Death's Gambit: Afterlife

I enjoyed playing the game, but the lack of the dev's technical prowess really shows. The advertizing gave the impression of very large scale enemies and environment, which left me rather disapointed with the end result. The Good: -Art and Music: The level art is very beautiful and the character art is good as well. The music is very good and fitting to the environments. The Bad: -Gameplay: This is supposed to be a metroidvainia, but there are no movement upgrades. In addition, the level design is small, making exploratition not really part of the core gameplay, and once a boss is defeated, there is never a reason to go back. Apparently all of the inspiration from shadow of the colossus was scraped. There were gifs of this type of gameplay early on. Showing "gameplay" that hasn't actually been successfuly implemented is false advertising. An optional "boss" is literally a dps race. Dodging takes so much stamina that it is impossible to avoid damage through skill on a couple of bosses with low strength builds that can't block efficiently either. The skill tree is the same for all classes, and for the most part uninteresting or even mostly useless for specific class types. -Audio: The music cuts off harshly during area transitions. There are problems with inconsistent sound volumes when unequiping items, somtimes being painfully loud, and seemingly playing multiple times stacked on top of each other. -Technical: Debuging(?) tools have been left in, and I had to reset the game less than 5min in. Don't press the F keys. Controls don't save and I had a shortcut path reset bettween sessions. UI and tutorial messages do not reflect custom controls. A vendor says he is going to get new items, but never does; I don't think there are any. Neutral: There is no fashion, there is only a single weapon of each type, and a 3 attack combo, a jump attack, or a roll attack is the limit of the moveset. The story got wierd and was overall kinda bland. I shouldn't have to call the horse.

I can tell a good metroidvania from a bad one when I play one. And this here is not the former; a damn shame, really. The artstyle, the soundtrack, the setting, the climate, very interesting healing system... And the gameplay issues. Death's Gambit's problems with combat and general character movement cast a dark shadow on everything that's otherwise good about this game. The two critical gameplay aspects of your typical metroidvania experience are simply bad here. - CONTROLLER PLAYERS BEWARE - One instantaneous movement speed, and you move only once you tilt your left stick about 75% in. Generally you want to play metroidvanias with a controller, and this particular issue renders controllers gravely uncomfortable. The game directly converts controller input into WASD keys. Easily the worst controller implementation I've experienced in years. - No hit feedback. Apparently losing 1/3 of your HP from an attack is no reason to get staggered. It's honestly difficult to tell that you or the enemy may have been hit. Most of the time damage numbers are all hit feedback you get. - It feels like your character has 2 or 3 stamina points, it gets drained sooooo quickly, especially when you dodge. All weapons use about the same amounts of stamina and all feel equally slow. This, however, is not the case for enemies, who can just spam their attacks to no end. - In some cases there is no collision between you and your enemies when you attack. I've absolutely never seen this in a metroidvania. - Long dead animation frame windows. You frustratingly need to wait for attack animations to fully end to dodge or block. - Broken (and frankly, lakcluster-feeling) sound design. Certain attack sounds don't match what's happening on the screen, or vice versa depending on how you look at it. - Unfair traps that look exactly like fore-/background - something suddenly falls to oneshot you because you so much as walk under it, with no environmental indication that something's off here.

First off, compared to what the game game was before the Afterlife update, this is golden. The game has been fully revamped, and it's now 100% a metroidvania. Not so many interconnessions between maps (some places can only be reached by fast travelling), but good number of secrets, good pixel art, and good voice acting (shout out to Crow's voice actor), and lots of movement abilities that define the metroidvania genre. As for the difficulty, oh boy. It's a double edged blade, the bosses and heroic rematches are the very core of the game, problem is, they're hard. I shouldn't compare them to things like final fantasy super bosses, but some of them are extremely close. As you die, your Will stat goes up, and if you reach and defeat the"last" boss with it being over 100 and less than 5 heroic bosses down, you 're screwed, meaning you can only unlock the bad ending. I honestly feel like the Will stat shoud go. It just puts too much pressure, and it has no place to exist. Technically you can still save scum (also defeating heroic bosses reduces the stat by a hefty amount), but it gets boring and repetitive after a while. Some attacks from random enemies can still trigger it. Soldier class easily hands down the best in the game, its passive shield talents are just bonkers compared to the other classes. You pretty much alway want to run soldier as main or secondary class. That being said, the other classes remain fun to fiddle with, and the game usually provides decent equipment toall of those quite early from the start. The game still has some bugs as of now, It never crashed for me, but I'd make frequent backups anyway. Also, play only in english. Every other language has not been updated after Afterlife aired, which means all the descriptions and effects of auras/items are heavily outdated.

This is a launch day review after only playing for a few hours, but hopefully it will be helpful for anyone on the fence. If you're into 2D Souls-like games like Unworthy and Salt and Sanctuary, you'll like this... it sticks real close to trying to bring as much of that Dark Souls feel and mechanics in without getting into legal trouble. The art is gorgeous, some interesting characters you'll meet, tons of branching paths with secrets and hidden paths to items, there's some great voice acting for dialog, several classes to choose from, skill trees to customize your play with. That being said, it's not perfect by any means, but I don't see any glaring issues that can't be resolved with patches. The high refresh rate fullscreen issue right now can be solved with NVIDIA Inspector... I'm playing on a 144Hz display in fullscreen at a locked 60FPS with no issues... here's my settings: https://i.imgur.com/4KF9vqr.png I have run into some bugs and glitches so far... worst was (and it was kind of hysterical) I found that hitting F12 to take a screenshot was adding an enormous amount of "souls" to my inventory... like 100,000,000 per hit... after just one hour of playing, I had enough to max my character to L150 (the max before NG+)... I had to pull a save backup prior to that happening so I could continue out without a glitched God mode.. I read it's something that's there in debug mode, but I was playing with a controller and only hitting F12 to take some screenshots, so not sure how I got it into debug mode. But all in all, it's got me hooked, there's enough there even in its current state that I'll be sticking with it till the end without waiting for patches. Just know that if you get it now, there'll be some rough edges to deal with.