izigame.me

as a fan of roguelites i've often heard a lot of people say "oh have you played dead cells? that one's pretty good", so whilst it was on sale i figured i'd give it a go, but honestly most of my time in it has been put into it solely for the sake of giving it a fair shake, so i'll rattle off my pros and cons:
Pros:
++ game was clearly made with love and there's plenty of references to other roguelites if you like that kind of thing
+ animations are very lively and full of character
+ satisfying parries (albeit maybe too forgiving)
+ SOME interesting weapons and items
+ unique modifiers can make some weapons more interesting
+ clearly some lore involved, albeit it's sparsely scattered around
+ there's a conscientiousness like the timer being frozen in shops, lore rooms and between levels present throughout most of the game
+ some okay level variety once you unlock all of the runes
+ game can feel pretty nice when you're speeding through it, and speedrunners have access to options for their gameplay
Cons:
--- super limited weapon, item and mutation pools, like, REALLY limited, there's probably as many mutations/items/weapons total as EtG has in just guns and nuclear throne can match it as well despite being a much smaller game
--- the damage type system, whilst somewhat unique for a roguelite, carves down the previously mentioned limited selection even more and shoehorns you into specific items whilst creating various build incompatibilities that hurt variety even more
-- the limited mutation pool gets limited even more by a hard limit of 3 per run, stopping you from getting ridiculous combinations you'd see in other roguelites like EtG, RoR, etc, which is then further harmed by weapon scaling not affecting the mutations that'd affect the weapon, ie, you have a bow that scales with survivability, but the arrow effects and buffs that come from it would otherwise depend on tactics mutations for their effects. similarly, a vast majority of the "brutality" skill tree mutations are locked to just melee weapons and tactics to ranged, hurting build variety even more on top of that.
-- ultimately this means that hybrid builds are essentially not viable in any way shape or form, especially since scrolls only get stronger the more points you put into them, but because mutations are all bound to specific stats, opting into any other scroll for survivability or utility purposes, ie to support your turrets or defensive gameplay for example, is kneecapped
-- boss variety is extremely limited, only having 4 in the base game
-- game can get quite repetitive, a bad sign for a roguelite
- bosses have an arbitrary damage cap of around 15% HP per hit, so even if you've got weapon mods like, "+300% damage dealt and taken", your damage will be neutered anyway, and whilst i'm familiar with boss DPS caps thanks to EtG, at least that game has some rare weapons that allow you to bypass it - having it unilaterally is a unreal wet blanket
ultimately the game seems sabotaged by its own mechanics, and whilst the lack of variety could maybe be remedied without the limitations, unfortunately they do exist and i'm not convinced i'd like to pay the game's cost all over again just for the DLC
and i've played enough to get to BSC2, so it's not like i'm inexperienced at the game