Casus Reviews

CHARACTER: Casus offers six unique character classes and an interesting combat system. The six primary classes each have their own skill trees, with three secondary classes offering another skill tree to use. Leveling up raises hit points and stamina, while crafted equipment raises stats. COMBAT: The combat is challenging and requires thoughtful consideration of which body parts to attack on your enemies first. Since the player's party is only a single character, multi-enemy attacks or status effects are a must to survive. Skillful use of confusion skills can effectively add enemies to your party for a few turns. PROTIP: Stamina, which lets a character use skills, such as healing, goes very quickly. Since Defending in combat restores hit points, you'll need to abuse it to restore health when one weak enemy remains. This certainly gets tedious, but survival without it will require many fortunate drops of stamina restoring items. There are no temples to heal, and resting costs experience points (25% of a level). So, again, exploit defense in combat to heal. CRAFTING: The crafting system is simple, but effective. While the initial recipes are obvious keepers (attack up + defense up), later recipes offer trade-offs. For example, you'll need to decide if you want more Luck or Healing ability or poison resistance. MAPPING: The mapping tool works well enough. It's a little touchy, in that you'll need to "paint" the ground before adding an icon to a square. But overall, it works. If anything, some more interesting icons would be nice. DUNGEONS: At this point, I've reached Level 7. Based on the info in the game, it appears that there are 20 levels. I'm not sure if there are any bonus levels. The first five levels lacked any real puzzles beyond some stronger enemies and doors locked from the other size, but they are very large. Level 6 introduced spikes, which can mostly be avoided. Level 7 is named, "Switches," so I anticipate more puzzles there. CONCLUSION: So far, it's been a fun game. I've played almost 20 hours and got through 1/3 of the game. I'm a completionist, so not sure what your playtime will be. My primary complaint about the game is that I've really had to rely on the "Defend to Heal" approach just to survive. This extends combat time quite a bit, and gets very tedious. A re-balance of the stamina cost or increased drops of stamina recovery items would help.