Have a Nice Death Review (Rotanim)
All in all, Have A Nice Death is a marvel of a action platformer, one which any fan of said genre should not miss. I will update this review as I get the time and with future game updates, but I will leave you with this: Have you ever asked yourself: What if Hades and Hollow Knight had a baby? Worry not, for the answer is lying Dead ahead of you.
Have A Nice Death (HAND) is a beautifully hand-drawn Roguelite action platformer teeming with humour, character, charm but most importantly: fluidity. I could ramble over how besotted I am with the animation and environment quality of the game for several paragraphs alone. More importantly, here are my impressions and compliments from playing the game.
THE MOVEMENT
Death's moveset is silky-smooth and every move can be chained into another: You can string together a scythe combo, dash, spell, alternate attack, upward and downward movement all in the span of 2 seconds. When you start mastering your movement and start recognizing enemy movements, the sky is the limit for how brazenly you can play; chaining together every attack and dodge/dash in a beautiful balette of Death (himself).
Oh, did I mention that your primary weapon has multiple forms with different movesets? Yeah, well, your secondary/alternate weapons most often have several moves too by holding up/down and/or by being in mid-air. To top it all off, EVERY primary, alternate weapon and spell have their own unique Super attack triggered by filling a meter which you charge up faster by mixing up your attacks with different moves and/or weapons.
It's crazy.
THE COMBAT
Combat is fast-paced and hectic, especially when encountering arenas ("minion hordes") and bosses. If you're unfamiliar with action platformers it's easy to get overwhelmed at first: You will most likely die a fair couple times until you start seeing progress. However, every enemy attack has a visual tell, and said attacks (wherever applicable) vary depending on distance to the player. Practice and knowledge allows you to outmaneuver even the hardest of boss patterns. Combine this with the fact that your primary attacks stun most smaller enemies in a couple hits, and you have a fantastic combat flow potentional where hyper-aggressiveness is heavily rewarded when executed properly. Additionally, charged attacks and heavier alternate weapons (aquired randomly and by choice every run) have the capacity to even easily build up to stunning bosses if you pile enough attacks on them.
That being said, the game is not easy by any means. Each enemy has their own, unique attack(s). Hordes and bosses will always keep you on your toes unless you have aquired a particularly broken build, and even then you can easily die if you aren't careful. Speaking of which...
GAME BALANCE
Let me start this off by stating the following: The game is perfectly fair in all the challenges it presents, but balance-wise it is not perfect in its current state. It is definitely is a work in progress and the developers are perfectly aware of these problems. Some weapons/builds underperform without certain upgrades, others overperform with certain upgrades to the point of nullifying a lot of the challenges the game has to offer. This problem is further exacerbated by weapons+upgrades being somewhat RNG and the fact that basic enemies gain a flat damage reduction at higher difficulty settnings once every world, resulting in chip-damage weapons doing zero damage on later worlds/departments in a run without the proper upgrades. You need to complete the game multiple times for you to reach this level of difficulty settning, however.
Additionally, to the player's advantage you have plenty of influence over the RNG in question: You can choose the primary reward for every level/floor you play, in every world. Be it extra currency, guaranteed drops for a weapon and/or spell, guaranteed stat upgrades, ability upgrades/additions, shops (which may include healing, stats upgrades, abilities and weapons), forges(where you upgrade your equipment) as well as mixes with random but often multiple rewards or levels with more enemies that have increased chances of dropping pickups.
About upgrading abilities, or "curses". This is where you choose how to build your character every run, the curse system has three different ability upgrade trees where each upgrade type on every step of said upgrade tree is random but predictable and influenceable with clear power progression. The more curses you pick for a single upgrade tree, the more powerful the curses for that tree offered to you become. The trees are primarily focused on weapon damage, utility/economy/defense and spell useage+damage respectively, but may grant abilities that heavily benefit the player by mixing things up.
PROGRESSION, CONTENT, CONCLUSION
A full run usually lasts 1-2 hours in the games current state. Which, for being a roguelite is perfectly fine in my opinion. It really feels like the game respects your time. Speaking of respecting your time, every run is a fresh start with new possibilties. As previously mentioned, there are no permanent upgrades which carry over runs. But there are unlocks. New weapons, spells, food items (boosts offered to you after every boss fight), risk vs. reward challenges/"contracts" and stacking difficulty settnings hades-style.
The one area where game noticeably lacks in content is that the amount of different room layouts available is rather limited. The excellent moveset and varying playstyles provided by the arsenal of alternate attacks available makes up for this however.
It took me 35 hours to reach and beat the highest difficulty of the game with the current content available as of writing this review. And I had a blast all the way through. I still have a select few unlocks to go, and will keep on playing experimenting with builds and challenging myself to different playstyles. The promise of future worlds, items and content throughout early access and hopefully further on will only add to this playtime further still.