Info about Darkblade Ascent: Official game description: Fluid & strategic melee combat with tight controls -------------------------------------------------- Smooth, responsive and strategic combat mechanics. Think critically and make tactical decisions to ensure your success. Learn your enemies attack patterns and know when to dodge out of the way, when to parry, when to use your ultimate ability and when to strike back. Create your build as you play according to your playstyle: be a master of the elements or go all-in on pure physical damage. Be a speed demon dodging and evading enemies poking them from range with spears, or a slow berserker delivering devastating blows with massive axes. Randomly generated weapons and upgrades --------------------------------------- Almost limitless combinations of weapons in terms of looks and stats. Choose from a wide variety of two-handed swords, fast spears to keep your enemies at range or slow but devastating axes. Each run is unique and you never know what upgrades or weapons you will get as drops from monsters and for completing stages. Adapt and strategize to playthroughs that are never the same. Unique classes with individual talent trees ------------------------------------------- Unlock new classes as you progress, each with its unique talent trees and game-changing effects. Choose carefully, as you can only pick one upgrade each stage from a selection of 3 randomly presented options. Be a fire mage destroying everything in your path with massive AOEs, burning damage and multiple projectiles. Or master lightning, shocking your enemies making them vulnerable to your melee attacks. Or take advantage of frost and cold, whizzing in and out of combat applying chill and freeze effects slowing your enemies in their tracks. Atmospheric dark-fantasy locations ---------------------------------- Hack and slash enemies in beautifully hand-crafted locations with randomized layouts on each run. Explore dark dungeons filled with aggressive skeletons, abandoned medieval villages, derelict cathedral libraries and courtyards, or gloomy and ominous cemeteries. Persistent character progression -------------------------------- Death is not the end. Gain experience the longer you stay alive and improve your character after each playthrough with various perks from the talent tree making you more powerful and more prepared to progress further and further. Unique enemies and bosses ------------------------- A variety of powerful adversaries to encounter, each with individual characteristics and abilities. Use different tactics to defeat them, as each type of enemy has different attack patterns and each boss has several phases that you need to strategize against. Release date: 23 Oct, 2025 Categories: Roguelike, Dungeon Crawler, Hack and Slash, Real-time Combat, First-Person Melee Combat, Character Progression, Extraction Gameplay, Wave-based Survival - 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 Value & Engaging Gameplay (weight 0.99): Players consistently praise the game for offering significant fun and content for its price, often highlighting its addictive gameplay loop and strong foundational elements for an Early Access title. It's seen as a steal and provides many hours of enjoyment. - Smooth & Satisfying Combat (weight 0.48): The combat system is highly lauded for its fluidity, responsiveness, and tactile feel. Players enjoy the weight of weapons, the effectiveness of parrying and dodging, and the overall energetic flow of engagements, often comparing it favorably to other titles. - Strong Roguelike Elements (weight 0.27): The game's roguelike aspects, including progression, replayability, and various build options, are a major draw. Players appreciate the challenge, the meta-progression, and the ability to discover powerful builds through diverse weapon types and boons. - Dedicated & Responsive Developers (weight 0.18): The small two-person development team receives immense praise for their dedication, frequent updates, and active engagement with player feedback. This commitment significantly enhances the game's perceived value and potential. - Impressive Visuals & World Design (weight 0.12): Players appreciate the game's aesthetic, calling its graphics superb and its environments beautiful and immersive. The visual quality and art direction are particularly impressive given the small development team. - Fun Hideout/Extraction Mode (weight 0.07): The newly introduced hideout/extraction game mode is highly enjoyed, providing a fresh and fun experience without the intensity of PvP. It adds significant replayability and content after the main campaign. - Well-Designed Core Mechanics (weight 0.05): The game's core mechanics are described as simple, fair, and well-executed, contributing to an overall polished feel, especially for an Early Access title. This includes tight controls and clear animations. - Good Enemy Variety & AI (weight 0.05): The game features a good variety of enemy types with decent AI, contributing to a challenging and engaging experience. While early enemies might be weak, later encounters offer a good learning curve. - Optimized Performance (weight 0.05): The game is noted for being extremely well optimized, even with numerous enemies on screen, and runs well on various platforms like the Steam Deck. This technical stability enhances the overall player experience. Common complaints: - Repetitive and shallow gameplay (weight 0.66): The core gameplay loop and combat are described as basic, simplistic, and quickly become repetitive, leading to boredom after only a few hours. This is exacerbated by a lack of content variety and depth in mechanics. - Lacking polish and technical issues (weight 0.42): Players frequently reported that the game feels unpolished, janky, and suffers from various technical problems like poor optimization, low framerates, and buggy animations. Controller support also has significant issues, making gameplay feel terrible. - Limited enemy variety and design (weight 0.31): There's a significant lack of enemy diversity and mechanical depth, with most enemies sharing similar basic attack patterns. This contributes to the repetitive combat experience, as few enemies pose unique challenges. - Simplistic and flawed combat mechanics (weight 0.24): Combat feels unsmooth due to mechanics like sword pausing on hit and short parry windows. Issues like stamina management disproportionately punishing parries in crowds and general lack of depth (no heavy attacks, stagger, or impact) contribute to a less satisfying experience. - Unbalanced weapons and upgrades (weight 0.15): Weapon balance is poor, with some types like daggers considered weak or useless, while others (like daggers in another cluster) are considered superior. The upgrade and talent trees are primarily passive, offering boring and often insignificant stat bonuses rather than new abilities. - Roguelike elements are lacking (weight 0.12): The game's roguelike elements are described as underdeveloped, lacking meaningful randomness, procedural generation, or unique playthroughs. Levels often feel manually created, and meta-progression offers basic, uninspired choices. - Weak narrative and pacing (weight 0.06): The game lacks an actual story mode, and the campaign is seen as short and underwhelming, concluding without a significant boss fight. This contributes to the overall feeling of a basic and unfulfilling experience. Gameplay feedback: - Game Modes Offered (weight 0.2): The game offers multiple modes, including a campaign mode with story-driven maps, a survival/horde mode called 'Abyssal Rifts' or 'Lair' mode, and a 'Gauntlet' mode with curses. A 'Hideout' mode was also recently introduced. - Core Gameplay Loop & Genre (weight 0.2): The game is primarily an action roguelite dungeon crawler with a focus on melee combat, drawing comparisons to Skyrim's combat but with a faster pace. The loop involves gearing up, treasure hunting, slashing through enemies, and progressing through roguelike elements. - Combat System Details (weight 0.15): Combat is based on simple mechanics: attack, spell, weapon special attack, and a key parry/reflect system. There's no block, but parrying is crucial and can reflect magic. The depth comes from timing parries against multiple enemies. - Variety & Replayability Needed (weight 0.13): Players desire more varied enemy types, complex combat mechanics, and unique procedural generation to enhance replayability and prevent the game from feeling repetitive. Suggestions include new enemy variations, charged attacks, and a co-op mode. - Run Duration & Progression Pace (weight 0.12): A full playthrough or campaign completion can be done in 4-5 hours, with some players nearly maxing their skill tree within 12 hours. This suggests a relatively fast progression, which some find makes the game tedious after a while, while others appreciate it for quick runs. - Upgrade & Perk System (weight 0.09): During runs, players collect random weapons and choose perks after clearing rooms. Upgrades are mostly standard stat increases, with some class choices to modify spells. There are both in-game and external (temporary/permanent) upgrades. - Meta-Progression System (weight 0.08): The game features meta-progression through unlocking weapon inscriptions by salvaging, new weapon/spell variants upon leveling, and a passive skill tree. There are also direct damage bonuses and final bonuses like enhanced weapon special attacks. - Missing Mechanics Suggestions (weight 0.04): Players suggest adding mechanics such as life-steal (either as a boon or weapon inscription) and bleed damage, as these would fit well with the existing combat system and offer more build diversity. - Movement & Stamina Management (weight 0.03): The game features an 'instant dash' button that consumes stamina, which players find useful. Some players desire a dedicated sprint button in addition to the dash. - Early Access Status (weight 0.02): Multiple reviewers confirm the game is still in Early Access, which implies ongoing development and potential for future changes and additions based on feedback. Performance notes: - Optimize specific game areas (weight 0.08): Players report significant lag and frame rate drops in certain areas, particularly the Cathedral, even on low settings. This suggests specific optimization issues rather than broad system incompatibility. Some players noted general performance dips after extended play sessions. - Varying performance across hardware (weight 0.07): While some players experience performance issues, others report the game runs very well on Steam Deck and other systems. This indicates inconsistent optimization or hardware-specific performance variances. One user noted constant 144Hz with V-sync, highlighting a contrast in experiences. Recommendations: - Generally Recommended by Players (weight 0.46): A significant number of players recommend the game, often praising its value for money and fun factor. Many suggest it's a great option for fans of specific genres, even in its current Early Access state, although some qualify their recommendations for future updates or specific preferences. - Early Access, Future Potential (weight 0.1): Players acknowledge the game's Early Access status, expressing anticipation for future updates and full release. They see significant potential for the game to improve and become a more polished product over time, indicating a willingness to return. - Price Point Concerns (weight 0.06): While many find the game worth its asking price, some reviewers caution that the current content might not justify the price for everyone. They often suggest purchasing it on sale or waiting for more content. - Developer Effort Appreciated (weight 0.04): Players are impressed by the game's quality, especially considering it was developed by a small team. This recognition of the developers' passion and effort contributes to a positive sentiment. Other player notes: - Future content and polish expected (weight 0.38): Players are optimistic about the game's future, anticipating significant updates, more content, and general polish to enhance the experience as it moves towards v1.0. This is a common sentiment given the game is in Early Access. - Performance optimization needed (weight 0.25): Players consistently highlight the need for better game optimization to improve performance. This is a crucial area for development focus. - Improve game modes (weight 0.08): Players suggest expanding current game modes, specifically the campaign, and adding a hardcore mode for Roguelite with downsides for higher loot. There is also excitement for the Hideout extraction mode. - Quality of Life improvements (weight 0.08): Players desire specific quality-of-life changes, such as sound indicators for failed dodges and successful parries, faster/skippable crystal crushing animations, a field-of-view (FoV) slider, and brightness/gamma settings. - Positive developer sentiment (weight 0.08): Players commend the developers' work so far and encourage them to continue their efforts, expressing hope that they maintain their drive. There's appreciation for the small studio's achievements. - Desire for more variety (weight 0.06): Players frequently request more weapon types, character classes, and the addition of unique gear items (rings, amulets, armor) to increase gameplay randomness and interaction. This would enrich build diversity. - Acknowledging game characteristics (weight 0.04): Players describe the game as having a 'retro vibe' and being a 'different kind of roguelike,' with comparisons drawn to Ziggurat. This reflects its distinct style and genre. - Low-quality/Limited Feedback (weight 0.03): Some feedback is either too vague, anecdotal, or non-actionable, such as comments about achievement hunting, the game's price, or general observations about skeleton movements and YouTube links. - Enhance skill and boon system (weight 0.03): There's a call for a rework of the existing boons, passives, and weapon skills, aiming for more impactful and meaningful choices beyond simple numerical stat changes. An expanded skill tree with more depth is also desired. - Specific combat mechanic suggestions (weight 0.03): Players suggest specific combat refinements, such as making the axe swing cancelable into a block and drawing inspiration from other combat-focused games like Warhammer: Vermintide. - Request for more story and a final boss (weight 0.03): There's feedback indicating a desire for more narrative content to deepen the game's world and the addition of a final boss to provide a more conclusive ending experience. - Desire for multiplayer/co-op (weight 0.03): A request for multiplayer or co-operative functionality in the future has been noted by players. - Chinese language support requested (weight 0.02): A player has explicitly requested the addition of Chinese language support, suggesting the content is relatively simple to translate. - Suggestions for item tier variety (weight 0.01): Players suggest adding 'Cursed tier' items that offer significant upsides in exchange for notable downsides, adding another layer of strategic choice. Emotions: - Satisfaction (weight 0.28): Players are highly satisfied with the game's excellent value for money, considering its overall quality, solid gameplay mechanics (especially responsive parry and combat flow), and the rewarding roguelike experience. Many appreciate the game's optimization, graphics, and the sense of progression and power spikes achieved through builds and upgrades. - Excitement (weight 0.14): Excitement stems from the game's incredibly cool and visceral melee combat, which often exceeds expectations. Players are also highly enthusiastic about the game's potential in Early Access and eagerly anticipate future updates, new content, and the full release, driven by its addictive gameplay loop and replayability. - Frustration (weight 0.12): Frustration arises from various technical and design issues, including janky combat feedback, poor balance (weapons, skills, enemies), and performance problems like low FPS and lag. Other causes include unpolished gameplay, clunky controls, bugs (e.g., game-breaking ring slot, softlocks), and design choices like inconvenient keybinds or visual distractions. - Disappointment (weight 0.12): Players express disappointment over the game's perceived lack of content, repetitiveness, and limited enemy variety. Simplistic combat, uninspired level design, and an overall feeling that the game is 'missing something' or doesn't meet genre expectations contribute to this emotion, as do issues with build depth and technical polish in its current state. - Joy (weight 0.06): Joy is primarily linked to the overall fun and addictive gameplay experience, particularly when completing powerful builds or executing tight parrying and satisfying heavy hits. Players find immense enjoyment in the core gameplay loop and the overall experience of playing the game. - Hope (weight 0.06): Hope is centered on the game's future potential and the strong desire for more content, such as new weapons, game modes (e.g., multiplayer/co-op), and map variety. Players are optimistic about ongoing development, polishing, and optimization, believing the game can significantly improve over time. - Enjoyment (weight 0.05): Enjoyment is derived from the game's smooth, charming, and fun gameplay, particularly its responsive melee combat and well-executed arena modes. Players appreciate the clear loot management, diverse weaponry, and the sense of progression that makes the game engaging and satisfying. - Anticipation (weight 0.04): Anticipation focuses on the game's future development and the potential for it to become a hidden gem once it's more polished and fully fleshed out. Players are looking forward to planned updates, further development, and a more robust roguelike experience. - Appreciation (weight 0.04): Appreciation is strongly directed towards the developers, particularly for their frequent updates, passion, and the overall quality of the game given its low price point and the small team size. Players value the effort put into the visuals and intriguing roguelite elements. - Surprise (weight 0.02): Surprise stems from the game exceeding initial expectations, particularly regarding its depth and quality for an Early Access title. Players are pleasantly surprised by the amount of content, challenging enemies, and the lack of bugs compared to what they anticipated. - Desire (weight 0.02): Players express a strong desire for specific new features and balance changes, including a co-op mode, more content, increased enemy variety, and additional weapon options. There's also a wish for more honed combat, faster pacing, and a more immersive game world. - Optimism (weight 0.02): Optimism is driven by the game's potential for future improvement, coupled with the developers' responsiveness to feedback. Players believe the game is heading in a positive direction and will continue to grow and evolve. - Skepticism (weight 0.01): Skepticism arises from doubts about the game's fundamental design and its long-term viability. Some players question the game's core purpose or its ability to achieve significant future improvements. - Concern (weight 0.01): Concerns are raised regarding specific gameplay imbalances, such as the risk-to-reward ratio for collecting boons, and technical issues like performance struggles on their personal computers. - Love (weight 0.01): Love for the game is attributed to its overall smoothness, satisfying progression, and stellar game design, especially its successful application of specific combat mechanics in a PvE context. - Admiration (weight 0.01): Admiration is expressed for the developers' impressive work and effort, particularly given that the game is an early access project created by a small, often two-person, team. - Addiction (weight 0.01): Addiction is experienced due to the engrossing gameplay loop, with specific game modes like the treasure hunt making the game highly engaging and difficult to put down. - Mild frustration (weight 0.01): Mild frustration occurs due to occasional minor bugs, slow animations, and a perceived lack of item variety, which slightly detract from the overall experience without being game-breaking. - Annoyance (weight 0): Annoyance is caused by specific user interface (UI) issues, which players find janky and disruptive to the gameplay experience. - Confusion (weight 0): Confusion arises from unclear aspects of the game, such as uncertainty about the actual end-game point, or potential bugs like a wizard spell incorrectly traveling through buildings.}