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.

Sundered is a smooth, but short, metroidvania wrapped in a Lovecraftian sci-fi shell. The combat feels incredible, the skill tree offers another layer of character progression, and the world is well designed with sequence breaks and secrets to discover.

I enjoyed it enough to do two playthroughs, one for each ending. The two endings require you to pursue different unlocks for your character, drastically altering the way you play the game. The “Embrace” path of corrupting your abilities gives you access to a much improved movement kit. The “Resist” path offers an upgraded skill tree and additional combat prowess. I vastly preferred the Resist path based on combat feel alone. My Embrace character felt underpowered in comparison, but navigating the world felt incredible with the improved navigational abilities.

There’s a wide array of difficulty options, from choosing a difficulty at the main menu to equipping perks that offer greater risk for greater reward to grinding for shards to increase your player power. I thoroughly enjoyed mastering the game on hard, grinding to max out my character, and then facing the empowered bosses.

Highly recommended to fans of Metroidvanias. It hits all the right spots and is the perfect length.

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

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

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.

Another game that could have been a masterpiece, but suffers from heavy flaws in various aspects of design.
Starting with how monotonous, dull, uninspired and empty the locations feel. But there's much more that could have been better.
Overall, I recommend it, but just barely, and because it's a bit different from most metroidvanias; because, damn, it's frustrating that this could have been such a good game and ends up being ultimately mediocre.
The lore is a shallow mess, the voice of the Trapezohedron that talks to you is very cool, but far from enough to make what is said barely interesting. Also, the devs went a bit too heavy on lovecraftian names (without really catching a lovecraftian atmosphere), stamping in the middle of the screen those unspeakable location names like Pfkyt'aan Mglub Grathakleemushopitech (not an actual name in game, but they're along those lines), and then you have lore character named Nelson, totally killing the vibe (same with enemies, on some locations you have lovecraftian horrors, on others you have dull-looking sniper robots).
Progression is pointlessly limited and badly designed. The first time you see the upgrade tree, it looks big enough, but then you realize it's overall quite small and doesn't make you progress to the cool point you'd expect. It limits your stats and abilities to keep you in check against enemies even when you're at the max.
Other than the permanent upgrades, you can equip up to three special perks (two, initially; four if you destroy Elder Shards) chosen among a total of 28, almost each of which comes with a passive negative effect. In certain cases, the effect is not as much a negative in itself, as it is more a "build-altering" effect, like the perk that applyes a percentage of health to your shield and reduces actual health to 1; but most of them actually have a flat negative effect. Personally, I'm not a fan of having negatives, but they'd be alright, if they weren't in a context that overall makes you feel very limited.
But all the perks and upgrades are just passive effects and numbers; active abilities are another messy matter. First of all, the only attacks abilities you get in the whole game other than your sword (and its "finishers" that aren't finishers but just a stronger attack that needs to be charged up) are a cannon and a special directional and chargeable attack. The cannon is strong if we talk about flat numbers, but in practice it's extremely meh, in good part due to its slowness (this is a very fast-paced game) and its huge recoil (in spaces that are often full of environmental dangers and possibility to fall down to your death in certain areas). The directional attacks are messy, because you have to hit direction button (or analog) and attack at the exact same time, which is difficult to do in a controlled and reasoned manner (in, again, a fast-paced game), but at the same time it happens when you're mashing attack and directing towards some enemy, resulting in unwanted attacks that make you move in ways you didn't want, like the cannon. And you'll practically never fully charge one of those attacks, because you're constantly barraged by enemy attacks, no time to stand there like an idiot, taking hits.
So, in the end, you're left trusting only in your sword combo from start to finish, which is very dull.
Exploration abilites are more varied, but they too end up being a tangled mess. First of all, a few of them are totally pointless... namely, the grappling hook and its very dull power-up; it's only used in one major location, where you can absolutely do without it (as you do until you find the room containing it, actually) and one or two minor locations.
Other abilities are redundant and even get in your way when trying to jump around fast (especially in zones with endless hordes of enemies, where there's no point in fighting them and you only need to move through the place fast). For example, the spider-climb: it's redundant because you already could latch to walls from the beginning (yes, you'd slowly fall, but you could just keep jumping to reach up) and it's annoying when you're trying to move fast and you find yourself spider-splattered on a wall, slowly moving along it when you just needed to fall down quickly.
Beyond all this, when enemies come in numbers, apart from the fact that it becomes a bullet hell, the main point is that you don't understand anymore where you are (enemies cover you, the camera zooms out, they hit you and push you around etc., and you lose track of where you are), you can't see the layout of the room, the environmental dangers, and you get overwhelmed in an utter chaos on screen.
The map is a mix of fixed and procedural: it has big zones that are always fixed in their layous; within each of those zones, there are smaller procedural zones that may form any path between the various exits of their bigger zone. They change upon death, as in a roguelite (but you don't lose anything upon death, you only get carried back to the main hub).
This seems like a lot of work for a pointless result. Having a fixed bigger layout where only smaller rooms change, where actually the smaller rooms aren't even that varied, doesn't add to the experience. It doesn't detract either, it's just... a lot of work for nothing.
I didn't want to waste time getting a bit in-depth, but I got carried away. Anyway, as I said at the beginning, could have been a masterpiece, but it's actually pretty dull. It's a pity. Try it to get a vision of what could have been, but don't expect too much.
EDIT:
Typos and wording.