Lia: Hacking Destiny

If you can get it for cheap it will probably entertain you for some time. I think this game is fine as a game, but doesn't make for a good roguelike. I believe it would have been better if you could unlock weapons as you played and choose them before starting a run. The reason is that the pool of items is much smaller than most roguelikes/lites, so a lot of the time you play with the same few weapons. If there's one in particular, you just have to hope you get it with good affixes, because enemies starting from the third area get super tanky. While you could for example beat dead cells bc0 on a fresh file without much issue, it's extremely unlikely in the game because the stat buffs and gadgets you unlock influence your stats a lot more than the random buffs you get. I would say that overall I had a good enough time (especially given that I paid €1,20), but I wish just wish it was better in the areas I described.

Short but fun, wrapped up just before it was about to overstay its welcome. Unfortunately there's not a lot of build variety available, and what is available feels a bit unnecessary at times but the core combat loop is relatively satisfying. Should only take a handful of hours to beat so plan the price you're willing to pay for that accordingly.

Really wanted to like this game, and it makes a great first impression, but the more you play it the more the crackers start to show. First off, the game looks decent, with lots of weapons, lots of upgrades, not bad visuals. It does give that initial impression of Neon Abyss like others say, but its a poor mans version of it. These are the reasons. There are no classes, so the only differences between runs are different melee and ranged weapons as well as well as some upgrades, some of which make a difference but most are just some small stat boosts or some affects during jumps or dashes. There are a lot of upgrades but they get so expensive so quickly that you have to grind forever to make small gains. Runs take a long time and theres no way to save during. I had some bugs with using a controller and on menus I had to use a mouse to navigate them. Also had a bug end 1 run on the final area that soft logged me and caused me lose a run. The bigger issue is with the overall design which is how NOT to make a roguelite. The first realm is good, but when you get to the second realm guys have 4-5x the health and do double damage. The same goes for when you get to realm 3 and realm 4. This means that you are legit level gated until you grind countless levels just to have enough health and do enough damage to get to the next level, then repeat. But again upgrades increase exponentially in cost so you plan on just grinding and dying on the next realm and repeating. This is made worse that every realm has the same 4 enemies, on the same environment copy and pasted 10x, with the same boss. The weapons start to get pretty old fast as the amount of repeat runs, same for in run upgrades. The higher weapon rarities also don't upgrade damage, just have some extra bonus stats added to them. There are unique exotic weapons with cool abilities but I only got 2 total in 25 hrs. The runs got old fast, and lack of different characters or abilities or new guns to unlock made this game a slog. The artificial bumping of enemy states being level gated and requiring obscene amount of grinding just to be able to hang with them is cheap and lazy, done to inflate game length. I would skip this one as it involves some really poor game design and sucks most of the initial fun out of the game when you've repeated the same area with the same guns against the same enemies the 20th time just for some stat boosts to be able to fight fair at the next realm. 5.5/10.