Ancient: Legacy of Azul

There is nothing wrong with taking a game you like, even love, give it a small personal note and hopefully succeed in creating an equally great or even addictive game. Ancient - LoA clearly took some very heavy inspiration from Risk of Rain 1, one of the most enjoyable 2d-roguelites I have ever played, and gave it a dark medieval fantasy vibe. So, calling it a copycat would be unfair since it already came up with some neat ideas on its own, despite having some very obvious similarities. 

Get into the loop

Similar to Risk of Rain, you'll start with only one available character. Fear not, it takes only three deaths to unlock the next one. I think it didn't take me longer than five minutes to actually get to that point. You have four skills at your disposal, one primary and three secondary skills, like in RoR, and every character has its own distinct playstyle. You start with some sort of Hybrid, capable of using melee and ranged, but you'll unlock a caster shortly after. These two play like night and day, which is a great plus on the replayability side. In the end, you can have six of them.

Gameplay consists of killing monsters, collecting Azul, the mystical energy and currency, finding boons and combining them to create powerful builds, able to mow through hordes of enemies. Every stage has a boss that has to be summoned via a portal. Meanwhile, a great amount of enemies spawns to make your fragile life even more dangerous. Kill the boss, kill everybody else and move on into the next stages. Time is of the essence though.

Like in RoR, you have to watch a timer. Here however is a big difference between master and pupil. Instead of simply spawning tougher, more dangerous enemies with random abilities you'll have the chance, or rather, can't avoid the fact that a mutation might occur. These will last for the rest of your run, unless you find something to cleanse it. These mutations can be very tough, even annoying if I'm being honest since they often affect every monster on the screen. Bleeding, poisoning, enemies have more hp, armor, chill on attacks. The list goes on and on.

Finding the right path between being quick and still collecting enough boons and ressources is key to your success. I was badly annoyed after my first runs since I couldn't make anything work good enough to at least get past the third boss. Reasons were that I always want to pick everything, which is a big mistake. Knowing which boon does what helps tremendously and will ensure that you'll use synergies. There is a handy ingame journal that explains every collectible and also adds some nice lore to it. 

Hit or Miss?

What bothers me a bit are the enemy designs and attack patterns, at least in some cases. Projectiles are often far more homing than missiles and don't get me even started on the flying enemies. There is a difference between being hard to kill and just being an annoyance to the player. Sometimes it does feel unfair since killing them rarely requires skill but rather using "thank god I somehow managed to hit them"-style.