Review 1
Purchased!
The basic action-roguelike/survivor-like framework is poorly balanced, which
makes the whole experience underwhelming. There are a fairly wide range of
weapons, but it feels like half or more of them are largely useless; e.g. a
10-second cooldown to create a single small damage circle on the ground, or a
small orb that does minimal damage and only travels the equivalent of a few
feet. This is further hampered by a lack of scalars for most abilities beyond
leveling up the weapon itself: you can increase damage and critical damage, but
not e.g. area of effect, projectile numbers, etc. to turn something that's
initially underwhelming into something strong.
The new ideas that it brings are also half-baked. Weapons are tied to factions,
and picking a weapon from a faction allows you to then get passive upgrades
associated with them, and find NPCs that help you during the run... but there's
no interplay between the factions, so you can just pick whatever you like for
your build, and the NPCs contribute next to nothing. There are "familiars", but
they are just another minimal stat boost (e.g. 10% attack speed) with a sprite
that follows you around; but there's already an upgrade system that lets you do
the same sort of stat boosts.
Review 2
Purchased!
Scarlet Tower is a weird survivor/bullet heaven type game. It has style, it has
an identity, it has unique mechanics that differentiate it from others of its
type...
...yet I still can't recommend it. Especially not in its current state. That may
change over time, but recent updates have made it somehow more confusing than it
used to be. It used to be a bit more standard and run of the mill, with a ton of
its items basically ripped from Vampire Survivors (it still has a couple of
those, like the Bible and Holy Water, but you know). Now it forgoes all that for
perks based around "loyalty" to different ideals like faith or perseverance
(really just alternate stat points) and to special traits you can only get if
you have a weapon of the corresponding element. However, there are SEVERAL
problems with how it's done.
The BIGGEST problem of all is that there is a large amount of content that has
little to no explanation at all about what it actually does. Shiny coins? You
can use them at a secret vendor in endless mode, but it doesn't say that
anywhere in game despite the option being there on one of the main metagame
tabs. What current stats and effects do your weapons have? Good luck finding
that out midgame, you can only see that out of a match. What evolution pairings
can a weapon have? You can only see that after you've selected a weapon, not
during selection. How many different traits can you pick before you run out of
space? It certainly isn't the number of empty trait slots in your "inventory"
screen, because you can run out way before that point. Why are some of the
special mastery traits from a weapon showing incorrect math (like the
elementalist frostburn pretty much always says it has 100% chance to trigger
despite the math saying it should start closer to 50%, yet still showing the
incorrect result). What are all these unlockables in the achievements even
supposed to do? Many of them don't have even the slightest explanation! The
shield and sword pickups you can get on the ground are apparently stat ups, but
you can't see this info anywhere as far as I'm aware, nor even how many you
have. Per the stats page it looks like potions you buy from vendors can't be
stacked anymore (they also don't display a second copy if you buy another) but
you can still buy duplicates and end up getting cheated--why? What do the
different followers you can assist even do, and why is the engineer on the
walker the only one that can seemingly survive the World Eater for a period of
time? Are the other followers even meant to be useful or just there to look
pretty (they are extremely useless), and what do they even do?
More information is direly needed for the player.
The other problem is balance. There are some items that do virtually the same
thing as another item, but despite both being non-evolved starting items, one
can be so VASTLY superior to the other that it's baffling. Some of them are only
good for evolutions, but then some evolutions aren't even good either. We're
talking one item will do like 3 or 20 damage, and another will do THOUSANDS, and
start with over a hundred damage, while potentially having better trigger
conditions/cooldown/area of effect too. It's nuts. A lot of the content feels
like it got forgotten after the new updates they've introduced. Healing right
now is obscenely powerful, but also the enemies are so fast and numerous that
you pretty much have to use it. Some trait groups are just plain useless
compared to others, making their weapons unattractive even if the weapon itself
is good, because you don't want to take something attached to such bad perks.
For some reason the paladin traits include one where every time an ally joins
you you get a +1% stacking bonus that can go up really high, but the paladin has
no means of summoning allies as that's a necromancer thing, and you sure aren't
going to find many champion allies naturally in the wild (especially not enough
for that perk to matter). I could go on, but I'd run out of room on this post.
"Endless" mode is always on a difficulty beyond the previous max of 10 and
pretty much always murders you in a few minutes unless you build insanely tanky
and outheal everything. You cannot do endless on any other difficulty, making it
basically a difficulty 11, not a normal endless.
Another weird bit is theming sometimes. The paladin trait group is the healer
and team support one, while the priest is some of the most insane dps around
while also being great at shielding and yet can't heal others, and even has
smite instead of the paladin, which is just WEIRD without some sort of flavor
text explaining why priests are the offensive ones and paladins are the team
healers. The Bible is a paladin weapon, not a priest weapon (though it doing
physical damage is hilarious--I guess you're literally bible bashing your
enemies). There's only two unevolved templar weapons I've found (and I have all
weapons showing unlocked), while others can have several weapons in their group.
Elementalist includes lightning but is only really focused around fire and ice
and their interactions with Frostburn. Just stuff like that. Everywhere.
Finally, in the months since the game launched into early access and came to
where it is now, the game has become a full on eye-melting particle fest that
makes it very difficult to tell what's going on, especially with ridiculously
fast enemies on harder difficulties. It literally gave me a migraine.
The game has gone from generic but with a cool art style to less generic but
also so much more unpolished and broken.
Hopefully the devs clean this up--A LOT--before launch. The discussion boards
are pretty much dead presently, and honestly the discord isn't that active
either (they also have an "updates" channel that is completely empty since they
only use "announcements." Kinda weird.) For now, I simply can't recommend it. If
they polish it instead of making it more scattered and unreadable over time,
then I'd strongly recommend it for its uniqueness under the mess. Time will
tell.
Scarlet Tower 
