izigame.me

I've beaten the first difficulty and I wanna write down my thoughts/impressions so far. I may update this review as I play more.
Dancy Ace is a bit of a mixed bag. On one side, the goofy mood and graphics of the game deceptively hide the punishing difficulty. This game is pretty challenging. I've played hundreds of hours of Dead Cells and Hades, so I have a fair bit of roguelike experience. Dandy Ace has no parry, no i-frames on the dodge, no deflect, no block. The only way to defend yourself is by crowd control effects (with a very short duration) and by timing your dodges with the attack pattern of the enemies. Every skill, including dodging, has a cooldown, you can't spam it. You need to time it right.
However, the lack of defensive tools does mean that the game forces you into a caster/ranged build all the time. I've tried melee builds with stun and etc, but getting into melee range of enemies (and possibly surrounded by them) is just way too punishing. You lose too much health trying to get in range to do damage. Dashing into enemies just means you take damage from their attacks, even if your dash does damage. There are a few skills that can help, like a shield that blocks one ranged hit, invincibility, and invisibility. Overall though, a ranged/caster build is just way easier.
I do wish there was more build variation. I enjoy variety, but some builds/combinations are just so much better than others, it kinda forces me into becoming an OTP because I need the highest damage output.
Visual exhaustion/overwhelm is definitely a thing. After a few hours of Dandy Ace, the amount of things that happen on the screen is just too much. Projectiles from all directions. Harmful surfaces on the ground. Your own skills creating more flashes of light and colour. Cards popping up on the screen when the cooldown is done. Some toggles in the setting to disable certain visuals, such as the cards popping up, would help a lot in terms of visibility. There are not a lot of audio cues that help with combat, something that Hades and Dead Cells for example do really well, you can use your ears when your eyes are overwhelmed by the amount of stuff happening.
Twitch integration is great. Viewers can choose your card rewards rather than the player just getting a random one from the chest. They can give you buffs and heals. They choose the path you take through your run. What bosses you will face. They can even temporarily become a boss. However, it tends to clutter the screen with more windows, ongoing vote timers, a game that already has so much going on, having another 25% of your screen hidden because of 3 ongoing viewer votes, is a bit much. I had to disable the Lele mode because it was just crowding the screen too much. An option to hide the vote window in-game and make it appear as a text message in chat instead would be greatly appreciated.
In return for handing your "control" to your viewers, the buffs and heals you get from the Twitch Assist make the game a whole lot easier. It's a fun experience handing the reigns of your game to the whims of your chat. The only downside being the extra visual clutter on a game that is already troubled by it.
I would also like to see more enemy variation, especially in terms of attack patterns. Higher difficulties just increase the enemy damage and health, while reducing the amount of heals the player gets, but it doesn't actually make combat more varied, just takes longer and taking damage is more punishing. This makes increasing the difficulty less exciting because you already know what to expect.
I enjoy the game a lot, it's fun, it's goofy, the graphics are both funny and adorable. The amount of cards and the possible combinations is insane. The dialogue is cringe as fuck, but in a good way. But these small things that just, could've been done better, takes away the potential the game has. I hope the developers will be polishing the game more after release, as a bit more polish could turn this into a true gem. Despite it's flaws, I still recommend it. It's a fun game, far from perfect, but fun.