Diluvian Ultra Reviews

For starters, consider this more of a "side vote" than an outright downvote. If the review score was very low, it would be a thumbs up. As it stands, however, the quality level needs to improve for me to justify a thumbs up at the current rating. A quick summary of the positives: The combat is mostly good, there are a number of challenging encounters. The boss fights are kind of good. There is some gimmickry at work, but for the most part they are the good kind of boss fight - big scary thing, loads of health, dangerous attacks which can be avoided with skill and cover. I enjoyed them. The weapons are mostly fun to use, too, with some creativity in their design. The overall theme of the game is fairly unusual as well, another positive; you get to play as a sort of gender-swapped Sarah Kerrigan (Zerg Queen of Blades), mixed with an insect vampire from that one Darkest Dungeon expansion. So, you run and jump and flap around looking for blood to accumulate focus points and upgrade your arsenal. Also you use upgrade points to revive if killed, assuming you've gotten to the level's first checkpoint before dying. You an even get some of them back by making it back to where you died, which is a nice touch. Bit soulsy. Like it! Now for the stuff I'm a bit more ambivalent about. The damage system is strange - your health is extremely vulnerable unless covered with armor, and you may never have more armor than health. Thus, if you take a bad hit while low on armor, most of your health is gone and in the absence of healing pickups (which are thankfully usually plentiful) you might be staggering around mostly dead for half of the level. Health pickups convert to armor if your health is full, but armor pickups can only be used for armor. This makes it a bit tactical how you use the pickups, but at the end of the day, the smart way is this: Get the armor-restoring upgrade for your armor-cracking hitscan rifle (or the chaingun, which also seems to have the same armor-heal upgrade for some reason) and just use a few bits of the ever-plentiful bio ammo to fix your armor after a moderate or heavy hit. Fast, effective, and it means you can save all health pickups for healing any lost health. On the topic of anti-armor hitscan rifles, some of the enemies have them too. This can be a major problem, as they can remove most of your armor from across the map and then have one of their cheeky friends take all your health in one hit. Adds to the sense of tension and urgency in combat, true, but it can feel a tiny bit annoying to frantically look around trying to find the jackoff who's nuking your health from a mile away, while also dodging all the regular, avoidable projectiles. It walks the tightrope between fun and frustration, as it were, and it's wobbling a bit. There is a lot of platforming, with a slightly annoying amount of precision required for some of it. If you want to go secret-hunting for upgrade resources and other goodies, you can expect a lot of careful jumping, long falls and tedious climbs to restore your previous progress. Still, if you enjoy platforming in first person (and who doesn't love that, slightly sarcastic tone!) then you will find some fun here. The story is... okay. Sometimes it kind of feels like it's pulling in different directions. The protagonist has a duality about him; ostensibly a guardian of life, but also an undeniably effective mass slaughterer. The enemy faction is interesting enough, and (without wanting to spoil too much) it feels alarmingly plausible. It could be worse, but it suffers a bit from some UI issues; for instance, advancing through dialogue is done by pressing the E key, TWICE per text window. Except when it just sort of skips one without a single press. And also, the in-game text says "hold E to skip", and says nothing about how to proceed. It feels clunky, interface-wise, which brings the experience down a bit. This neatly moves us on to the purely negative - the aforementioned interface issue is not confined to the story events, but also appears in-game. Reloading frequently takes two or more presses of the reload key. Throwing a grenade may or may not. Switching weapons or using a "quick" melee attack, again, might take several presses. Cancelling a shot or even a reload to swap weapons rather than stand there reloading slowly while being shot to pieces? Nope, if you fired the last shot, you have to wait for the reload to finish. Except that sometimes your weapon doesn't even start reloading until you hammer the reload key a couple of times. Try to heal with an empty hitscan rifle? No heal, no reload. And it still takes a few presses to swap to another weapon, or start reloading the thing. This is all a lot more trouble than it should be, and greatly diminishes the feel and flow of the game. Melee is odd and messy and doesn't work very well. Your sword produces mostly vertical slashes, but without much actual vertical sweep, so odds are you won't hit anything that's not standing still right in front of you. You also have a charged up power attack which, again, will probably miss. Which isn't great for an attack that takes a second or two for each attempt. It also managed to stop working almost entirely when I tried to use it to finish off a late-game boss for the fun of it; charge-up, release, lack of actual power slash, perpetual charge-up pose, weapon swap, try again, same result. Not great. Elevators, which appear in some of the later levels, do not work some of the time. In the final level, there is an elevator whose recall button breaks the elevator and forces you to restart the level. There's also an issue where you resume from a checkpoint partway through a level (several of the levels are quite large, to the game's credit) and you inexplicably start with no weapons at all - not even the sword. And this game is not designed for "pistol-starts", i.e. Doom having many or all of the weapons obtainable within each level. You need your sword and weapons to get through breakable walls and such. There is a workaround, thankfully - you can restart the entire level, which in some cases means a significant amount of progress robbery, and play through the whole thing in one sitting, which should be doable for most people - but it's an inconvenience and it shows a definite lack of polish and bug-squashing. At the end of the day, this is a game that's being sold for money, and there's an embarrassing amount of janky code and interface trouble for a finished product. If it sounds like your cup of tea, there are still worse games to spend one's money on. But there are also a fair number of better games, albeit none with quite this mix of styles and themes at play. Ambivalently semi-recommended.

Played only 2 levels so far, but got a good first impression. I especially hope future levels (ones I haven't played yet) will include some cool monsters to fight. Doom style idk. Positives: -Art is fantastic, so are the animations. -Retro feel. -Movement feels good. -I lose myself in this game easily, and just fly around, good for my ADHD brain. -Bella Constructive feedback: -No button to walk slowly, I want to pan through the map to check out the awesome art. -There is a sword (I love this weapon) charge-attack glitch if you click too fast that forces me to wait a second before I can charge it up, not game breaking, but nice if it was fixed. -Few minor coding bugs, f.a. my game crashes if I hold "1" and "2" at the same time for too long (weapon switching bug) I'm nitpicky, but regardless, game is cool, once again, the ART MAN!!!! COOL ART!!!