Gatekeeper Review Summary

Highly enjoyable and polished gameplay: Players overwhelmingly praise the game's fun factor, engaging gameplay, and overall enjoyment, highlighting its polished state even in early access. Many find it surprisingly complete and well-worth its price.

Excellent developer support and updates: The development team is highly praised for their consistent updates, active community engagement, transparency, and responsiveness to feedback, which has significantly improved the game over time.

Stunning visuals and art style: The game's visual presentation, including its graphics, art style, and overall design, receives high marks for being beautiful, polished, vibrant, and aesthetically pleasing, contributing to an immersive experience.

Diverse and engaging build crafting: Players enjoy the deep and varied build crafting system, which allows for diverse and powerful character customization through items, upgrades, and cursed artifacts, enhancing replayability.

Varied enemies and challenging bosses: The game features a good variety of enemies and challenging bosses with distinct mechanics, ensuring combat remains engaging and forcing players to adapt their strategies.

Unbalanced and Inconsistent Difficulty: Many players feel the game's difficulty is inconsistent and poorly balanced, with some finding it too easy and others too hard, especially after recent updates. This leads to a frustrating experience where the game can feel like a tedious grind or an insurmountable challenge.

Lack of Content and Repetitive Gameplay: A significant number of players report that the game suffers from a severe lack of content, leading to repetitive gameplay, limited replayability, and a general feeling of hollowness. This issue is exacerbated by a perceived lack of variety in objectives, maps, and overall game progression.

Frequent Crashes and Technical Issues: Frequent game crashes, freezes, and infinite loading screens are a major source of frustration for players, often leading to lost progress, especially during long runs. These technical issues significantly detract from the overall playability and enjoyment.

Negative Impact of Recent Updates: Multiple players express strong dissatisfaction with recent updates, particularly the October 2024 patch, stating that these changes have worsened the game's balance, removed enjoyable features from the beta, and generally made the game less fun and more of a 'slog'.

Problematic Enemy and Boss Design: Enemy and boss design presents significant challenges, with complaints about enemies scaling too fast, having excessive health (bullet sponges), and bosses lacking engaging mechanics. The constant swarm of high-HP enemies and repetitive boss encounters contribute to a tedious combat experience.

Top-down Roguelike with RoR/VS Elements: The game is consistently described as a top-down roguelike, heavily inspired by Risk of Rain 2, with elements of Vampire Survivors and Hades. It features both an objective-based progression mode and an arena/survival mode.

In-Run Leveling and Progression: The game features a robust in-run progression system where players level up and choose from three stat upgrades. Every fifth level allows for a special skill upgrade, and progression through stages involves increasingly difficult enemies and objectives.

Variable Difficulty Scaling: The game's difficulty is generally well-received, with a good scaling curve and options up to 200%. However, some players find the game too easy, especially after a full run, and suggest further difficulty increases.

Content and Replayability: The game offers decent content for solo play, estimated around 20 hours or a couple of evenings. Runs can be long and even loop infinitely, contributing to replayability despite a limited number of unique maps.

Solo Play Challenges: Playing solo can be a significantly more challenging and potentially less engaging experience compared to co-op, with some players finding it boring or too difficult on normal mode.

Excellent performance and stability: Many players report excellent performance, especially on the Steam Deck and high-end PCs, with consistent frame rates and no bugs. This indicates a generally stable and optimized experience for a significant portion of the player base.

Standard PC requirements: A player noted that the game has minimum PC requirements, which is a standard expectation for most games. This point is less about a specific issue and more of a general observation.

Highly Recommended for Roguelike Fans: Many players recommend the game, especially to fans of roguelike/roguelite genres and titles like Risk of Rain 2. They highlight its potential for fun, particularly in co-op, and suggest it's a worthwhile purchase, especially if on sale or if players enjoy similar games. Some also note its early access status and potential for future growth.

Better with Friends, Co-op Focus: The game is frequently noted as being more enjoyable when played with friends in co-op. However, some feedback suggests that the multiplayer experience itself might need optimization, and finding co-op partners can be difficult. There's also a call for better single-player optimization.

Early Access, Needs More Content: Players acknowledge the game is in Early Access and express anticipation for future updates, content additions (like biomes, enemies, items, bosses), and balancing improvements. They hope for continued development to realize the game's full potential and increase replayability.

Difficulty Preferences Vary: There's a mixed sentiment regarding difficulty, with some players recommending playing on maximum difficulty for a challenge, while others suggest lowering it if needed. This indicates a desire for flexible difficulty options.

Buy on Discount: Some players advise purchasing the game at a discount rather than at full price, suggesting that its current value aligns better with a reduced cost.

High anticipation for future content: Players are highly anticipating future content, updates, and the full release of the game. There's a strong desire for more maps, enemies, characters, and varied gameplay mechanics, indicating a belief in the game's potential for growth and improvement.

Specific balance and feature suggestions: Players offer specific suggestions for game balance, character buffs, item mechanics, and monetization. These include ideas for character skins, enemy balancing, item cost adjustments, and artifact management.

Mixed feedback on pricing: There's mixed feedback on the game's pricing relative to its current content. Some feel the price is fair, while others expected more content for the cost, especially compared to the demo.

Desire for new character archetypes: Players express a desire for new character archetypes, specifically mentioning melee classes like a sword-wielding knight or a ranged bow user, indicating a wish for more combat variety.

Unique top-down perspective: The game's top-down perspective and unique style are noted by players. This distinguishes it from other games, even those it's compared to.