Astral Ascent Review (Iconoclast Mark)
I do recommend this game in it's current state, but that comes with come caveats. TL;DR, the game is absolutely gorgeous. Incredible pixel art, great animations, solid combat, but somewhat poor balancing.
Too long, but will read anyway:
As said, the art, music, characters, designs, are nothing short of incredible. Like, the quality is nearly second to none. It kicks the crap out of Dead Cells and Skul: Hero Slayer in terms of presentation, and it's not really even close.
The combat is not bad, it has a very solid base. But I think there are some issues. I think some of the smaller enemy's attacks are poorly telegraphed. They are way too small, and the feedback on when they initiate their attack is nearly completely lost. The other thing is that enemies initiate their attacks while you're attacking them, which I'm never a huge fan of, especially when there are like 20 enemies on screen, but only one of them matters, while the others take juuuuuust long enough to kill that they take little pieces off your healthbar. It's just more annoying, and it feels like the dash has way too much downtime, for few iframes you actually get. Though that could just be perception. I managed to first-try 2 of the bosses, and I think the bosses are generally well designed. They have unique moves, but I think they are built to lose against your first try, since you never really know what they are actually gonna do until it actually happens, unless you come in extremely well prepared with a ton of HP and a healing charge. Also enemies drop HP drops so rarely that you could complete the entire first stage and get 1-2/5 shards pretty regularly, then another run you'll get like 10 it's pretty inconsistent. Seems like a pretty weird rate for the system to punish you so heavily for using the charges before you reach the 5 you need. Also 80% of your damage comes from using your abilities. It's not my favorite style, but it works, however, that makes the game run super differently if you don't get good spells, it becomes a huge slog. And you only typically get 3/4 spells that you're forced to cycle through by the end of the first stage. Meaning, you have to fight the first boss with basically 2/4 of your main damage dealers being more of a mana-tax, rather than an actually good damage option, to get to your (hopefully) good damage options.
All this is to say, the combat is good, but has some flaws that if were addressed, it could be a masterpiece. Personally I don't like having to cycle through spells by having to mill through the other 3, and sort of makes half the combat about buying time, and farming mana trying to deal chip damage with your main attack. Alternatively, and much more boringly, you could wait till your single, consistent ability on your LT cooldown goes up to actually do any amount of sizable damage, then use the opening to farm more MP. Idk, it feels clunky for how dangerous it is to farm MP while so many of the abilities are almost one-shot kills on everything but bosses. It feels like it should maybe be more evened out. Weaving spells during the natural combat rather than only engaging TO GET to use your spells.
The metagame, or the overarching strategy also leaves something to be desired. The choice between keys, currency, or a boon to one of your abilities seems like there's only one good answer. KEYS. Keys are how you get run-wide passive stat bonuses. My best run ever got stacked with strength, and it's almost impossible to do that with anything other than keys. The aura bonuses are almost always useless, despite being very important. Like, you can get an aura that will give you a small bonus when you poison an enemy! Cool! Sucks that all my abilities, weapons, and passives are for fire... There's hardly any buildcraft, and you sorta just have to hope the game gives you a synergy that you can use. And, even then it's like "deal a tiny bit of ice damage when you cast this spell" which is negligible compared to the actual strength of the spell and I feel like I hardly ever notice. That and also why would you put your passive bonuses on the early spells? You have to go so far out of your way to upgrade them, that 90% of the time, you'll have 1 OP spell, 1 decent spell, and 2 literal trash spells because you literally cannot afford to invest in your other spells, since spell upgrades, slot unlocks, and spell upgrades require you to go well out of your way to get. Better to just farm passives and then get some money to replace your spells at the guaranteed shop at the end of each stage.
I think the designer was afraid of people becoming too OP, while wanting to make an RPG system baked into a rogue-like. This game feels like it has the quality of a fully fledged single player adventure game, with the setup and everything, but they were almost afraid to take that route due to the lack of replay-ability.
It just feels uneven, uneven is the way you could describe almost everything in this game, but this game is still genuinely an artistic wonder, and I hope that the gameplay and metagame eventually reach the point to match it's near flawless presentation.