- Absorbing. 3 hours went by without much notice, although there were two times where I was frustrated enough to stop until my buddy invited me back.
- More action, less tower defense. You do have some towers, but this is not a stately strategy game where you place your defenses and watch over them like a demigod. In the early waves/levels, you are there in the front shooting, and later, you are repairing them while the attacks are coming in.
- Still buggy. I think the gameplay works, but the game environment is problematic. I’m told it is more of a PC issue, and you immediately get the sense of how much the PC matters to the developers when it opens with “press start.” My “push to talk” turned off every time I zoned. The keybindings reset with one of yesterday’s patches and became uneditable at the options screen. My friend playing ranked remarked that the game/server/whatever crashed 3 times while he was still in character creation. The Steam achievements were not working for me.
- There’s not really a point to high score screens in open. It displays while you are there, but those are obviously modded/cheat games, with scores in the millions versus the thousands. But it still displays on your forge while you’re on the map. Ranked gets you away from this, but did I mention “crashed 3 times at character creation”?
- It’s absorbing and frantic but not great (so far?). Weak tower defense plus decent action is not synergizing strongly.
- Classes differ strongly. I had lots of Squire envy, as their tanking+knockback towers were the heart of our defense. My Apprentice was the DPS behind them, and then I was the healer keeping the tank tower repaired. My buddy the Huntress had mostly last-ditch traps rather than attacking towers, so that class presumably is meant to be on the attack more. I did not see the Monk in action, but I get the sense it is similar.
- There is a level grind. The difficulty and experience point curves assume that you will repeat levels to be prepared for the next, although I presume that great planning and execution can overcome a lot of that. There is also an equipment grind, and finding a staff that tripled my attack damage changed things.
- Update, missed one: bring a group or go home. Maybe this is fun single-player, or doing older maps once you are high level, but only the first map is really solo-able (when you reach it). The maps do scale with group size, but they your combined power scales up faster than the enemies do, so perhaps it is better to say that they are 4-player maps that do not scale down well.
This is through about 4 maps, so who knows how things differ much later.
