Remnant: From the Ashes
Good game, but beware of over-leveling! The more you level up, the more the threats level up and the harder the whole game becomes. If you have an elite or boss who’s always killing you, look to your gear and/or tactics. Leveling up to beat the challenge is NOT the way to go in this game. Just something I learned the hard way.
– Real player with 126.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action RPG Games.
This game overall was a very nice pleasant surprise , A third person shooter with a few of the ‘‘dark souls’’ gameplay mechanism like rolling around to dodges but controls that just work much better with a mouse and keyboard.
the game is not overly difficult outside of a few specific boss battles , the challenge is very well balanced and you can always crank the difficulty up if you find it too easy also.
checkpoints are common and you always have one right before a boss battle so even if you die you rarely have much to redo and you also don’t lose currency when you die.
– Real player with 106.3 hrs in game
Skautfold: Shrouded in Sanity
This game is an oddball. It has basic soulslike combat in 2.5 convention, one giant mansion level, deep lore and Lovecraftian overdrive. The whole game can be finished in less than two hours, but there are 4 endings and a lot of cryptic information for people that love put pieces of information together. It’s not exactly a masterpiece though. Before you decide to buy it or not, you should probably know there’s already a free version of this game called Shrouded in Sanity: Freebirth and it’s basically the same game but without New Game+ and some additional challenges.
– Real player with 22.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action RPG Games.
Shrouded in Sanity is the relatively recent one-man project that claims to be inspired by Dark Souls, Resident Evil, Eternal Darkness, Bloodborne, probably Hellboy and Prey at this rate. Throw in Pride and Prejudice while we’re at it, why not.
Like most indie games, Shrouded in Sanity isn’t so much inspired as it is brewed in a beaker Powerpuff Girls style with its roots wholesale vomited into the concotion. Chemical X in this case being “lack of money” resulting in lowest resolution for pixel art since the original Wolfenstein.
– Real player with 14.1 hrs in game
Nioh: Complete Edition / 仁王 Complete Edition
One of the best rpg samurai games since ninja gaiden.
– Real player with 346.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action RPG Games.
Soul-like but also different.
Sometime the game can get really frustrating but overall Nioh still a great game to play.
– Real player with 114.5 hrs in game
Pharaonic
Pros / What’s good?
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The Egyptian theme is an eye-pleasing hook, and consistent throughout most of the game. The Serket armor set looks like something from monster hunter and the Ishtar set has this silly blue-pink paint job going on.
Combat is challenging, tactical almost. To Some attacks cannot be blocked, only dodged. Some cannot be dodged, only blocked. These attacks have ‘colored trails’ on them: red is unblockable, blue is undodgeable. Parrying - I found it new that you could parry enemies blocking with their shield in order to get them to drop their guard.
– Real player with 116.1 hrs in game
Pharaonic is a game that has drawn many comparisons to the Dark Souls series with its action RPG features and the hacking and slashing. Honestly, I have not played one game of the Dark Souls series. I wanted to give Pharaonic, an indie game, a try because I was captivated by the art direction, the stunning environmental design, and the stunning background design. It is a side scrolling game with a steep learning curve, tough enemies, and a fantastic setting in Ancient Egypt.
The story of Pharaonic is set in Ancient Egypt and you play Dagi, a prisoner who tries to escape from prison to find out what happened to The Red Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt in the year 440. You get to escape with the assistance of a mysterious woman. This is where your journey truly begins, as you are almost fully naked and armed with a basic sword. The plot is not very deep, but the focus of the game is on combat. There are many enemies and the battles are very difficult. I died many times but was rarely frustrated. I quickly realized that getting killed was mainly my fault and it was a matter of understanding my strengths and weaknesses as well as understanding the strengths and weaknesses of my enemies. Your defense, like dodge roll, block, and parry, is just as important as your offense because taking a few too many hits will result in certain death.
– Real player with 47.5 hrs in game
Mortal Shell
Shell we get started?
The Good
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Graphics
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Performance
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OST
The Bad
- Too short
My Thoughts
Considering this game was made by a dev team of only 15 people, they did a brilliant job in making their own Souls-like game, you can clearly see the people who made this are huge DS fans, they even go on to say via their own Twitter and webpage that they took inspiration from the DS games and wanted to put a unique twist on it, safe to say they did it.. with a low budget this game is polished than most AAA titles out there, it is everything you expect from a FromSoftware title.
– Real player with 30.9 hrs in game
I started this game hoping for a great souls-like with a unique twist. For starters the harden mechanic is genius and is one of the best parts of the game. There are 4 weapon types and only one of them actually makes you feel powerful. There are 4 shells but only one has the stamina to allow more that one combo before backing off for 30 seconds. The game does have the brutal difficulty you might expect, however it isn’t done in an engaging way. Every enemy of the game is beaten in the exact same way. Hold back until your stamina is full, do 1-3 attacks, harden to avoid the counterattack, hold back for 30 seconds, and repeat. Out of the three temples one of them is invalidated by a single ability from the best shell and another one is a massive, empty, poorly thought out mess that punishes you for exploring by ambushing you the moment you pick up the item. (This is a repeated thing not just a once off.) After beating the boss in each temple the game goes into “Fog Mode” and rearranges the temples to make it difficult to leave. Essentially punishing you for completing your objective. Your objective being completely obscured and barely even existing outside of: “Beat the Game”. Despite all of this harsh criticism, I have more that twenty hours and two playthroughs down and am considering a third. I genuinely don’t understand what kept me going through this game for multiple runs but it keeps me coming back. The visuals are absurdly good, the alternate soundtrack absolutely rips (please use the Blood Christ soundtrack it’s the best), and it kept me going for multiple playthroughs. However, the difficulty is poorly constructed, the freedom to choose the way you play is punished often, and the game is strangely buggy for being months out from release, and it spends far too much time punishing you for playing the game. Despite all that I still find it captivating. My rating is a 4/10. Just below average enough that I really can’t recommend it strongly but not so bad I don’t think it shouldn’t be played if you find it interesting. Given it’s around 10 hours of playtime and I couldn’t see paying more than $20 for it in it’s current state.
– Real player with 26.0 hrs in game
Hellpoint
If there was ever a game that I did not expect to resonate with me so much, it would be Hellpoint. When I tried the demo; The Thespian Feast I thought “Meh it’s okay I guess”, but I decided to take the plunge and bought the full game a couple of days after release to give it a real honest fair shake, and to support a new up and coming developer. And oh my did I fall in love so deeply with this game as it has become one of my all time favourite games ever. Yes it is a Souls-like and yes it is rough around the edges with some balance issues and bugs but it’s one of those games I found myself continuously coming back to and loving every run I do because it always felt fresh and different trying out new builds, routes and seeing the game world change around me all the time as I discover new thing.
– Real player with 123.7 hrs in game
(tl;dr version)
This game is legit. It gets a lot more right than it gets wrong. This is your sci-fi Souls that you’ve wanted all along.
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(Longer version)
You know how a lot of Souls-likes try, but ultimately kind of fail at really capturing that “Souls” feel? Usually due to overly janky and/or unsatisfying combat, milquetoast level design, tepid atmosphere… there’s always something that’s missing, that makes you think “yeah, no, this just doesn’t cut it”.
Hellpoint… is on point. Despite being crowdfunded project made by an experienced, but small, indie team, and not a high-budget endeavour, it gets a lot more things right than it gets wrong, and is overall on of the better Souls-likes I’ve played.
– Real player with 49.4 hrs in game
The Surge
This is an interesting one … a rollercoaster of emotions so far. When I started out I was amazed. I was aware I wouldn’t really like the environment much because the tech-production-warehouse setting has been dead to me since Doom (the original one, mind you ;-) Knowing that I came for the combat (and hopefully, the story). So I was surprised to see what effort went into building the levels. I still find the setting boring, but it has been created by a very competent team.
Difficulty level was fine for the first area. Entering the second area it started ramping up until I hit a brick wall somewhere in the middle of it. Coming up from a shortcut into an area covered in toxic waste with two leaping, sting-tailed robodogs and a guard was something I think I couldn’t handle, because I was dead so quickly without time to learn anything about the enemy. The other option was to slog through the initial path, wasting minutes and minutes to end up like 30 meters from that other point, but in a much better place (from a tactical point of view). Only to be killed 10 seconds later.
– Real player with 98.7 hrs in game
This game is goddamned excellent. Bosses are thrilling, but there are only five of them. Combat is tense and exciting throughout. Grinding, leveling and building are ingenious. And the story hit me with two themes surprisingly effectively.
The Bosses
There are only 5 bosses in this game. However, this game makes the absolute most of those 5 encounters. The first boss is your warm-up. It’s your introduction to the game. It punishes you if you’re bad, though. So, as a beginner, it feels good when you defeat it.
– Real player with 74.5 hrs in game
Immortal Planet
Immortal Planet is an Isometric RPG that mimics a Dark Souls format. I think the game has great combat, dialogue, level design, art direction and immersive atmosphere. The pace of the combat can be a little slow due to reliance on stamina and avoiding attacks. Everything that this game does has a purpose in my opinion, but someone who is not familiar with the genre may find that movement is a little stiff. In short, I think this is a fantastic game for people who like methodically slow gameplay that relies on timing, patience, and reflexes. It also has a limited 90-degree animation which is nostalgic but causes some aiming problems.
– Real player with 47.5 hrs in game
tl;dr: it’s hard for no reason, but is an interesting attempt at games like this if you like to suffer.
The importance of any game one plays “For the Challenge” is predicated on the understanding that ultimately, that challenge is fair and interesting to achieve. Through whatever mechanics you provide, you expect the player to 1. get a handle on them, and 2. master them enough such that the player can overcome challenges in their way. The top problem with a sword stuck in it is “you can just lose 200 health on a misstep,” and that’s to any enemy. My two most common ways of dying are “oh my hitbox was overlapping with an enemy slightly so when i tried to dash away it counted it as inside the enemy and stunned me,” and “oops i dashed off a cliff,” and these often kill you regardless of how much health you have. For a game ostensibly about making mistakes and learning from them, it took me hours upon hours of intensive practice to get used to the game, and i’ve still not done a single boss without taking damage partially due to how many of them spread fire or acid or cold or something on the ground.
– Real player with 16.6 hrs in game
Chronos: Before the Ashes
A good Souls-like, but too many puzzles…
The game has a very interesting progression system where-by each time you die, you get stronger, until your reach about 35 deaths, then you start getting weaker… that’s because each time you die, you grow older (until age 80, when you just stay 80). You also unlock new passive talents at 10 deaths, 20 deaths, 30 deaths, etc. but they become a drawback as you reach old age since at old age ‘Arcane’ combat is favored instead of Strength/Agility. This is a very innovative system and one that I haven’t seen in any game I’ve played before.
– Real player with 112.0 hrs in game
Chronos wasn’t what I was expecting and it took a little bit of a warm up to fully immerse myself into it, but it was a very enjoyable delve into the ashes world again.
After playing Remnant: From the Ashes, seeing the release of the prequel caught my interest so I bought myself a copy and now find myself here. It took me a while but now I’m fairly certain I can recommend this title.
The game starts a tad slow with a few hard cut area transitions in lifts and a momentary entrance into the remains of the modern world in the ashes universe before throwing you into the actual gameplay. After a good hour or so, I still felt as though the combat was rather slow but this evolved over time to become very enjoyable as I learned the attack patterns of the enemies one by one and began overcoming everything Chronos threw at me.
– Real player with 21.3 hrs in game
10mg: HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0
Removing the procedurally generated aspect from the beloved roguelite seems like a risk, and it is – but with careful game design, Handmadedeathlabyrinth delivers: through incisively selected data that carries over across runs, and a dungeon that goes by faster and faster as you learn its inner workings, a convincing argument is made that procedural generation isn’t necessarily integral to the roguelite feeling. And learning is indeed the name of the game here: studying how traps and enemies work – trying new methods of handling what’s thrown at you – is a delightful journey of discovery. From start to finish, barring extra content, the game is only 30 (not quite 10!) minutes or so.
– Real player with 3.1 hrs in game
I purchased the full 10 Minute Game Collection and am going to play them in the order they appear in my library. That means this is #4 of 10.
Know in advance what you are getting. As the collection title suggests, a ten minute game is not a triple A title. It is a short game-jam-esque proof of concept / working prototype / execution of an idea. At least that’s what I’m going to infer from first impressions.
So far the quality of these little 10 minute games has been superb. Let me say this from the outset; this game is a mini masterpiece.
– Real player with 1.0 hrs in game