First of all, I'd like to say, thanks to the devs for making such a great game; this is already pretty darn good, and I've barely gotten anywhere. There's such an incredible amount of potential here! Very excellent.
Some early thoughts on the game:
Right off the bat, this is very enjoyable. It has a sorta Metroid-ish feel to it, with all of the crazy maps going every which way and monsters hanging out all over the place. The exploration part of this game is definitely done right!
The combat and such is done well also; the nice selection of spells makes for a good variety of attacks/things you can do. Though, it seems like certain spells are very definitely better than others, which ends up making those certain others not worth using. Early on, like, levels 1/2, I'd use the boulder spell alot because it didn't take up much mana, which was good since I didn't have that much to spend. At level 6 now, I pretty much stopped using that and am now almost entirely just using that wave thing or whatever it is, that crescent bolt, which does the same thing basically, but is faster and does alot more damage, yet costs more... but there's not enough of a cost anymore to make it even somewhat an issue. Particularly since it's very, very easy to get the materials needed to make more of those mana scrolls.
That brings me to one issue I found: the materials.
At these early levels, and depending on the worldmap that you get, some of these can be nigh-impossible to get at times, depending on the situation. I ran outta healing items at one point, and the best place to get more of that green stuff is the forest, or so it says on the tooltip. Well, I couldnt quite kill the blasted boss guarding the gem room because.... I had no healing items. Dodging them entirely was a bit out of the question also; they're very fast, and the area they were in is brown platforms on a brown background, with brown bats flying around as well. I *needed* those healing items that I could not get in order to reach the materials that I needed to get to make the healing items. And I know, there's the potions as well, but they take a ridiculously long time in order to collect; I tried getting a few but only found a couple of mana potions.
With a bit of luck I managed to get past that, thanks to a tower I hadnt noticed originally on the world map, gaining me a couple of levels and making the bats doable.
Now though, where I'm currently at, I find myself with only 3 warp scrolls left... and the materials for that seem incredibly difficult to get right now (still level 6). I can either go into a level 9 town, or into the ocean (and blow a bazillion healing items). I tried the ocean, managed to get to a gem room, aaaaaand.... it gave me ONE solid Disperium crystal. No dust. AKA, completely useless. Wasted another scroll getting back OUT; I think I have two left, and there's little I can do about it. Obviously they're not as necessary as the healing items, but still, that'll make for quite alot of tedium until I can gain a couple more levels and enter a town.
If there's some other way to get these items, I'm not really seeing it. I've very rarely seen the dust items appear in buildings, but.... yeah, that's not exactly a reliable way to get them.
That, so far though, is the only issue I've run into with the game. There really isnt anything else negative to say about it. Well, the buildings could be more fulla stuff and a bit more enemy variety would be nice, though I'm guessing those are being worked on, so those are non-issues.
For a game that's, what, only half finished? there sure is alot of content here. WAY more than I'd thought there'd be... I get the impression I've not even scratched the surface yet!
Also, screw those stupid exploding dwarf things. They're annoying to begin with, but boss fights just get NASTY if you've got a millionty of those little jerkwads running around. These guys are definitely the Stupid Ninja Gaiden Birds of the game (those ones that punt you into pits in the original games).
And I'll be interested to see where the whole strategic/city stuff goes. Definitely very bare-bones currently, but it looks like it could get very interesting.
Overall, a superb game. Just superb. It's rare that I find games with as much potential as this, and also rare I find something that's as GOOD as this, particularly in an unfinished state.
