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If you're familiar with Hideki Hanida games, it should come as no surprise for me to say that EISEN is a fascinating-but-barebones experience. As I noted in my review of his last game, his output can sometimes feel more like a proof-of-concept than a game, but that can be ok if those concepts are compelling enough. Unfortunately for EISEN, though, I'm not sure this mech survival game has enough going on at its core to make up for its odd design and inelegant appearance.

Shoot to survive

EISEN starts with very little introduction. The game boots straight into the cockpit view of a mech and instructs you to hit a button and pull a lever to get launched right into the action. There is no other starting menu, settings, or anything. Once you hit the ground, your machine gun starts firing automatically and it's up to you to use the left side of the screen to control your mech's movements and the right side to aim at enemies as they appear.

Your goal is to stay alive as long as possible by defeating enemies, avoiding damage, and leveling up to unlock new weapons and abilities to keep up with the ever-increasing number and power of enemy combatants. The start of every run almost feels like a gallery shooter as the only things to target are non-attacking spheres but within a few minutes you need to have gained some significant upgrades to take down opposing mechs and turrets if you want to survive for any significant amount of time.

Short stints

Any typical run of EISEN generally runs just a few minutes, and it seems impossible to last much longer than that as the quantity of enemies and the amount of projectiles they fire your way seem impossible to weave between. Upon death, your score gets totalled up and you can dive in again. There's no roguelite elements with unlocks between runs or even any other menu element. Once you tap past the score screen you're right back in a new round of play.

Each new run gives you a new opportunity to experiment with combinations of abilities you unlock as you level up. These abilities include passive bonuses like increases in damage or movement speed and also new weapon types altogether like a shotgun, cannon, sawblade, and missiles. In theory, the variety of these upgrades seem like they'd add a lot of replayability, but in practice runs feel too short for any particular upgrades to feel particularly impactful.

Lack of weight

It's kind of surprising how light EISEN feels considering it is pitched as a mech “simulator.” Aside from having a cockpit view and some pretty slow movement, the game otherwise feels like a very typical action shooter experience, though played in portrait mode on your phone. There isn't really much to manage aside from trying not to get hit, and there's no kind of redemption mechanics allowing you to repair yourself or otherwise add some kind of wrinkle to the gameplay.

As a result, a lot of EISEN just feels like a test of how well you can circle strafe. In my time with the game, I kept hoping that if I extended a run long enough something would happen, some mystery would reveal or a new system would open up, but this never seems to happen. It just seems to be a shooter variation of Vampire Survivors, but without any of the progression.

The bottom line

EISEN feels like the first misstep in Hideki Hanida's mobile output. His previous games share similarly odd design philosophies and a focus on capturing a specific concept, but the difference here is the concept of “shooting gallery but you're a mech” isn't all that compelling and the leveling up system layered on top doesn't have much depth to it.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/eisen-review/

Everything about Cursed Labyrinth -Hack & Slash doesn't sound all that great, perhaps aside from the price. It's a kind of janky roguelite deck-builder with a progression system that is fairly linear. The saving grace of the pitch–and why I decided to check it out–is the fact that it's free (read: not free-to-play). And, to my surprise, it's actually a pretty fresh and fun deck-builder despite the things working against its initial appeal.

Stop me if you've heard this before

Cursed Labyrinth -Hack & Slash is a card game where you play as an adventurer who must battle their way through dungeons and defeat bosses to earn loot. Your abilities are dictated by a deck of at least 30 cards you can customize to bring with you into battle, and with that one deck you need to fight through quite a few enemies and a midboss before reaching the final encounter.

The cards in your deck can do anything from attack enemies directly, create shields, heal, apply buffs and debuffs, and more. The enemies you face use cards as well, though they don't really use a deck. The cards enemies plan to play are laid out on the game board at the start of your turn so you can decide how to best thwart their attempts to defeat you.

Combo breaker

The game board itself is where Cursed Labyrinth -Hack & Slash starts to depart from territory covered by other deck-building games. As opposed to having any kind of stamina system for playing cards, you can play as many cards as you like so long as they fit into the five slots available on the game board. Where it gets even more interesting is the fact that most cards can be played on top of each other to combine their effects, meaning if you have an attack card and a heal card, you could add them to the same slot to have both of those effects trigger at the same time.

Whenever you end your turn, all of the cards on the game board resolve one slot at a time from left to right, which also adds an element of strategy in terms of skill ordering to the mix. And if that weren't enough, there is a system for something called “composting” cards, which allows you to effectively clear out slots of the game board by stacking a certain value of cards on top of each other. Mastering this mechanic is key to later stages of Cursed Labyrinth -Hack & Slash where enemies get really tricky with their combos.

Priceless grind

As you can tell from screenshots, Cursed Labyrinth -Hack & Slash isn't the most visually appealing game. Its onboarding tutorial is also a bit roughshod and doesn't do a great job of explaning all of its mechanics thoroughly. In fact, there are a few things that still occasionally pop-up in the course of a fight that seem to run against what I've learned of the systems through playing.

You can figure out most of what you need to have a good time with the game, though, and as you put more time into it you get rewarded with a lot more card variety and even new classes to play as. It definitely is a grind to unlock new things in Cursed Labyrinth -Hack & Slash, and some of the things that you unlock are just categorically better than the things you've unlocked previously, but the journey to get to those unlocks is still fun thanks to the game's unique mechanics, and it's hard to complain too much about rougher edges of the game considering it offers up such a fun core for zero dollars.

The bottom line

Cursed Labyrinth -Hack & Slash may not be the most polished package, but considering what it offers and its asking price, it is well worth checking out. This deck-builder feels unlike any other in ways that will keep you coming back to try and master its hardest challenges.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/cursed-labyrinth-hack-and-slash-review/