Bringers of Darkness
- NeX
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
Introduction
Another bullet heaven game inspired by the huge success of Vampire Survivors. It was developed and published by Arcane Celestia, currently in Early Access with more content hinted at.
Gameplay
If you haven’t played a bullet heaven game before, here’s a quick overview. You choose a starting character (currently 5 in the game), defeat monsters that drop EXP, and, upon leveling up, you get a choice of 3 upgrades for your current run - these include powerful new abilities (up to 6 total) or upgrades for existing ones.
Most games of this type are time-based, with mini-bosses spawning at 5/10/15 minutes, and your goal is to survive a certain amount of time. Here, though, it’s slightly different. Your goal is to defeat warriors of light to bring out the boss, then defeat that boss 3 times (probably will be different in the future, but for now, there's only 1 type in the game) to win the campaign.
One of the big flaws of this game is the complete lack of any data you have. You don’t know the damage of abilities, chance for a critical hit, damage of a critical hit, area of effect, or literally any kind of information…
Some abilities seem to be the same except one is red while the other is blue. Whether the enemies react differently to either is also a complete mystery.
Upgrades range from damage ups, over critical damage and chance improvements to longevity of spells or the increase of area of effect.
You can collect items which again provide no context as to what they actually do. I'm guessing axes increase physical damage while the purple star increases magical (purely speculation). Hearts, as usual, provide heals, but once again, the actual numbers remain unknown.
There are currently 2 playable maps, and they look similar. In fact, they look like the outskirts of a town and the town itself. Enemy variety is decent for this stage of the game, but I did notice a large amount of militia types. Both maps have exactly the same enemies.
There is a roadmap and lots of options in the menu to be checked at a later date, like more maps, more heroes, passive abilities for heroes, curse system for difficulty adjustments, ability interactions (I’m assuming an evolve like in most of these types of games), and plenty after that…
Positives
● Has a roadmap
● Has potential
Negatives
● Early Alpha build
● Limited Content
● Bad visual indicators
● No optimization
● No information given
Video, Audio & Sound
The video is, in a word, bland; if someone had told me this is a League of Legends mod, I would have believed them. It’s about as generic as it can be. Sure, the characters are unique, and the mobs appear different, but the style is the same. Their attack patterns are identical; they come close, then swing their weapon at you.
The effects on the attacks are decent; they do seem to move slowly and interact with enemies properly. They are colored based on the element, and other than green, attacks are easily distinguished.
There is background music, and the sound effects are minimal. I think this part will be improved with future updates - maybe level-specific themes, weapon-specific sounds, etc.
Personal Thoughts
The game crashed on me when I first booted it up. It activated my CPU for whatever reason - fans started working like I was playing GTA6. Other than that, I found the game to be too easy. I won my first run without even knowing (hence using) about the dash.
Playtime: 40min+
Conclusion
With the saturated market of the genre, and many more complete games for similar or less money, I can't really suggest trying this in the current iteration. Hopefully, with updates it will become something worth investing your time in.
Factors | Rating | Description |
🎮Gameplay | 5 | Not enough content to properly say |
🎧Music | 5 | Generic music, nothing special |
💲Price | 3 | More expensive than other games in the genre with less content |
🎰Overall Rating | 4 | Needs a lot more work before it’s viable |
Rating: 4/10
Gaming PC Specs
CPU: I5 14600 KF GPU: Nvidia RTX 5070
RAM: 32GB of DDR5 @5600Mhz
