Arisen Force: HeroTest Steam Charts & Stats

Its mediocre combat in actively boring maps. You start the game, make your way through the poorly translated dialogue and get to pick your weapon. Pick. Not try. You lock-in your choice without having any opportunity to try them. Your weapon will come with 4 skills, so if you like it you're fine, but if not... the fastest way to get 4 skills for any other weapon is to legit start the game over; actual shops to buy weapons and such are locked behind metaprogression. You go do first mission and you're forced to play as someone other than your MC anyways, so right away, your choice didn't matter. Why make me choose so early then? If they happen to have the same weapon you picked, you'll notice they play... exactly the same. A lot of the appeal of this game seems to be unlocking the new characters and its one of the main things devs have added, but far as I can see, its because they're extremely low-effort. There is funtionally 0 difference outside of minor stat ones if I take Jeane's weapon and skills and give them to the MC. I play 100% like she did. Speaking of how it plays, bad. The maps are huge, sprawling affairs where you just run past far too many groups of identical enemies to open a chest then be forced into a fight or touch 4 orbs until one breaks and lets you move on. Sometimes when killing enemies in these forced fights or opening chests, you get a colored item to open a colored, locked door. You can get 'blue key' at the very top of the map, only for 'blue door' to be at the bottom... guarding the chest with 'red key' in it, which is... right next towhere you just got blue key from. There's so much time spent just running around for literally no reason in this game. But then there's the combat. How is it, the appeal of the genre? Also bad. You can hit enemies with a basic combo that changes per weapon and maybe do a charge attack. If enemies get low enough, they'll glow yellow (bosses do this too sometimes, but I don't know the rules since the game doesn't explain it against them), so you can press Y to do a 'finisher', which is the same animation every single time. This gets old really fast. You also have a dash attack and if you dash with the right timing you can do a parry-dodge. Its a decently robust moveset that just doesn't feel satisfying at all because the finisher is both way too easy to trigger and not actually a finisher (enemies will survvie it all the time). Then there are the skills, which are just widly imbalanced. They take a meter you gain on hit to use, but they also GIVE that meter on use. Some of them gain more than they use. You can just spam them over and over again, making the game even MORE repetitive, which is genuinely impressive with how much of this game plays the same already. Then you have others which cost tons of meter, give nearly 0 back and want you to parry with extremely specific timing... on the same weapon that starts with a skill that hits multiple times, parries during the entire duration and does more damage. One thing you're supposed to be able to do to vary it is switch character, but as covered, everyone plays exactly the same. What you CAN do are team-up moves, where if you switch during an attack, your character will do an attack as they switch in. Yet again, same attack every time. Repetitive. Also not optional. They do this every single time you switch during an attack. I don't want to to do this; these attacks are usually not very strong and in the case of at least the great sword, have tiny hitboxes making them hard to hit with at all. The last things to note are metaprogression and bosses Metaprogression: Its bad. You may or may not find an NPC in the dungeon who you may or may not have the items to reach and free. If you do, they go to town and offer services which should be baseline. I don't know why this is in the game, it just makes it feel like all progression such as gaining skills is pure RNG until you get them... because it is. Bosses: Also bad. They'll chunk you for like 1/3rd of your health in dungeons where enemies are literally barely scratching you so they don't feel balanaced at all for where they are, they have 0 warning grab moves that hard-stun you until you mash out (and you can't switch character during this for no apparent reason) they'll just spam and they're... super easy. You either A: Just sort of run in their face and mash skills that pay for themselves. B: Use spear jump attack, which bounces off enemies every time it hits. None of them so far are designed to deal with this. At all. They can do nothing. They can't hit you. Why does this attack exist? No idea. Once you beat the boss, it'll drop like 9 chests. Each of them takes a key to unlock. How do you get these keys? Explore the overly large, boring, repetitive map and just hope RNG gives you them. Why do they take keys to unlock? Why is my reward for beating the area and boss being told "go grind more of the same fights"? And after finally beating the boss, opening all chests you care to, you walk up to a door or something above you and it asks "Go back to tower". The hub is a tower. You click yes. It sends you... to the next area. Not back to anything. How to get back to hub? i don't know. Also, it immediately crashes. On top of all of this, you're supposed to be making a squad via beating areas and then unlocking them but A: Its a gacha system (why?) And B: You have very little control over your allies The result is you get people you may not care about but the game is balanced around you having who pick fights with every single identical pack of enemies on the map as you try to run past them. All of them. They never don't pick fights. So you either fight every single pack of enemies on the map (for no real reason since most enemies seem to give bad exp and you can't sell their drops until you rescue a specific npc you can easily not find) OR you run past the majoirty of enemies and they get hit over and over again and die. Just outright die. You can't just switch to them to heal this or use your own healing magic to heal this because both of these options are on cooldowns. Again, why? Why do skills need to have a cooldown system, a stamina cost then also mp is a thing?