Feudal Alloy Reviews

[h2]Feudal Alloy[/h2] Has a total of [b]10[/b] trading cards.

Feudal Alloy is a fun, small- to medium-sized metroidvania with nice graphics, an irrelevant story line, mostly good controls, hard-to-understand upgrades, and an interesting checkpointing system. + good-looking game + nice design of areas - graphical and structural + interesting checkpoint system + soft-spot: upward and downward slashing 0 souls-lite 0 HUD going for looks rather than info 0 upgrades (skills & items) are too vague - single savegame slot - some attacks seem hard to reliably execute - inventory has strange size and is not convenient - pet peeve: rare unexplained damage-on-contact - pet peeve: skills cannot be disabled The [b]story[/b] delivers some motivation at the very beginning of the game and is not touched on again until the very end. You find the occasional [b]checkpoint[/b] which can be activated to effectively select it as the active respawn point - you appear here if you die. (Activating a checkpoint also heals you.) However and unusually, it does not save your state. Any item you consume or drop will not come back on death. On the plus side, anything collected will not vanish on death - including items, money and experience. I like that. It makes me recklessly run into challenge rooms because even if I die I end up with more money and level progression. The [b]inventory[/b] has 90 slots. There are less than 120 different things in the game - some stackable consumables and mostly equipment. Why not allow all of them in the inventory? There is also no easy way to filter or sort the inventory, or compare things in the inventory to equipped things. Sorting can be done by dropping things and picking them up in the wanted order. Comparing equipment is done by equipping - the cursor shows the "stats" for the selected equipment in the inventory, equipping it will usually put the previously equipped item under the cursor. Is it [b]souls-lite?[/b] Arguably. Almost all situations can be learned and damage avoided, and learning does not take long. [b]Pet peeves and soft spot[/b] [ul] [li]Pet peeve: Some enemies can deal unreasoned contact damage, i.e. they are not doing anything and have nothing like, e.g., spikes.[/li] [li]Pet peeve: Once a skill is bought it cannot be disabled.[/li] [li]Soft spot: I was delighted to find the game has "Zelda 2"-like upward and downward slashing.[/li] [/ul] [b]Upgrading[/b] is not supported by numbers and the effects are hard to judge. There is a skill tree and equipment comes with stats. (There are also some progression rewards that may add combat options in addition to their metroidvania aspect.) Apart from the starting gear, equipment (weapon and armor) come with two features where a feature is composed of a type and (presumably) strength, e.g., "Damage *", "Damage **", "Armor *". An item may have two features of the same type. [b]But[/b] "Damage **" is not double the damage of "Damage *". An early upgrade to more damage feels almost inconsequential, i.e. the first enemy requires 3 hits before and after the upgrade. Although damage dealt will increase noticably eventually, this initial change is disheartening. Similarly, skills have only vague descriptions indicating, e.g., melee damage will increase. There is even a "Parry" skill which I am convinced has no effect at all. It does not let you parry. Instead you need to get a reward called "Block" that lets you parry, independent of the skill. Changes usually make themselves known when fighting harder enemies. When falling, the camera may be unable to keep up. This can make your avatar needing to react to danger without the player seeing what is going on. Altogether, I had fun with and recommend Feudal Alloy.

A personal favourite of mine. The challenging gameplay plus the amazing visuals and music come together to create a nice gaming experience to remember. Hoping one day there will be a part 2!

This game is just plain fun. I don't play very many metroidvanias, but this is definitely a good one. It's a little more on the challenging side, but it more than makes up for that with its visual charm. The only big hangup I have is that the controller inputs are completely messed up. It might be because I use a dualsense controller, but I did see other people having issues with xbox controllers as well. I did end up mapping the keyboard inputs to my controller and that has been working pretty well (I also uploaded it to the steam controller configuration for this game so you all can skip the painful part of sorting it out).

Great game. VERY challenging platforming though so you really got to have skill and even then it will take some patience. The game doesn't do a good job at giving you enough XP to upgrade as much as you would like. You get just enough to MAYBE upgrade one full tree. I did a little of each but it's a bummer that I didn't get to experience the higher tree bonuses. The keys can be a PITA to find. I had to find 4 that I was intended to get early game but never found and before running down the final hall after the last boss, I went and back tracked and found them. I didn't get all the chests and I feel like I saw 100% of the map so they just have hidden some exceptionally well. My final critique is that the story is just laissez-faire; the opening is ok since we need some kind of motive but then you get to the 2 bosses (which there looked like there were more than 2 bandits that stole the stuff) there is no fuss whatsoever. They just silently die. The end scene is like "he did it" and that's it. Felt out of place given how passion-made this game feels otherwise. It is a beautiful and well made game.

great controls and art design, but too many enemies that are too persistent. I quickly found myself feeling like I needed to grind to build up my character, but even after getting some good armour, it still wasn't fun