Alright, I abandoned alphabetical here and just clicked on something random that looked small.

Immediately I’m welcomed with a little intro piece about some warlock stealing your shit, yadda yadda yadda – a pretty campy bit of story telling, but no problem.

It’s a bare bones premise, but enough to send you off pretty quickly into a nice simple little arcade/castle crashers style slasher.

On the menu screen I’m greeted with one very welcome feature I rarely see anymore – Local co-op! Cool. Looks like it’s only 2 player, but it’s hard to play more than 2 on a PC game anyways – maybe consoles can do 4?

So, alright – off we go into another cartoony little land of wizards and goblins and barbarians, etc. With the intro out of the way we are dropped into a little camp zone with a training ground that tutorials you through all your basic attacks (charge attacks, jump attacks, stomps, shield breaks, and a simple fat dodge roll) and some simple customizations. I’m happy to see none of the customs are behind paywalls, and the classes are cleanly displayed with their unlock paths there to tease you to progress.

Will I care enough to want to mash attack with a pirate after mashing attack with a barbarian for awhile? I’m skeptical, but I appreciate the simple menus with straight forward instructions and no gem unlock nonsense.

Hopping ahead into the dungeon, the player is presented with a randomized sequence of little maps. For the first level, it looks like you walk through about 4 forest maps and then 3-4 castle maps. Each replay these are different and spawn different enemies. Some spawn no enemies. This is a nice basic use of structured randomization so the feeling of hopping into the blender doesn’t get tedious too quickly. I like it.

Every few screens players are also presented with a chest. The chests all give you a very simple lock pick game. You don’t need any tools or burn any resources, just time your taps as the animation moves. Catch being, if you fail and hit a spike, your character takes a hit, and he’s pretty fragile. I died to a couple chests at the start. Once again design wise on first look, I like it.

Pass the test and the chest explodes satisfyingly with some coins, potions and items. Along the top bar you can see 4 simple item slots. Magic, thrown weapons, scrolls, and potions. You can only have one type of item in each at a time (for example you can have 4 throwing axes, but if you pick up one throwing knife they will all spill onto the floor). Again I like it, simple scarcity, no large inventories to manage.

As you progress, chests and enemies start dropping real items, weapons, hats, boots, etc. Once again there’s no inventory to manage. If you pick up boots you wear them. If you had boots on, they fall off. The description of what the item does hovers over the item when you go to pick it up. Nice clean design, and none of the deep-dive RPG demand pushed on the user. It’s an arcade game, just grab stuff and use it!

Some of the character types have item disadvantages to go along with their bonuses. The Barbarian refuses to wear armour, the peg-legged pirate can’t equip boots. This adds a little to the flavour of each without being a serious punishment, you just sometimes stare at a nice piece of equipment and go “G@#$)&AMNIT!!”

Each small section completed shows you a little stats page, and then you continue on. You start with 2 lives and lives are scarce. Sometimes a great run ends by accidentally jumping or getting bumped off a cliff. Unlike death by gameshow though, these were scarce enough that I usually laughed them off.

Many items are silly – a lifeguard’s inner tube protects you from fall deaths. Potions might warp your face into an ass or give you giant swollen feet that you can’t put shoes on. Players can catch diseases from potions that make you unable to stop running or jumping, or leave you meandering the screen drunk. These can be cured or wear off over time. Oh, and there’s an American eagle item that makes you literally float around shitting bombs on the ground. So, yeah.

Live long enough and you’ll start to look something like this – some kind of grizzled pirate demon with a bloody two faced axe, a bomb head and a small icy elf companion. Your attacks change in speed and reach with different weapons, and some single use items give you permanent new abilities (when I beat this it was largely thanks to a mechanical arm granting me a buzz-saw like spinning attack).

In addition to armour, potions, thrown weapons and artifacts, you can accumulate little familiars, that follow you around shooting off minor effects – pecks, zaps, fireballs, etc. You seem to be able to have any number of them.

At the very end you’re granted your choice of mount, weird pegasus, vacuum cleaner, or… I’m not sure what those tube things are. You’re suddenly launched into a very brief (and easy) side scroller where you fly up and down shooting fireballs at incoming enemies. Feels like the creator’s ran out of gas a bit trying to finish strong here, but it wasn’t a bad idea, just not nearly as well developed as the rest.

So what’s the final verdict? Honestly, I came into this game skeptical and remained skeptical the first 10-15 times I played. Like Awesomenauts, I’m kind of a career hater of these kinds of arcade games where you’re in a pseudo-3D map and move up and down whacking and slashing at random enemies. It was a great fit for those original co-op arcades as kids, getting to jump in and rejoin matches and smash away at things together, but I never thought of them as games I’d play much on my own.

As I started to get the hang of the basic combat though, I was pleasantly surprised all around. I went from thinking it was well designed to actually just having fun stomping around playing it. I love that the game knows it’s an arcade game and doesn’t weigh the player down anywhere with big inventories, long cut scenes, or grinds.

You can legitimately beat this game in 30 minutes and unlock harder modes/characters and do it again. There’s a lot of action and I died plenty of times getting through on normal. The depth of the items and the randomized maps combine to make each play through feel fresh. Your player gets stronger in different ways and you’ll get into different fighting patterns with them based on the items you end up grabbing.

All around, I give it an A- : it’s well thought out, well executed, and just the right combination of quick action, limited lives, interesting items to keep me enjoying smashing through it. Players that know this genre better might find the combo abilities a bit limited, but there is some depth there as you open more classes and access more abilities. The bosses were simple and fun, challenging but not a dramatic leap from the regular fights. The final boss was a bit of a let down.