izigame.me

I really liked the first half of this. Up until around the third boss I would have happily recommended it. Then it became more and more of a grind, until I realized I was just picking up the controller out of obligation.
The early game feels really good. Every run you're earning upgrades, unlocking new things, getting new movement tech, etc. There's a constant feeling of progress. Until there isn't.
The problem is, most of those upgrades are meaningless. Healing is rare, so I was really excited to find a lifesteal rune. Heals you when you kill an enemy. Great! Paid an entire run's worth of gold and all of my upgrade materials to craft it.
It restores 1 hp. One singular point of HP per enemy killed. I have 400hp. Enemy attacks deal around 50 per hit.
But never fear, you can unlock multiple stacking runes! ...By completing obnoxiously hard challenges over and over and over with every class to grind out upgrade materials to unlock the ability to maybe possibly find duplicate blueprints out in the dungeon and then paying exorbitant amounts of resources to craft a second rune.
Now you heal 2 hp. Huzzah.
In theory I could find a third. I don't know what that would cost. I bought the upgrade that should allow me to find one, but I haven't seen it in 25 hours.
And apparently they scale with strength. I say apparently because the scaling is so low that no class and no combination of gear heals more than 1. In NG+38 it might mean something but I don't intend to spend 700 hours getting there.
Speaking of gear, let's talk about gear. Gear sucks. You can find blueprints for equipment in the dungeon. You probably can't afford that equipment. It takes money and ore, and while money is plentiful, ore is incredibly stingy, taking many, many runs to afford even one piece. You can then equip it, assuming you've spent ten levels learning how to wear clothes. These give you much needed boosts to your stats. Except they also reduce your Resolve, the stat that lets you equip Relics that you find in the dungeon. Relics can have powerful synergies, except it doesn't matter, because if you equip armor and weapons to have a chance at surviving in the dungeon you won't have the stats to equip the relics you find in the dungeon. It takes a special kind of game to make you not care about finding treasure in a dungeon, but here we are.
I stopped in the sixth dungeon. It's the same enemies from the other five dungeons but all their attacks are obnoxious and they have ten times the health so fighting anything is a chore. The eyeballs that used to shoot one fireball now shoot barrages of five in four directions simultaneously and also homing lightning bolts that will track you through walls forever unless you spin kick off of them and in doing so probably launch yourself into the ceiling spikes or invincible saws or barrages of fireballs or void waves or curse ghosts constantly being shot from every direction by enemies that take way too many hits to kill.
But the thing that really killed any enthusiasm I originally had was the bosses. Specifically the 5th boss, a bullet hell with way, way, WAY too much health. Because you can't just try again. You can lock the dungeon layout and warp straight to the boss' room (by paying all the spoils of your eventual victory to the architect, hooray), but every. Single. Time. you have to pick a new heir, walk across town, talk to Charon and hope he doesn't have extra random dialogue, take the boat, enter the teleporter, select the boss room, walk to the boss' door in the boss room, sit through the same obnoxiously long intro animation, just to get immediately juggled to death in less time than it took you to get there. And that's assuming you were offered an heir that was even worth making an attempt with. Sometimes you get all bad choices, and the game doesn't let you reroll until you select one and do the entire trek into the dungeon, and then you can retire them and roll three new ones.
It's honestly kind of impressive how sharply my enjoyment dropped off, so I guess I can give it that.