take something a simple as the resource management for example. Each character in this game will have both a Health and Vigor resource and if either of these resources go down to 0 then the character dies. For the most part, Health is fine in this game - you'll lose health in attacks on your characters, sometimes from traps, and the odd time from events. However, Vigor for the most part just feels like 'another' Health resource; just that it goes down a bit different. Vigor primarily goes down whenever you enter a new room and encounter traps, sometimes from events, and the odd time from attacks on the character. In many ways, Vigor just feels like 'another' Health resource for the character, which really begs the question of why is it included? If it was included for the reason of it being a 'hunger clock', then it isn't really a good one as you can heal up your Vigor with items much like Health - and the game has a 'Mad Wraith' system which acts in a similar matter as the Rebel Fleet from FTL: Faster Than Light. I'll give a mention here to Lyric's 'Leveling' system as another thing that I can't say I enjoyed. In game as Lyric progresses through the story, she will gain 'perk' points, which can be used to improve her various stats. However, Lyric can only improve any specific stat by 2 and her base characters will start with extremely low stats in everything. What's more, the stat upgrades are permanent; so while Lyric can be pretty versatile with her party members, she can't be as versatile with herself. In my game, I simply dumped all my points into Combat, Health, and Vigor since I knew all of those would at least be useful to me. The second thing I think I'll touch on will be the [b]Gameplay[/b] of the game. Before I jump into gameplay though, I will have to briefly talk about the game design of this game. Specifically, the meat of this game comes from exploring the various 'districts' of the frozen city your character is exploring. Each district is comprised of several zones you'll travel through, and each zone is made up of various rooms forming a path from the start of the zone to the end of it. Each room will have one encounter with it, and may or may not have some traps or chests for you to loot. Okay - so, far, so good. Unfortunately though, nothing really praiseworthy, and I'm just about to get into the 'bad' here. The first problem I'll note about the gameplay is that one of the encounters you'll deal with isn't all that interesting. Event encounters are instances where a situation will pop up and you'll have to choose how you will resolve it. After first choosing if you will ignore the event or not (assuming you can choose to ignore it), you will have choose one character from your party to trigger the situation; which will have a negative or positive outcome. This sounds fine but honestly it is really boring as when you know what the outcomes are, you can really shore up your bets by using characters that won't be affected as much (or at all). And then there are the traps. As you walk around the various rooms, sometimes you'll trigger a trap. Traps will generally affect the first member of your party (unless the traps specifies that it hits everyone), unless you successful avoid them. That makes thematic sense of course, but generally the traps will have rather bland debuffs that won't really affect your lead character anyway. Speaking of the debuffs, there are several items that can be used to clear those permanently affecting your party; but generally you will only really have to worry about having Splints on hand most of the time. This is due to the fact that generally the only debuffs that will matter to your lead character can usually be healed by a split; you won't need to clear the other ailments most of the time as you probably won't be using that character for that specific stat. If you do need to cure some debuff though, don't worry! Between each zone in a district you'll find a shelter where you can craft items from the resources you'll find in the game. Better yet - not only can the resources you've found be used, but also those you've stashed at home! And if that isn't just grand, the shelter counts as a same place to use said items; so not only can you craft something for that debuff, you can cure it there too. Oh, you can also craft items you heal your Health and Vigor so that becomes rather mute once you have all the items you need to do that too. Okay, enough about Gameplay. I'll note I could perhaps talk about the Combat but, the Combat was just basic, not bad. Now granted, being that this game was 'inspired' by Darkest Dungeon, it really should be better, but I don't necessarily consider it a negative so I'll just skip over it. That said, I will note that one thing about [b]Game Design[/b] that really should be mentioned. And that's the maps in this game. Okay, so first, this game calls itself a rogue-lite (which is better then most developers who call their game rogue-likes when they clearly have nothing to do with rogue-likes), but the maps in this game aren't randomized. The rooms you can enter might be randomized, but the zones and districts will always look exactly the same each time you look at them. Now, this isn't to say that it is a bad thing to have preset maps and such - and it is somewhat a result of the heavy artwork focus of the game, but I think it is a hard sell to call this game even a rogue-lite. Anyhow, the above is more about semantics and definitions; but one thing that can be said as a negative about the maps is navigating them. Simply put, trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B is confusing in this game as you'll have to take into account where you entered the room and how that specific room is oriented on your map. Worse yet is when you get to the later levels of the Temple Distract, that map will show connections between rooms but have a question mark; perhaps indicating there may be a link between rooms or perhaps not. Ultimately, trying to move around was a huge chore and there were times where I would lose my bearings due to the frustrating maps. Finally, I will note that there are a lot of [b]Quality of Life[/b] features that one should think would be included but ultimately don't seem to be. However, I'm running out of space for this review so I'll just say a lot could be done better here.