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I originally was going to give Dandy Ace a 2.5/5, but the more I wrote this piece the more I was convinced it deserved a 2/5
On my scale, a 2/5 game is disappointing, unfun, or otherwise not worth the purchase price. There are definitely better alternatives, and I highly recommend you consider finding one of those.
I’ll be blunt. Dandy Ace is not a bad game, it just is plagued by the weaknesses of the roguelike genre and succumbs to them. It is a game with a lot of charm, nice animations, nice music, and an interesting approach to weapons. But it is in the moment to moment gameplay where it becomes far too situational to recommend to a wide audience.
TLDR: If you are a player who loves roguelikes and have played Hades, Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Skul, and Have a Nice Death and are craving a new setting in which to experience these sorts of challenges, then this game might scratch that itch in a satisfying way. If you have NOT played all of the aforementioned games and/or you are likewise not a roguelike addict, ehhhh this becomes much harder to recommend.
What Dandy Ace does well:
Dandy Ace’s primary inspiration is Dead Cells. You collect blueprints which unlock items you can equip from the start on future runs, runs start with a random assortment of cards (as long as you upgrade this properly), and there are (limited) branching paths you can take to complete the game. It draws some inspiration from Hades from the camera perspective, although it is less smooth because of an awkward angling placement.
The artwork is charming, and the voice acting is mainly passable. The enemies are pretty creative and are well designed.
I really like the upgrade system, where you could slot in other cards you find to power up the weapons you’re actually using and you can do this on the dime. This was the most creative innovation in Dandy Ace, and I really think more games of the genre could learn from this.
In most roguelikes, you tend to have to toe a fine line between psychopathy and safety, such that you generally have to play close, tight, and fast to weave in and out of enemies. In Dandy Ace, you’re rewarded by playing more like a ranged character that can basically lure enemies out of their rooms in small groups and pick them apart from the edge, kiting backwards. If you want to die in this game, run headfirst into a room and try to fight from the middle. The game does a good job placing you in locked arenas where you have to do this, although they tend to be larger and give you more room to maneuver than the average room.
And now, what Dandy Ace does poorly.
First and foremost, the story is… asinine. You have such a bizarre relationship between Lele and Dandy Ace, such that Lele is like the average Twitch fanboy who trapped his favorite streamer into an alternate reality where he finally gets to force a 1v1. You have a weird power dynamic where Lele is “helping you” get to the final boss and Dandy Ace is too mentally challenged to put two and two together. There is this entire world that supposedly exists inside this magical mirror, but you never escape? You just win and then Lele says “I’ve retrapped you in a harder mode?” And when you beat Nightmare mode you don’t even have an end cutscene that is like “we definitely left the mirror?” What the fuck is this writing.
Now, I could overlook this except for the fact that: there is no way to turn off bitch ass Lele’s voice from taunting you in EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ROOM. Enemies spawned in? Voiceline. You killed enemies? Voiceline. Cupcake dropped? Voiceline. You stop moving for 15 seconds? Lele complains. So you can’t ignore the story, because Lele is constantly talking to you as a reminder that you are, in fact, trapped in this magical mirror and these are his minions doing his bidding. There are like maybe 4 voice lines that he has that are funny, but after 11.5 hours of listening to the same 10 voicelines, I’m about ready to Gangplank Q to cranium. You can’t access any menus from the pause screen, and even then I don’t think there is an option to turn him off.
Then you have the single biggest pitfall plaguing any roguelike game, Dead Cells included: unlocks that downgrade you. What I mean by this is that as you unlock more cards, you come to realize that the vast majority of them are troll cards. Remember how you’re supposed to play this game as a ranged mage? Well good luck, because 60+ percent of all the cards you can unlock in this game are melee cards. This means that the more you unlock, the worse chance you have of being able to complete your build. So after a certain point, you realize that you’ve trolled yourself, because now it’s near impossible to complete the higher difficulty because you can never get any cards which are actually good.
Now before any of you say “skill diff,” let me explain why ranged cards are necessary to beat the game: the bosses are horseshit. They are mongo ass to play against. In most roguelikes, you get your ass kicked because you either didn’t understand the boss’ attack pattern, or because you fucked up and got filtered by your reflexes. You know how in most roguelikes, hell even in Dark Souls, most bosses have momentary windows of opportunity for you to attack them in between rounds of their BS? Or in bullet hells like ROTMG and Enter the Gungeon you can attack while moving in a different direction? Or that, if you’re good enough, you can complete the boss taking 0 damage? Good, because in this game you can do neither. Not only do the bosses never give you a breather, but you must be facing the boss to attack them. So what you will do for the majority of the fight is run around away from the boss and the hundreds of AOE environmental hazards or attacks and pray you get to hit them. Both Scissorella and Axolangelo have attacks that lock onto you even if you dash meaning that the only way to dodge them is to dash EXACTLY at the time they fire the attack. God forbid you do it half a second too early, because their aiming reticle will snap onto you. They have auto aim installed, apparently. (Also, Axolangelo has some BS terrain that spawns and stays on the map forever, doing 15 of your 500 HP per second you stand on it. It stays so long, that he can spawn it a second time while the first round is still on the floor, converting the entire floor of the map into harmful terrain. And don’t get me started on Lele’s 6 fucking clones, each of which auto-spam 4 simultaneously spells on no cooldown rendering the late game fight unplayable.) Lele in particular is a stupid fucking fight.
So the only way to beat the bosses is to abuse damage over time abilities. DOTs are so fucking op, they are necessary to winning the fight, and you can basically stack them as much as you can. The ideal build is using the 5 card fan attack (like Twisted Fate Q) with either poison, burn, or bleed buff because each individual card stacks one tick of DOT. So in the rare window you have, you can dash right at the boss, spam the ability, hit all your cards, and stack 30 DOT stacks on the boss, which will do at least 1/3rd of their HP while you’re dodging. If you can find them, run Twin Daggers also with DOT (or alternatively vulnerability, but this is less DPS overall). My favorite card to round it out is Event Horizon with vulnerability, as it gives an AOE slow necessary for clearing rooms of minions. Once you get to Lele, swap for Fairy Lights, as you need some protection against projectiles for his BS. I’ve tried to beat the bosses without DOTs, and it’s impossible. This is why unlocking upgrades is a direct detriment to your experience: the more cards you have unlocked, the harder it is to find the cards necessary to stack DOT builds. Other builds can be more effective than DOTs with normal enemies, but you’ll inevitably get filtered by the bosses. So you’re really not rewarded for experimenting.