Take a pinch of Metroidvaniaadd two teaspoons Souls-like, a dust of soul aesthetics and voilà, Lost Epic is ready and served. A recipe now chopped and retried in an indie landscape where, in the marasma of titles all equal and poorly inspired, sometimes an exception to Salt and Sanctuary, but you can say the same as this title developed by Team Earth Wars? Well, not really...
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Go, and kill the Six Divinities
Or should I say the two deities: yes because of the 6 macro areas (and relative bosses) that will be present at the launch, currently only two are available in the early access build that was provided to us. But apart from that, because I should want to kill deities, the reader will be asked. Maybe you imagine a story of hatred and revenge on Kratos, or rebellion like in Hades...no, none of this. Much more banally the Six New Divinities behave like selfish, they only favor a small part of the population letting rot the rest of humanity, the punishment they deserve is death, logically not?
Let's start our game as an incorporeal entity that is guided through a scan and incomplete tutorial that teaches us mechanics present in each game from the dawns of videogaming as the double jump, but lissa totally on well more important and specific mechanics such as parry or character inventory and skill management. Once the tutorial is complete it is time to choose a body for our character: there are several models, many of which are still not available in Early Access, more or less inspired, but without any type of associated peculiarities of gameplay, it is only aesthetic factors.
Speaking of aesthetics, that of Lost Epic is evidently inspired by the Japanese anime-manga style, which can please or not like. Personally, as an estimator of this particular artistic style, I have not yet understood whether the aesthetics of Lost Epic I like it or not: some backgrounds are actually made with quality, but they alternate whole sections very "cheap" and not particularly inspired. As decidedly little reasoned is the level design, really blando and repetitive.
Shake the sword and fight
We now move to the focal point of the title: the combat system. You know when at school the teacher pronounced the fateful phrase "is intelligent but does not apply" to your parents? Here. Lost Epic you can say exactly the same. There are good bases, obviously taken from various Souls titles, such as light and heavy attacks, parrys, slaves, but all lacks weight, there is no sufficient feedback in tapping swords and defenders, and inevitably the 2D nature of the game devotes all depth. If to this then we add questionable design choices like the stunlock to which a powerful backstab can be followed to eliminate enemies, it quickly reduces to a skill spam with QTE associated to quickly finish each enemy, fragmenting unsustainablely the gameplay and depriving it of the natural flow that you would expect.
Not to mention the second area, where the defects already experienced in the first are further amplified by a choice of settings that has not and has never made sense: the underwater area. Here my gameplay has been interrupted, since my hatred for the underwater levels is only equal to that for geova witnesses who call you at 7 a peaceful (until then) Sunday morning.
Inventory and skill manager
For each enemy killed we will get currency that we can spend to improve our character, learn new skills and climb level. During the gameplay there are also NPCs with which we can interact to receive also some This secondary and get more bonuses and items. The problem in all this is given byexcessive complexity of the various skill trees available and how little and bad the levelling mechanics is explained to the player, which will be found often and willingly to proceed to tentones in building a build that then, at the end of the accounts, however will affect very little on the efficiency in combat of our character.
Negative and confusing also inventory management, at limited slots, which will soon fill because, hearings heard, identical objects do not group in a single slot, but they occupy separate slots. Have you harvested during the course 7 herbs to craft healing potions? Well, you have just occupied 7 precious slots of your inventory. Do you want to find a particular object that you have collected? Wishes, there are no filters or options to reorder your bag of objects, you simply need to scroll to libitum until you find what you were looking for (or until you lose patience and let it go).
In conclusion
It's fine: playing titles in Early Access needs a more or less dose of patience and comprehension. These builds serve, or would serve, developers to have quick and genuine feedback on the development of their title. Well to the boys of Team Earth Wars We can only say that there is still a lot of work to do, as we understood I hope from this preview. The panorama of Metroidvania / Souls-like titles is really too much, too vast to be able to even think of succeeding with a title still so uncertain and not memorable. We hope that, with time, our opinion on Lost Epic can change. Until then, we can only advise you to wait, as the 16,79€ where the title is proposed on Steam Now there are still a few too many.
