Sundered: Eldritch Edition

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☐ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☑ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☑ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

TL;DR: It's mid. I'm not disappointed I played it and/or spent money on it, but wait for it to go on sale, and don't expect Hollow Knight or Nine Sols. The story is forgetable, combat is mash-tastic, but the skill tree/perks and boss fights make for a decent experience.

Full review: Overall, I'd say this is mid. It's art style is good, the skill tree is fun, and the perks you get are random, so you have to adjust your playstyle for what you have... until you have most or all of them, and you use one of a few combos that synergize together.

The horizontal movement is very fluid and fun, but vertical is just... sigh. Platforms are usually just at the top of your jump so you default to upslashing all the time to make sure you make the jump. Movement gets better as you gain more abilities, but vertical movement is annoying pretty much everywhere there's not a bunch of walls to wall jump from.

Combat if fun at first because of the fluidity of movement, but after a while it gets stale. I hate horde mechanics and that's what this relies on. The first times you make it through a horde, it's great. They are tough especially early on, but eventually they don't pose a threat and you want to explore, then a horde shows up... then another horde shows up... then another horde shows up... then another horde shows up. Some hordes are literally never-ending. It mostly boils down to mash attack and periodically hit dodge or your "finisher."

The Boss fights are really good though; they are actually unique, epic fights with a good sense of satisfaction when you complete them.

The story is meh. I played through it twice and it's just not gripping in the way Nine Sols or Hollow Knight are. You're in the desert for some reason, get pulled into some other dimension or other. If there's a reason you're in the desert, I didn't retain it after watching the start of the game twice, but I could almost novelize the Hollow Knight or Nine Sols story and lore. Evil thing says they'll help you escape. You collect elder crystals along the way and you can choose to "embrace" (evil) or "resist" (good). As with most binary choice endings, they end up pretty meh. They are significant playwise though as embracing enhances your core abilities, where resisting leaves your core abilities alone, but gives you other benefits instead.

It's not a bad game, but it's a "wait for a sale" and only if you've already played the much better metroidvanias like Hollow Knight and Nine Sols kind of a game.

Such a good game and some of the coolest and most epic boss fights I've seen. Hallow Knights + Super Smash Bros + skill tree = 10/10

8/10. Very fun albeit short game. I love the lovcraftian elements! I wasn't sure how well the medtroivania rouge like combo would work but they do it very well. Takes about 12 hours to beat, but there are 3 endings so its worth a replay or 2. definitely recommend if you have a rouge-like addiction like me! :D

I enjoyed this one quite a bit. It has a mash-y action-y style to the combat, but it's difficult enough that you actually have to be mashing the right buttons, not random buttons, if you don't want to get sent back to home base. The challenge is mostly based on quantity of enemies rather than learning a single enemy's tactics, having "hordes" swarm you at time, and some areas they come infinitely and your goal is just to get through the area and collect anything you're after along the way.

Movement feels good and fluid and things are generally fast paced. As you get skills it really opens up your movement possibilities as well, and the ability to corrupt those skills significantly enhances or changes a few of them, which is great.

The talent tree is nice, but it's more of a "which ones do I get first" kind of tree rather than a "which ones do I give up to have these others" kind of tree, but I suppose that's good because there's a few skills that are all but mandatory (being able to destroy projectiles is absolutely critical). For the most part they're passive and it's how you power creep through the game, but you can focus it by choosing which paths to take or skip, and the major nodes generally significantly enhance whatever ability they affect (or in a couple cases give you a new capability as mentioned before).

Combat can be a little grindy but I didn't find the grind annoying at any point, and was running into new or enhanced versions of enemies at about the right spots. There are difficulty spikes as you move into new sections of the three main areas, and then each area transition is a difficulty spike of its own. Generally if you're getting your butt handed to you to aggressively, you don't belong in that area yet - go find some shards in other areas. Bosses are generally tough and take multiple tries, similar to dark souls for me, though didn't take me quite as many tries as certain souls bosses, at least on Hard difficulty.

The map is really nice, showing where something's blocked until you get a new ability so I don't sit trying to pass it and wondering if I'm meant to be able to now, or if I'm supposed to wait until later. It also shows where doors are and if you've traversed them, which I appreciate in this sort of game. There are some procedurally generated spots on the map, but not the entire map is generated, just specific "rooms" or sections. It seems a lot of folks didn't like that but I didn't mind much, it made for a bit of obstacle in that you can't just memorize the path and call it good, which I just took in stride as another part of the challenge - didn't really add or take away anything from the experience for me.

The best thing is you can play couch coop with up to 4. I love couch coop tacked on in single-player-experience type games like this, and the system they used for it is nice, imo, and works for me and my kids (though if you have a huge skill gap could get frustrating for the one attempting to carry).

A solid entry into the genre for me.

TL:DR 11hr playtime on Normal Difficulty. Gorgeous game. 9/10. Big recommend to any fans of Metroidvanias who also enjoy Rougelikes.
The game is a mix of Metroidvania and Rougelike. The overall map layout is the same, but many of the rooms are more like zones with the insides of the zones being randomized so while you will always follow the same path through the zones to get back to where you were, the exact path will be different every time. I thought this was a really good way to blend the genres and also addresses some of my complaints about a lot of rougelikes being never ending mazes where a good run is completely RNG based and you can often feel like you are wasting your time. Here in Sundered, every enemy you kill and pot you break drops shards that you can spend between runs on small upgrades to things like your health and damage. Eventually, enough of those small upgrades makes a big difference when you go back through old rooms you've visted before.
The artwork for the game is GORGEOUS everything is hand drawn and really gives off that creepy Lovecraftian vibe. The movement abilities are fun and impactful on exploring the world. The map is well laid out for a Metroidvania with lots of ability check shortcuts and other shortcuts that reward you for exploring everywhere. The combat is fun and has some customization with your upgrades. For instance, I skipped as many of the Ranged Attack nodes on the skill tree as I could, favoring Melee combat. Sometimes, though, the best thing to do is to just run until the monsters stop spawning.
My biggest complaint with the game is the minimalistic approach they took with the story. I felt kind of lost in the beginning not really knowing why I was doing what I was doing. But I suppose that was kind of the point? The game has 3 different endings, something I didn't know when I first started. One where you embrace the darkness and become corrupted, one where you resist the darkness and become a beacon of hope, and the third neutral ending if you didn't go 100% one way or the other. I felt like the game didn't really make it clear in the beginning there were options for this. I ended up going full corruption as I didn't even know that Resisting awarded you with different skill upgrades compared to the corrupted upgrades which they are very up front about.
Overall, I put in just over 11hrs and acheived a 98% completion rating. I thought about going back in to finish that to 100% but then I remembered the things I would need to collect to achieve that were RNG drop dependent and it just killed my desire as I didn't feel like grinding. Overall, I would give the game a 9/10. Big recommend to any fans of Metroidvanias who also enjoy Rougelikes.

Very good game! Its has very fun game play and the story is also really good. It seems like there could be multiple endings but I only did one play through.