Nobody save the World: Ok, I'll admit it; it gets a bit repetitive
I'm now 15 hours into my overall gameplay of this rather innovative and interesting game by Drinkbox Studios and most of the experience has been pretty fantastic.
I do like to be fair to a game though and after these 15 hours it has occurred to me that the gameplay is becoming rather repetitive.
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I'm not saying I have a problem with the combat, quite the opposite actually. The combat, from where I am standing anyway, is simplistically wonderful. You have a lot of different options as far as your plan of attack is concerned and each of your 18 characters offer different methods of overcoming your enemies.
Take for example the recently acquired Bodybuilder, which is about as ridiculous a character as one can possible imagine.
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I can tell that the devs are definitely nerdbois just like me because why on earth would anyone ever include a character like this alongside a monk, ranger, and a knight? His attacks include flexing for AOE damage, pumping up for a damage boost, and his main attack involves slamming a weight rack into all enemies in front of him for a wide attack that while slow, is very effective because it pushes all enemies back as well.
That all sounds great right? Well, if you are silly like me it does anyway, but the problem we get into is that one of the main aspects of this game that takes up a bunch of time is not progressing to the next dungeon... oh no, the main objective over time becomes leveling up each individual character in order to unlock other characters.
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While leveling up certain abilities are pretty easy at first and involve simply using the skills that you have over and over, they get progressively more difficult to accomplish such as "breaking wards" on enemies and the ward that you have to break is often involving a skill type that any particular character doesn't actually have in their arsenal.
Fear not intrepid traveler, because you can swap out most skills that normally are used with other characters! This is fun at first, because for example I quite enjoy this one skill that the magician has where he spawns rabbits and tigers to fight alongside you. It's a lot of fun but at the same time the fact that you can now use this skill with ANY character, there isn't much incentive to use it with the character that it originates from.
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It was around the second hour of play last night that I realized that I had been doing essentially the same thing over and over for the past hour and wasn't even trying to advance the story, I was just doing something that I normally loathe in other game and that is I was repeating the same area over and over again for the sake of leveling up a character.
If you follow my writings you know how much I normally berate games for building in "grinding" to make the game appear longer and well, sorry Drinkbox, but that is exactly what is going on here.
That being said, the grind isn't as bad in this game as it is in say Path of Exile 2, but the fact that it exists at all is kind of a blemish on what is otherwise IMO, a perfect game. You don't mind the grind at first, but after suddenly realizing that I had been doing this for 2 hours in a row last night, I came to the conclusion that I don't really like doing that.
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look at all those cute bunny-minions, fighting on my behalf!
Thankfully, as far as I can tell this isn't required (unlike in POE2 where it definitely is) so I am going to proceed henceforth in a fashion where I do NOT ever grind until it becomes apparent that I have to in order to progress. Given the whimsical nature of this game I would imagine that I don't encounter a difficulty spike where it becomes absolutely necessary for me to level up 5 levels before proceeding.
If that happens, we are going to see my opinion of this game change dramatically. At the moment, the fact that I have mostly really enjoyed 15 hours of this $30 game says to me that it is a worthwhile purchase. I guess it all depends on what you think your time is worth.