RemiLore

RemiLore is good, a surprisingly well polished anime-style action game from a small Korean indie team and published by the ever-so-interesting Nicalis. The action is fairly straightforward. Top down hack and slash, you have a light attack, a slightly slower heavy attack, and a dash that has no iframes but can interrupt anything you are doing except getting hit. This gives the combat a wonderful flow; the dash feels so good you want to use it constantly, and this is a bad thing as you only have so many charges of it and it is your only defense. You have a spell too, only one at a time, but the spells tend to only supplement your hack and slash action. Enemy windups are good and clear, and smart play feels like a nice ballet of dashing, striking, dashing away, and just plain stylish fun.
The game is... kind of a roguelike? The structure is roguelite but the game clearly does not want to commit to permadeath, allowing you to restart each world if you die. (More roguelites, and probably roguelikes too, need that level of humility as very few of them are truly good enough to earn the right to employ permadeath.) It also runs a hair long, about 2 hours per clear (Though most roguelites can't control themselves and think 2 hours is a SHORT clear), but it's got a generous saving system so you need not do that all in one run.
Another HUGE mercy: This game does not jew you on health. Unlike almost every other two-bit roguelite out there where if you get nicked once you better just restart the run, health potions drop randomly and are generally plentiful. Unfortunately, one bad room is typically more than enough to kill you dead and the game tends to swing a lot on that randomness of health drops.
It also does not have much in the way of roguelite power creep. You slowly unlock more weapon types the more you clear the game, but practically speaking they do not offer much except slower or faster combos (The heavy weapons are generally just TOO slow to work around the enemy openings), and the only way you meaningfully get stronger during each run is by grabbing a higher tier weapon. There are dozens of weapons at each tier with slightly different DPS and perks, and each weapon also has a different spell equipped. This is the sort of game where some of those perks are clearly WAY better than others. "Bonus vs Slowed enemies" is way worse than "Randomly slows enemies" for instance, and the DPS spells are almost all way worse than Stun/Freeze/Slow spells just for the defensive utility you get from them. But again, you don't get stronger outside of tiering up. You only ever have one weapon and one spell. There are some random cards that occasionally give you a slight HP bar boost, but can also randomly swap your weapon (Catastrophic if you have a great kit) or REDUCE your max HP (WHY?!) and you have no way of knowing what they will do. You're playing the same game at the start as you do at the end, just with slightly bigger numbers popping up when you hit robots.
Every level follows the exact same flow, too. There are no side paths. Just a series of combat rooms, each level is two combat rooms, a midboss room, a chest room, and a smaller room, and the end room. The paths wind pointlessly but always direct you down this same linear sequence.
For being an indie game, the combat and enemies are really good. There is some great variety and the dodge gives the combat a wonderful flow, but there are some rookie mistakes here. Enemy projectiles are tiny, slow moving, and generally tough to see amidst the visual clutter of the game. Your own spellbook companion shoots automatically at enemies and his bullets are bigger than enemy bullets, not counting all the crap you collect slowly flying into him. You eat a lot of projectile damage you can't hardly see. The other big issue I have is that a lot of combat scenarios just spam too many enemies at you. You have a great dodge and strike kit but beyond that you have no option for crowd control. You can't uppercut and air combo, you can't do anything to separate enemies or avoid getting stunlocked to death by three angry robots apart from maybe using a shutdown spell or just running away and hoping only one or two bother to follow you. Most enemies can be stunlocked until they start a windup and then you need to get out of dodge, and they will not wait for their friends to finish attacking.
The other issue is that there just isn't enough variety here. I have enjoyed the first couple of plays immensely but even I was getting tired by the end of these runs. The combat is good, better than a lot of competition in the top down action subgenre, even going beyond roguelites and comparing it against REAL games. But it can't carry the roguelite repetition. There are several extra modes: random weapons, random spells, 2x speed+1/2 damage, 1/2 speed+2x damage (please no the hikes take long enough), boss rush, ACTUAL permadeath mode... but I can't be bothered to do them when I could just go run an actual action game again like DMC or Ys or Fight n Rage or I'll just credit feed Metal Slug 7 again or something.
RemiLore is tough to review in that position. The polish is top notch, the fundamentals are strong. The story is a little corny but it is charming in places even if most of it is pointless chatter to waste your time. If you just play for the story, once for each character, you're looking at a 6 hour-ish game where you see all the content, you fought a bunch of cool robots, a bunch of cool bosses with some good variety and fundamentals (Surprisingly fair and clean too, which is more than most roguelites and several top down action games can manage.), you had a good time. But you paid $40 for it, when even roguelites with actual longevity and action games with actual variety don't cost that much. But the polish, art, music, it's all at the $40 tier. It's not worth $40 but then it can't be worth anything less than $40. Maybe it clicks with you, maybe you actually want to run every mode in it, unlock all the cute girl costumes, maybe what's here really DOES work for you. I doubt it, but it's possible. But the point is even if the roguelite stuff does not pan out, as a one-and-done game, this is still better than most you will play. On that level it still works, even if you are in the unenviable position of having paid for a roguelite and got a one-and-done arcade game.

This game caught me by surprise i was iffy about actually trying it with the mixed reviews but I'm glad i gave it a chance, it's a fun little hack n slash reminiscent of the binding of isaac and they even pay a little homage with a costume of him, which just makes me think that it was inspired by it even more so. you can expect a bunch of dungeon crawling in different venues (not sure if they are randomized or not.)... but what is randomized to an extent is the weapons / perks you gather along the way, this also has a good handful of costumes / recolors which is a lot more than most games will give you nowadays, and from what i can tell so far the random effect cards just mainly only effects health, mana, points, and weapon, which is nice, but would be a welcomed factor to have more randomized effects in the game when picking those cards up... im only on the 3rd act so far so for all i know there could be but i haven't experienced more of them personally yet. with steams new online couch coop they integrated this allows it to also be a fun experience to share and play with a friend since they won't need to purchase the game to try it out or play it with you, although i would highly encourage to get this game if you like binding of isaac-esk games. Good Job, i just hope this game progresses and gets more added to it content and feature wise down the line and not just costumes so that it really adds a random chaotic fun improvement that the game could benefit from even though it's really not bad in it's current state.
Could benefit from multiple save slots as well for the different game modes, instead of all of them sharing one save slot.