The Serpent Rogue Reviews

After 100% completion I can say the Serpent rouge would be a pretty good demo. As a complete game however not so good. You have to restore balance across the otherworld/afterlife as waves of corruption from an unknown source wreck the place. To do this you'll need to master the art of alchemy, brewing a wide range of potions and using those powers to brave the worlds dangers. seems good right and yeah theres some promise here. Lets say you find an ingredient that has the change property, well if slay animals and monsters you can get reagents related to them. Combining these will give you a potion that shapeshifts you into that creature. Neat, and thats no all, undeath/life and gender states can also be switched between and combined, so many options, so how much use do you get out of these mechanics, pretty much nothing. The gender swap for instance has a single use, as a female chicken you can lay eggs, this is useless as it costs more stamina to lay an egg than that egg will restore by eating it. Most forms are like this, frogs can grab scrolls from hard to reach places, but these are just recipes that you'll unlock by experimenting long before you get to the shapeshifting potions. Shifting into a monster seems like it would be a good idea, but you lose access to your equipment (the main source of your power) and half of them have lower carrying capacity than your base form, which in a game about gathering resources is a big pain in the butt. Even the ability to turn undead is a waste as while it lets you breath underwater (used to access like two chests of random junk and thats it) and removes hunger it removes your health regen and the abiltiy to sleep at camp to recover health, so I avoided this too. Well what about the other crafting options? They seem promising on the surface, theres a variety of items and equipment to craft and then enhance with the same alchemy that the potions use. You can for example take a sword and remove its damage replacing it with hunger or age effects, so you can have a weapon that removes age form a target, turning them into a baby (or adding age after you tame a baby monster to make it a more powerful adult from) or maybe a weapon that makes them hungry slowly working them down to starvation and weakening them further in battle or just classic burning bleeding or poison statues. Or you can just make it do more damage and oneshot everything. Ageing, poison and hunger etc. all take forever dragging out a battle (and your character kinda sucks at fighting) its better to just go damage, and as for all the weapon types? don't use em, the damage enchantment raises the damage to maximum (20 flat damage) rather than adding an extra damage so a cheap easy to craft item with max damage is the same as a master crafted advanced weapon. This also defeats the purpose of crafting combat potions (thrown one use items) why craft a burn potion that will slowly do 15 damage when you could craft a max 20 damage potion instead and why use a one use potion when throwing a weapon with that enchantment will do the same thing but you can pick it up and use it over and over and it costs the same amount of reagents! And the companion and taming systems, seems neat on the surface, build your own army, gear it up, watch them run into stage hazards and drown or poison themselves or just die all over the place, its not worth babysitting them except where the game forces you to use them to carry stuff. What could be a cool system becomes like an escort quest as you try to stop them from getting killed, they can carry loot for you but then they die and you can't haul that shit home. using them for combat isn't needed anyway, theres no escalation is challenge as you go on through the game, its flat the whole way, if can handle it in the opening you handle it all the way. And if you did take time to build up strong allies and craft master level gear well theres only two main zones in the game and the final boss fight removes all your crafted gear and items, no armour or healing potions for you, take this super sword and end the game, if you took your time or rushed its all turns out the same in the end. It would probably take a couple of hours to beat this thing if you ignore all the side areas and half the mechanics. The main time sink is gathering and researching ingredients to use for potions, mainly because the items in the main zones reset constantly and are random, want to collect a specific reagent? it might not be there, wait for reset and try again for a chance of harvesting two of the things, keeping in mind you need to consume 40 of them before you can craft with them. Side areas like the merchant house (which is a really cool/creepy zone) offer you a random collection of items you wont need because of the before mentioned crafting system. The combat arena side zone is a waste of time as it has one fight and removes all your gear when you do it. The two recruiter zones suffer from the companion babysitting thing. You could make these thing all work in a bigger game, but this the full release and its missing alot of work needed to get these systems working together to make something worth the time playing it.

There is absolutely no way I would recommend this game unless you enjoy games that do not tell you how to play it and have no way of surviving beyond 45 minutes of playing. Definitely not for me.