Did my Friday Demo segment last week because of Steam Festival bringing us a lot of demos to play, wasn’t too bad, but I think now with all the corona delays and games that aren’t even starting because of that there are many demos that I already tried before.
Still we got some new stuff to play and let’s review some of that…
Let’s start with Loop Hero, which is honestly the best demo out of those I played this time. In general you can say it’s one of those 2D roguelites that also got some card game elements inserted for extra points – quite a lot of games like this nowadays really, so I wasn’t really impressed when I saw it announced, but it was hyped up quite a bit, so I decided to try it. Despite being part of the genre I mentioned it is nothing like any other one (at least I can’t really remember any similar one) with very unique gameplay. In short you just have your hero which can be different class in full version that runs circles in procedurally generated “track”, getting first some encounters with slimes appearing on tiles, farming some equipment from them and getting cards that allow you to place different “upgrades” on tiles right on “track” or outside of it. Some upgrades have AoE effects, some work right where you place it, majority is basically spawning different enemies, but there are some buff/debuff ones and ones that provide you different resources, while some you can’t control and they just appear on the map randomly when you do some particular things (which is also pretty cool interaction). Combat is completely automated, you can just adjust your character’s equipment and watch how he fights without any interactions. When you finish the circle you can go to your camp and use resources that you farmed or you can keep going for more circles to up the stakes. Resources are used for camp upgrades that provide you with healing items etc, working as roguelite factor of the game. After using enough cards you fill the progress bar and instead of your camp you get the boss fight. Overall game is very addicting even in demo stage, considering more content in release version and low price, I’d say game is amazing if you liked what you read above and seen for yourself.
Glitchpunk was another demo I played and this one might be promising, because it returns you to GTA 2, but in Cyberpunk setting, which is pretty nice, but I’d say currently it feels quite janky to properly feel it, lacks a bit of that movement smoothness and tbh colour palette currently feels a bit bleak, even though maybe that’s the idea. Need to look for final version before getting it, might be good GTA fun, but might be pretty just too janky.
Shady Knight was also quite a nice demo, gives you that Ghostrunner vibe a bit, but less rails – more freedom and more options. Traversing different levels through platforming and killing enemies in between, trying to do so in a most sophisticated way to get more combo points. Game will have some crazy pro players montages on Youtube potentially, but need to see how much will there be on release. For me personally combo points isn’t the best system and I’d much rather just try to have some challenging platforming/fights to go through rather than trying hard to make them WAYTOODANK for more points, but that’s me, overall looks promising for sure.
No Place For Bravery gave me a bit of that Children of Morta vibe with artstyle and family shenanigans, but gameplay is not very similar, more of a “soulslike” (yeah yeah, I said it) approach to it rather than ARPG like in CoM. Art is pretty good, controls are nice, can’t say I’m a huge fan of difficulty settings in games like this, but that’s not really a negative thing. Really depends on the story and how much content full game will have.
Sands of Aura was a weird one, on one hand it’s beautiful and seems deep enough in terms of mechanics but on the other hand combat feels really strange, hard to explain, one of the things is lack of impact on hits, that I can tell for sure. Boss fight was kinda alrighty though, so potential is there, but need to see how it will look on release.
As you can see Loop Hero got the most detailed description here and that’s pretty much perfect representation of my overall Demo Friday experience – Loop Hero was the best and everything else was ok, but nothing special, a lot of those games for me will depend on how they will evolve.
Leave a Reply