Info about Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde:

Official game description:
  
**Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde** is a rogue-lite, action game in which you fight huge waves of monsters using passive attacks and abilities. Slay thousands and thousands of endlessly encroaching monsters to stay alive! Collect souls to level up and to increase your power and abilities both in the field and in the Oracle’s vast, permanent upgrade system.  
Become a god in minutes by learning the abilities you can obtain when you level up and how they grow in power. Combine many different powerful attacks to take down the hordes!  
Death is just a state, The oracle will bring you back to fight another day.
Features
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*   Super accessible, Magical Survival/Vampire Survivor inspired combat system  
*   An ever-growing roster of Spirit Hunters to unlock and take into battle  
*   An expansive meta progression system.  
*   A huge amount of abilities to unlock and master  
*   Deep synergy system when combining Hunters with different abilities.

Release date: 20 Jun, 2023

Categories: Roguelike, Survivor-like, Horde Combat, Character Progression, Character Customization, Exploration, Strategic Combat


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Excellent Roguelite Experience (weight 0.99): Players consistently praise the game as a high-quality, enjoyable, and well-made entry in the roguelite/survivor-like genre. Many consider it superior or a strong alternative to Vampire Survivors, highlighting its unique twists and overall polish.
- Engaging Progression System (weight 0.52): The game's extensive and engaging skill/talent tree is a major highlight, providing a strong sense of permanent progression and encouraging continued play. Players enjoy unlocking new abilities, characters, and weapons, which adds depth and replayability.
- Beautiful Art & Graphics (weight 0.33): The game receives high marks for its visual presentation, including beautiful art style, inventive sprites, and mesmerizing animations. Players appreciate the clean, modern design and smooth performance.
- Challenging Difficulty (weight 0.09): The game provides a satisfying challenge, particularly on higher difficulties. Players appreciate the increasing combat dynamics and the adequate difficulty scaling.
- Short, Accessible Runs (weight 0.09): The 15-minute run length is a popular feature, making the game accessible for quick sessions and less tiring for players with limited time. It's ideal for short, engaging playtimes.
- Great Music & Sound (weight 0.06): The game's audio elements, including music and sound effects, are highly praised by players, contributing positively to the overall experience.
- Easy to Learn, Hard to Master (weight 0.05): The game is easy to pick up and play, with a non-existent barrier to entry. While simple to start, it offers depth that makes it harder to master, appealing to a wide range of players.
- Smooth Controls (weight 0.05): The game offers smooth and fluid controls, especially with a controller. Improvements to character movement have made the gameplay experience more pleasant.
- Great Value for Price (weight 0.05): The game is considered excellent value for its low price point, especially given its quality and content even in Early Access.
- Satisfying Enemy Hordes (weight 0.05): A core satisfying element of the game is the ability to destroy large hordes of enemies. Players enjoy finding optimal ways to mow down baddies and harvest resources.
- High Level of Completion (weight 0.05): Despite being in Early Access, the game is perceived as highly complete and fully featured, with expectations that it may not even require paid DLC.
- Effective Weapon Combos (weight 0.05): Specific weapon combinations and enhancements are noted for their effectiveness in different combat scenarios, such as clearing mobs or hunting bosses.

Common complaints:
- Unbalanced and frustrating difficulty (weight 0.9): Players report a significant and frustrating difficulty spike, especially on higher difficulties, leading to a tedious and unbalanced experience. This often makes the game feel unrewarding and not fun, with progression feeling slow and grindy.
- Unsatisfying upgrade system (weight 0.43): The skill tree and overall upgrade system are criticized for offering unimpactful, incremental bonuses (e.g., +1% damage) that feel like padding. This makes progression slow, unrewarding, and often boring, requiring excessive grinding for minor gains.
- Poor weapon/character balance (weight 0.39): There are significant balance issues with weapons and characters, leading to a limited number of viable choices. Unlocking new, weaker options can dilute the upgrade pool, making it harder to create effective builds and forcing players into repetitive strategies.
- Lacks 'Survivors-like' appeal (weight 0.3): Many players compare the game unfavorably to Vampire Survivors and similar titles, citing a lack of satisfying power fantasy, slower pace, less strategic depth, and fewer engaging synergies or character differentiations.
- Lack of developer updates (weight 0.23): A major concern is the perceived abandonment of the game by developers, with a lack of significant content updates post-release. This leads to a feeling of stagnation and unfulfilled potential.
- Unengaging spell design (weight 0.19): Many spells are described as boring, lacking impact, or having strange targeting. This limits build variety and prevents players from feeling powerful, often forcing them to rely on a few specific, effective spell combinations.
- Flawed pet system (weight 0.13): The pet system is seen as poorly designed, with many pets being useless or poorly explained. Unlocking more pets can dilute the pool, making it harder to get useful ones and increasing reliance on RNG.
- Confusing skill tree UI (weight 0.12): The skill tree lacks clear organization and readability, making it difficult to navigate, understand progression paths, or plan future builds. Hidden nodes and scattered tiers contribute to a confusing experience.
- Inaccurate hitboxes (weight 0.11): Players report significant issues with hitboxes, which are often inaccurate or misaligned with character sprites. This leads to frustrating situations where players are hit by seemingly distant attacks or cannot effectively dodge.
- Lacks power fantasy (weight 0.11): The game fails to deliver a satisfying power fantasy, with players often feeling underpowered and constantly on the defensive. Specific issues include weapons lacking mob-clearing impact and frustrating boss mechanics like instant-death spikes.
- Unsatisfying challenge mode (weight 0.09): Challenges are criticized for forcing predefined builds, removing player freedom, and sometimes having fixed skills that nullify the challenge. The UI for challenge requirements also lacks clarity.
- Need for more content (weight 0.08): Players desire more content, including additional maps, enemy types, characters, and weapon evolutions, to enhance replayability and provide a fresh experience beyond the current offerings.
- Uninspired boss design (weight 0.08): Boss encounters are generally considered uninspired, with some featuring 'cheap shot' mechanics or being excessively overtuned, leading to frustrating rather than engaging fights.
- Uninspired visuals/animations (weight 0.07): The game's visual presentation, including character designs and animations, is often described as boring, uninspired, or reminiscent of a soulless mobile game, detracting from the overall experience.

Gameplay feedback:
- Extensive but Obscure Skill Tree (weight 0.4): The game features an extensive skill tree for permanent upgrades, new characters, and abilities. While it offers a sense of progression, visibility of locked nodes is poor, and some unlocks are tied to specific achievements or challenges, requiring significant grinding.
- Abundant Content & Progression (weight 0.4): The game offers substantial content, including multiple difficulty levels, challenges, and achievements, providing many hours of gameplay for 100% completion. Some content and modes, like hardcore, are locked behind specific difficulties or challenges.
- Limited but Deep Abilities (weight 0.26): Players are limited to four active abilities (weapons/spells) per run, which can be leveled up to a cap of 25. Each character has unique starting weapon perks, and spell upgrades offer various improvements.
- Vampire Survivors-like Gameplay (weight 0.25): The game is frequently compared to Vampire Survivors, sharing core mechanics but differentiating itself with features like map exploration, more maps, and a slower pace. It's seen as a 'Survivors-like' game.
- Challenging Boss Fights (weight 0.17): Each 15-minute run culminates in a boss fight, often in a confined arena. Bosses can be challenging, sometimes occupying large portions of the screen and summoning mini-bosses if not defeated quickly.
- Pet System Adds Variety (weight 0.15): A pet system allows players to find and upgrade pets on maps, which provide unique active and passive abilities. Finding pet cages can be difficult due to lack of map indicators.
- High Difficulty Spikes (weight 0.1): Higher difficulties, particularly 'Brutal' mode, significantly increase enemy health and damage, making survival extremely challenging even with optimized builds.
- Exploration for Loot (weight 0.09): The game encourages constant movement and map exploration to find resources, chests, and shops. This design promotes active gameplay and rewards players for seeking out loot.
- Restrictive Challenges (weight 0.09): Challenges, which are often tied to specific maps and difficulties, can be frustrating as they sometimes force players to use weak or fixed weapon sets, limiting build variety.
- In-Run Skill Upgrades (weight 0.08): Skills can be leveled up significantly during a run, offering good abilities and incremental upgrades for both combat and utility skills like run speed or mining speed.
- Consistent 15-Minute Runs (weight 0.08): Each gameplay session or 'run' consistently lasts approximately 15 minutes, providing a predictable and relatively quick play experience.
- Diverse Playable Characters (weight 0.07): The game features a diverse cast of characters, each with distinct abilities and playstyles, contributing to varied gameplay experiences.
- Weapon Evolution Pacing (weight 0.07): Weapon evolutions are tied to a linear progression system, and players often feel there isn't enough time within a run to fully level up their weapons.
- Overwhelming Enemy Hordes (weight 0.06): Players are frequently overwhelmed by large crowds of enemies, necessitating constant movement and strategic positioning to avoid damage. The camera adjusts to help manage this.

Performance notes:
- Optimized performance (weight 0.05): Players consistently report excellent performance, even on older hardware. This indicates good optimization and accessibility for a wide range of systems.
- Clear combat visuals (weight 0.03): Players appreciate the clear visual feedback during combat, avoiding the 'bullet hell' scenario. This design choice allows for strategic gameplay and better situational awareness.
- No motion sickness (weight 0.03): A significant number of players noted that the game does not induce motion sickness or dizziness, which is a common issue in some fast-paced games. This improves accessibility for sensitive players.
- Clean UI design (weight 0.02): The user interface is frequently praised for its clarity and minimalist design. This contributes to a less cluttered screen and better player focus.

Recommendations:
- Mixed Recommendation & Value (weight 0.54): Player sentiment on recommendation is mixed, with many suggesting waiting for updates or a sale. While some find it enjoyable for its price and genre, others feel it's not worth the full price in its current state and needs significant improvements.
- Compared to Vampire Survivors (weight 0.17): Many players compare this game unfavorably to Vampire Survivors and similar titles, suggesting that if players are looking for a 'survivors-like' game, there are better or more established alternatives available. Some recommend it only if other similar games have been exhausted.
- Good Value for Price (weight 0.12): A significant number of players believe the game offers good value for its low price, especially when on sale. Some even state they would pay more for it, indicating strong perceived value for money.
- Anticipate Future Content (weight 0.07): Players are looking forward to future updates, DLCs, and new content, including specific features like a monster encyclopedia. This suggests an expectation for continued development and expansion.
- Solid Genre Entry (weight 0.04): For fans of the specific genre, the game is considered a solid entry. This indicates that players who already enjoy this type of game are more likely to appreciate it.
- Avoid Purchase (weight 0.02): Some players advise against purchasing the game, suggesting it's not worth the investment of time or money.

Other player notes:
- Early Access Potential (weight 0.25): As an early access title, the game shows significant potential for growth and improvement. Players are looking forward to future updates, especially regarding skill tree depth, additional progression mechanics, and more challenging achievements.
- Gameplay Balance Suggestions (weight 0.14): Players have specific suggestions for balancing and gameplay mechanics, such as improving the 'Bone Shot' ability, rethinking the shrinking arena, and adjusting resource drops from harder monsters. There's a desire for more freedom in creating 'OP' combinations.
- Unique Genre Approach (weight 0.1): The game offers a unique take on the survivor-like genre, distinguishing itself from titles like Vampire Survivors while maintaining an accessible and easy-to-understand core gameplay loop. Its background story is considered acceptable for the genre.
- Active, Transparent Developers (weight 0.09): The development team is highly active and transparent, engaging with the community through discussions, accessible roadmaps, and even streaming their work. This commitment fosters player confidence in the game's future.
- Customization & QoL (weight 0.06): Players desire more control over their gameplay experience, specifically requesting customizable keybinds and an option to respec the skill tree. The ability to visualize hitboxes is also a requested quality-of-life feature.
- Monster Spawn Tooltips (weight 0.04): A key quality-of-life improvement requested is the addition of tooltips for monster spawn locations (map and difficulty) to aid in unlocking web content.
- Random Spell Option (weight 0.03): A 'use random spell' option would add variety and replayability to runs, allowing players to experiment with different spell combinations.
- Translation Quality Issue (weight 0.02): The quality of the Korean translation is noted as being C-grade, indicating a need for improvement to better serve the Korean-speaking player base.
- Great Maps (weight 0.02): The maps within the game are generally well-received and considered to be great by players.
- Reduced Upgrade Costs (weight 0.02): Developers are actively reducing the resource cost of some upgrades, which is a positive change for player progression.

Emotions:
- Disappointment (weight 0.26): Players expressed disappointment due to a perceived decline in game quality over time, often linked to a lack of impactful updates, developer abandonment, and unfixed fundamental issues. This also stemmed from the game not delivering a satisfying 'power fantasy' through its progression, with weak upgrades, slow skill progression, and design choices that felt punishing or limited player agency.
- Satisfaction (weight 0.24): Satisfaction was primarily driven by the game's high quality, enjoyable gameplay mechanics, and effective progression systems. Players appreciated the game's completeness, polished features, and good value for money, often highlighting its strong adherence to genre elements and appealing art style.
- Frustration (weight 0.23): Frustration arose from various issues including high difficulty spikes, slow and grindy progression, and poor balance that made upgrades feel unimpactful. Players also experienced frustration due to awkward design decisions, game-breaking bugs, and a lack of consistent power growth, often leading to repetitive and unsatisfying gameplay loops.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.06): Enjoyment was derived from the core gameplay experience, including the satisfaction of slaying monsters and the engaging grind. Players found the game fun due to its challenge, addictive nature, and appealing art style, often appreciating the short run times and depth of gameplay.
- Excitement (weight 0.04): Excitement was generated by the game's addictive and engaging gameplay, unique characters, and the anticipation of new content and future development. Players were excited by the game's potential for interesting combinations and its strong position within its genre.
- Anger (weight 0.03): Anger was primarily caused by perceived bad game design, particularly difficulty spikes and nerfs to powerful skills in a single-player context. This led to players regretting their purchase and feeling frustrated by unfair mechanics like poor hitboxes and rapid monster spawns.
- Boredom (weight 0.02): Boredom resulted from repetitive and monotonous gameplay, often exacerbated by a lack of exhilaration and dull music or sound effects. Players felt they were repeating boring content without sufficient variety or engagement.
- Annoyance (weight 0.02): Annoyance stemmed from specific usability issues such as frequent keybind conflicts, difficulty with certain enemy types (like bomb enemies), and developer responses to feedback. Unreachable skill tree nodes also contributed to this feeling.
- Appreciation (weight 0.02): Appreciation was expressed for the game's unique take on the genre, its fluid gameplay, and appealing art style. Players valued the developer's commitment and saw the game as a good alternative to similar titles, highlighting its unique twists and progression system.
- Joy (weight 0.01): Joy was experienced through enjoyable features, the convenience of one-handed playability, and the overall positive feeling derived from playing the game.
- Optimism (weight 0.01): Optimism was tied to the game's potential for improvement and the anticipation of future updates. Players looked forward to new content and believed the game could evolve positively.
- Stress (weight 0.01): Stress was caused by negative changes to gameplay, such as worsening movement and attacks, slow game speed, and skill nerfs combined with new enemy additions. These factors created a more challenging and less enjoyable experience.
- Admiration (weight 0.01): Admiration was directed towards the game's high quality in terms of graphics, fluidity, and its talent tree system. Players also admired the developer team and their communication through dev blogs, as well as the overall art, music, and gameplay quality.
- Neutrality (weight 0.01): Neutrality reflected an objective assessment of the game's quality and its potential, without strong positive or negative emotional attachment.
- Hope (weight 0.01): Hope was expressed regarding the game's potential for future improvement, indicating a desire for positive changes and development.
- Confusion (weight 0.01): Confusion arose from a lack of in-game explanations for mechanics and unrevealed skill tree nodes, making it difficult for players to understand certain aspects of the game.
- Addiction (weight 0): Addiction was driven by the strong desire to continuously improve one's build, indicating a compelling and engaging gameplay loop.
- Hate (weight 0): Hate was a strong negative emotion directed at the game's fundamental design flaws, indicating deep dissatisfaction with core mechanics.
- Anticipation (weight 0): Anticipation was felt due to the limited variety in early access, suggesting an expectation for more content and features in future updates.
- Irritation (weight 0): Irritation was caused by specific technical issues such as a lack of controller support and a small window size, impacting the player's comfort and accessibility.}