Recent reviews by Bertlebob

Pretty fun roguelike deckbuilder, the idea of using a claw machine to play your deck is novel, and the physics of the hooks themselves are very satisfying.

It does feel like it's missing something, only after about five hours of gameplay I've been able to beat the hardest difficulty, and on a few characters (Anne Bunny, Scrappy) I'm able to craft a deck very early in the run that allows me to win every combat by just throwing damage at the enemy. For example, I have a save of an Anne Bunny on floor 68, with only two items in the deck - one is to multiply your strength, and the other does damage based on the strength. These two items, along with perks, are able to clear the entire game, without the enemy getting a single turn.

What I'd like to see more of is enemies with interference in the claw machine themselves without having to spend their turn to do so - once you get a winning combo with your deck, it basically feels like a waste of time to engage enemies, because they stand no chance at stopping you. The enemies that fill up your tank with ink, and jostle your items around are great - if they did that without having to waste a turn to do that effect, the game would be much more challenging.

I have great hopes for the devs here, and I'd like to see the game evolve beyond the state that it's currently in.

This game has a nice and fun learning curve where you slowly figure out more and more about how you can manipulate spells with the builds you pick up, and it is deeply satisfying when you try something and it works out perfectly. I think this game has a lot of potential, but there are a few potential issues I'm worried about for the game's future that have to do with its difficulty scaling.

Scaling in this game basically adds new monsters as you go to new floors, which have different abilities. Some attack from very far away over walls, some ressurect, and some put bad curses on you if you are within attack range. The issue arises when you get to double digit floors. There is no way to upgrade spell damage other than picking up more powerful spells, and a lot of those spells are locked behind prerequisite spells that you ordinarily wouldn't want to pick up. When your spells do ~10-30 damage and the enemies have 300-500 health a piece, it takes several turns to make a dent in them using conventional spells. This is fine for the first few levels where you encounter minibosses and other high health enemies, but it quickly scales to EVERY monster having these values, and it's a little ridiculous when your spells do anywhere from ~10-30 damage. The only times I've gotten post-level 15 is in multiplayer where you can abuse spells like Debilitate (Increases damage taken by 200% per stack - the most broken offensive spell in the entire game in my opinion) with my partner just blasting things, or when I tried the 'Necromancer' class which allows you to capture enemy souls and gain them as a permanent summon ability - you can get the Priest Miniboss as a summon which ressurects multiple corpses to fight for your side. In this case, we actually broke the game with the 'Clone' spell interaction, turns took 4-5 minutes to resolve due to the amount of minions on the field and eventually led to a game breaking bug where we were reset to level 1.

Overall the game is very fun, but as you play it more (I have 7 hours of gametime and I'm already very tired of the system) it quickly loses any sort of variance due to the need to pick GREAT spells if you want to get past level 10. There are a ton of 'not so great' spells in the game that you will get instead usable spells. I hope they balance the higher levels of this game as it would open a lot of options to not have to feel forced to restart a run if you get a few unlucky picks with spells.

Game is pretty solid, but has several issues, a lot of which could be improved very easily. I picked this game up with 3 friends, and this is what I noticed.

1. Multiplayer issues

The game for the host is different than the game for the players. Monsters will attack you from further away if you are a player, likely due to the state of the netcode. This is especially apparent when playing slower characters like the Wizard, who gets outrun by almost every creature unless you solely focus on upgrading your movement speed. Assassin also feels very bad to play because you are meant to be a 'squishy' melee, and it is nearly impossible to gauge the correct distance to hit from without taking damage yourself. All of my friends live in the same state, so the netcode needs to be improved for multiplayer use.

2. UI and information

Upgrades feel very bad to pick when you cannot accurately gauge how much of an upgrade "10%" is. There is next to no information about characters other than the "Select Class" main menu option, which gives you a brief rundown of each characters strengths and abilities. In-game, your characters stats are represented by a notched bar, which goes up when you pick the corresponding stat during a level up. Does each character have different bases?

It would obviously play a role in choosing which upgrades you pick if, say, your base defense stat is 2 and your base damage stat is 6, and a "legendary" perk card for Defense drops, increasing your Defense by 40%. This would only increase your defense by 0.8, when a rare 20% damage increase would give you a 1.2 damage increase, which is more stat overall. Without having any information about the bases in a percentage upgrade based game, it's a complete crap shoot if you actually want to optimize your character and make proper decisions about a build.

3. Enemy AI

Currently my group has made it to wave 50 due to being unable to kill the wave boss due to netcode reasons, and other than the ranged venom spitter, enemies only variance is their HP value and how fast they walk at you. I would love to see slower creatures that slam the ground around them every once in a while, or a creature that throws stuff that you can dodge. There's a lot of potential in the game, but the current set of enemies usually leads to situations where you're either clearing every round without any issue or due to poor perk choice you simply get overwhelmed due to lack of DPS. Some skill and tact about which enemies you need to clear as priority would be great.

I do want to reiterate, the game feels much better on single player than it does on multiplayer due to the aforementioned reasons about the netcode. If the developers improved this so that players connecting to a host didn't experience monsters attacking them from far away, I'd like to try this again.

Only reason I am giving this a negative review is because of the archery. I picked the game up because I saw medieval archery, thought cool.

Projectiles fired from bows travel at 1/4th of their real life speed, to the point where horses can outrun the projectiles. Due to this, the effective range of bows is also almost halved, requiring you to aim at ridiculous arcs to reach the realistic effective range. You can also deflect arrows, which is what happens 90% of the time, because people can see arrows coming (due to their slow speed).

In the features list the game says "MORDHAU strikes a balance between gameplay and realism.", however how can you tote realism when the realistic values are halved and quartered?