izigame.me

This one hurts. It's so, so close.
I'd soft recommend this to action roguelike junkies, but there are too many caveats for me to be enthusiastic about it. It's great fun for the first 5 hours, but after a few runs the cracks start to show, and by the time you're doing D3+ runs, it's fallen apart.
You get four spells, with access to a single one at a time. You cycle through your spells in an order you've defined, so it's a lot of fun to try to combo spells that feel like they'd work well together. Almost immediately, you start to get visions of combos you might be able to do, but often times they don't pan out. Usually, the same two gameplay systems are the culprit: Physics, and mana.
For starters, the game is simply too floaty. You can stay airborne almost indefinitely. Your air jump regenerates after you basic attack something, and your descent to the ground is very slow (unless you do a 2A command input for a standard "downwards stomp" type of attack). Your iframe dash is usable mid-air, and you don't lose height while mid-dash. Initially, all of this feels kind of neat; you can do a lot of big aerial auto attack strings, and it's never cumbersome to run around the screen while platforming or hitting airborne enemies.
It doesn't take long for the floatyness to get in the way of your combo strings though, and really slow the game down. A lot of spells are tied to movement, so your character's positioning will shift around as you cast (often jumping up, or dashing around). A lot of the coolest combos _feel_ like they should be able to play off of this. It's exciting to imagine stuff like lunging forward with a dash strike, followed by a jumping backstep that leaves a mirror image, then throwing a barrage of ice shards into the hoard of enemies.
But once you actually try it out, you find that once you're in the air, you just kinda stay there, making any follow ups pretty hard to execute. Doing the downwards stomp to get back to the ground is generally slow and unsafe, so more often than not you abandon your hopes of creating smooth strings in favor of doing some additional movement, or simply basic attacking. Full OTG don't tend to fair much better, as the only reliable animation cancel is your dash, forcing you into too much movement when going for precision.
One can easily work around these limitations and concede to different strings with more homogeneous hitboxes and angle types. In particular, it's very effective to spam spells that hit straight downwards to rain death from above (you're in the air forever anyway), or just spamming attacks that hit in a line in front of you. It might not feel as neat as the combos your heart wants to do, but it's simple, and it works.
... Or at least, it works until you run out of mana, which isn't going to take very long. The only reliable way to restore mana is to auto attack things. Generally if you have a full mana bar, you can get about 3-4 spells in before needing to stop and hold down the auto button.
The problem with this is that using the auto attack sucks on every character. A lot. They do nearly no damage, they lack any weight in their animations, and have no oomph in their sound effects. They simply don't feel good to use. Mechanically, they serve their job decently when you do stuff like add status ailments to them, so you can spam autos to stack up things like Burn or Poison; but multihit spells tend to be better at this too. You never want to auto, you just have to.
Autos are pretty slow, even when you get like 25%+ aspd buffs rolling, which is a huge part of the issue. I get the sense that a lot of the reviewers who call this "fast paced" are unfamiliar with fast paced action games—it does step it up a notch compared to Hades or Dead Cells (both games that, in their intentional slowness, have proper weight to them and feel quite good), but it lags behind something like One Step From Eden or Astlibra. As it stands, it feels like the game can't really keep up me on the offensive... but it doesn't really demand mindful timing or precision either. Ultimately it becomes kind of mashy and 1 dimensional. That said, it demands a decent amount of attention out of you in order to properly _dodge_ attacks. There's this strange disconnect where defense and evading feel about right, but your offense is too sluggish and limited.
The most fun I had were runs where I lucked into passives that made mana management way more tolerable. There's some passive auras that helps with mana, and a very short-lived buff you can pick up occasionally that gives you infinite mana. When you get a taste of that, and you can play without the auto attack constantly getting in the way, it feels pretty dang good. But it never lasts.
Visually the game looks pretty good, and it doesn't feel too noisy even when the screen is hella mobbed in Eclipse challenge rooms. Still, somehow non-gameplay elements (OP, backgrounds, cutscenes) all look way better than the actual gameplay elements (actors, animations, effects), which feels a little dubious; they know how to sell copies, I suppose. The character animations in particular are a little strange, they look rotoscoped (though the store page advertises frame by frame). Regardless, this is easy to look passed.
Harder problems to overlook are the atrocious writing and voice acting, which are roughly on par with a 90's WB Kids anime dub. The writing is such a problem that the game would better if there were simply no story or dialogue at all. Characters are stupid and 1 dimensional, lines are corny, delivery is literally laughable, and the game fails to convey meaning in any of it. It's all one big trite annoyance rife with inconsistency. Between the villian that unironically yells "FRAK!" all the time and the playboy martial artist that refers to himself in third person, I'm certain GPT-3 would have done a better job. It feels kind of like a preteen's first visual novel script that they posted up on deviantart or so.
The music is fine, on its own, but in the context of the gameplay it fares only marginally better than the writing; I was quickly getting tired of the first stage's track, and when I got to the second stage, there was hardly any tonal shift at all, despite the fact that I just went from a breezy plainsland to a desert volcano. The music fails to bring you into whatever environment you're supposed to be in or convey any particular emotion. It's just kind of there.
The game is somewhat challenging at least, it took 3 runs for me to get my first clear, another 2 or 3 for my second, and another 3 or 4 after that for my third —each time you turn up the difficulty a little bit, you can definitely feel it. But part of this because I feel like the game suffers more from RNG than it should. Because your auto attack isn't a very reliable part of your build, you have to rely on your active spells and passives to make it through the tougher encounters, and if you happen to get a run where the pieces don't come together, it feels a little hopeless. You can generally make do with only 1 or 2 decent spells though, so it starts to encourage building around those and neglecting your other slots, and once that realization hits, the character building degenerates even further.
None of the characters really grabbed me in the end, so I just kind of aimlessly bounced between them all hoping to find some combination of spells that makes the gears really turn in my head and the control finally click into place. It never quite clicked all the way.
All in all the game has some interesting systems and it has glimpses of insane potential, but I think it falls JUST short enough to mostly deliver disappointments. Really a shame—it's really so, so, close. Just a biiit of gameplay tuning and some extra "oomph", and I feel like this would hang with the greats.
Oh well—If you're looking for another game that's "almost there, but not quite it" then look no further.