Stopped playing Sundered.
It's trash.
A Metroidvania with partially randomly generated level design... I thought it would be bad. It's not actually, it's just invisible. Never even noticed that level subdivisions would be marginally different. They're just flat, boring, ugly, samey, and you run through them anyway, because it's backtracking in its distilled form, each time you die you lose nothing... you just go back from the start of the game.
But it plays very well! It's fast, fluid, with great hand drawn animations... and that's it, because the number of skills to unlock is pathetically small, and there is no gear system.
Plenty of garbage MMO-like progression however! Reminds me of Salt&Sanctuary (and Dark Souls in general) with tiny buffs... except they let you use new weapons, spells and stuff in other games when you reach a threshold. Here you just take or deal 3 less damage. And you need it, because you will get one shot or hit basic ennemies 50 times otherwise. Just a slooow grind of horrendously boring stats with no meaningful upgrades... since important stuff is less inspired than a Ubisoft game, rarely seen such a fake feeling of progress. Wow, a gun to light up switches. No, not even a special wall piercing one, just... a gun. To shoot. Once in a while because ammo is scarce.
And as usual in bad Metroidvanias, there's no enemy variety. Bosses are great... and barely even exist in the game. You'll fight the same palette swapped ennemies for hours though... especially since they added the worst thing ever in the genre: Left4Dead waves. So... you fight dozens, or hundreds of them at a time. It's easy to get overwhelmed (especially when you have multiple laser guns that cover the entire area far beyond the camera, go through walls and stun you) but in general it's just boring. Add all the optional upgrades (that are at least something more than +1 armor, but sacrificng 20% health to get 15% melee damage is not exactly genius either) behind a wall of... guessed it, more waves of ennemies.
At least you can choose to get be "good" or "evil", and you'll obtain different abilities like a glide instead of an additional jump, but again, there's literally 7 choices to make so...
It would a good boss rush game if it was like Jotun.
But its piss poor level design, non existant enemy variety, boring ass progression, absurd amount of backtracking and ultimately simplistic combat along utterly useless "changing" levels makes it an extremely poor game.
Less is more.
Adding an empty world, devoid of interest, constant waves of hundreds of ennemies was not the way to make a better game after Jotun. Not at all.
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