Halls of Torment Review (Lord Gyrops)
I have mixed feelings on this one. On one hand, it is only 6,66€, looks good and runs well. On the other hand, that is all it has going for it, yet it still sits at 95% positive reviews. This rating seems too far from what I think it deserves, so I want to shine some light on its weak points to help out those who got blinded by the visuals (you know who you are).
tl;dr: Game has no performance issues and looks like Diablo (which is 95% of its merit). Gameplay is unengaging and grindy and peaks at "not harsh anymore". Not good, far from fun, just "not as bad as it was starting out".
If you REALLY need your survivor-like to look like Diablo, then go for it. Otherwise go for Holocure or Death Must Die (or Vampire Survivors) as they all outclass it in every aspect aside from maybe your personal preference in visual style.
Be warned that a long, rambling yap is following.
The game starts slow, as in "your character moves at a snail pace and barely clears the enemies" slow. Matches the visual style and the unforgiving gameplay of the era that its visuals draw from, but that's about as far as the compromise goes. Maps have a few different point of interests you can reach, but due to the movement speed you likely won't get to complete more than one set of them at a time during your first runs, if at all. Combat feels adequate, with some desperately needed stat increases on level up to make your first character not fall behind too far and maybe survive 10-15 minutes on your first try.
Go back to the camp and spend a few coins on meta upgrades to your stats. Rinse and repeat a few times until you get enough stats to have your character not feel crippled, but instead appropriate to have a chance at clearing the level. Repeat for 10 hours until you realize that the grind never stops and you have yet to reach the point where you feel strong instead of handicapped, and the game did not hit actual fun territory once during your playtime.
Sounds overly dramatic, but that is what my experience with the game was like.
It is understandable for your power level to be too low for a chance to clear the first map on your first tries, but here it feels sadistic. You move slowly, barely get to pickup resources due to your tiny pickup range, and attack slowly. Once enemies start to come in at a faster pace it won't take long to die. It takes a few runs to grind enough stats to have enough power to clear, and even more if you want to get some QOL stats, such as movement speed and pickup range, just for gameplay to be less tedious . The first map and its accompanying missions provide enough motivation and rewards to offer a quick increase in power level, but all that does is unveil the plethora of other systems the game has been graciously saving so you don't get swamped with too many grinds at once.
One at a time you get to unlock (and grind to upgrade) meta progression such as: more stats to upgrade, reroll and banish options on level up, items to equip, and also new classes. Just for those you will need to run maps plenty of times, not only do you collect currencies, the equipment you want to unlock only reaches your camp if you collect them during a run and then send it back, one at a time, during the level to save it, and thus have access to it in future runs. You need to sacrifice power during any given run in favor of meta progression since you lose a well needed upgrade to unlock it permanently. On its own that sounds fine, but it is so slow. You only get to do that for one item per run (at first? Could be upgradable, but who cares to play enough to find out), and with the amount and variety you want to build up for the roster of heroes, that is gonna take a LOT of runs you play just to collect items and send them back. And then do it again, but this time purposely pick an item that does not fit your class, but hasn't been unlocked. And then again. And there is no other option, such as playing well and getting to carry out all the items you carry. Only the one item you send back to camp, everything else collected is lost.
Is that bad? So bad that I would go out of my way to write a negative review?
No, but it's one of the more egregious systems that require running maps over and over. The real bad part is that running maps is not fun. The core gameplay that the meta systems loop you around is slow and unrewarding, and that is the actual sin.
I started out talking about the game feeling slow, which is due to the default movement speed, along with attack speed and no access to advanced skills. This gets better after all, since your gold goes into rectifying that. But then you complete dozens of runs and find out that the game is a different kind of slow aside from the meta grind: Actually clearing maps is an uninteractive waiting around until the time ticks down. Once you hit the desired power level to comfortably grind meta items, you get to enjoy not being threatened by mobs anymore. That is where you find out that leveling up is presenting you with a screen showing multiple rewards to pick from, yet there is no real decision to be made. It might have felt like it during the first map when every stat was lacking, and you had to assess which area was lacking most at any given moment, but later on those stat increases become less impactful. The real meat should be in the advanced skills you get to upgrade every few levels, yet there is not enough variety among their upgrade paths, or interactions between skills to force any actual decision making. Skills are just a different visual that enemies die to. No matter which one I committed to, the gameplay felt the same. The way you move and engage with enemies does not change depending on what you picked. It is easy to see the clear best option, and then it is back to waiting for another 5 level ups to pick another one. There is no crafting a build in this game, no theory crafting synergies, there is only choosing which skill you want to carry you through a level, and then investing in it once unlocked.
And once you do, it doesn't even get fun. Even with a strong loadout and great items, you might be strong and delete enemies, yet not even this state is actually fun to be at. Enemies come at you too slow to make it satisfactory, so even the ideal endgame power level is just...not fun. After all the grinding to get past the painful early stats, and the grinding to unlock enough meta systems, and enough grind to earn meta currencies, you go into a run, auto pilot your "build", and the reward is watching enemies not kill you. You don't explode the screen, no shredding hordes of mobs that threatened you before. No happy brain chemicals. The game goes from "you feel slow and weak" to "you are not slow and not weak anymore". The best it gets is not being painful. Gameplay peaks at "not bad" instead of good, let alone actually fun. This is the real death sentence.
Torturous beginning that flows into a steady stream of meta systems that require grinding their currencies. A slog of repeating maps and doing runs that do not require actual decision making, and do not offer the depth to allow theory crafting build. All of that just to make a character reach a power level where you do not die, and do not even get any real satisfaction of looking at waves get annihilated, but instead just trickle in through the border of your screen before dying. A roster of characters that play too similar and not engage or synergize with skills either, so no real depth here either. Pick whoever has the best stats, and by the time you hit level 10 in the level, it's all the same.
This game encourages you to grind a boring repetition of levels and refuses to acknowledge good gameplay with meta rewards or even the basic satisfaction of "build goes brrrrrr". Painfully tedious at the beginning, slightly less tedious by the time you realize that is all it has, and drop it for a better game. But at least it looks like Diablo from 1997, right?