...especially as a portable game. the production values are great and there's no significant load times, of course. at first, the weirdness of it and the cumbersome equipment interface threw me off, but the more i play, the more i'm seeing some really sharp design. the game plays like armored core the dungeon, only faster moving and with better controls, and an emphasis on combo heavy melee. enemies drop weapons and powerups of rather wide variety, and you can really trick out your hellbound cyborg with crazy weaponry, from chainsaws to drills to samurai swords, to shotguns to railguns to giant homing missle spreads. if they don't drop gear, the drop "elixir skin" which is used to buy cyborg power-ups. the random dungeon generation is pretty good, and in line with portable gaming, you'll reach save point/upgrade hub every five or so minutes. die, and you get sent back to the first level minus your equipped gear, but it's nothing a reload can't address -- or, if you're hardcore, there's usually a teleport back to near where you died so you can recover your kit.
the graphics are insane. 60 fps, loads of lighting and particle effects, and each level has a varied theme. strikes and combos have a real "weight" to them, and scatter particles and sparks everywhere. bosses are huge and bizarre, and ramp up nicely (at least the first three have) with lots of patterns and good camera tracking. the plot is unimaginably bizarre, with weird cutaways between each level to some hand-drawn stills of animu scientists discussing ROBOT HELL. the whole game feels like you're trapped in roger dean's take on an iron maiden album cover, only the mummies are insane undead samurai cyborgs.
it's a very weird, unorthodox, action-driven dungeon crawler. it's not really a roguelike; it really *does* feel like a fast-paced armored core wed to an early experimental 3d pc game in design. in fact, i think much of its charm is that it DOES feel like one of those really oddball european amiga games, only with modern japanese game design. i can't predict if anyone will like it as much as i do, but if you're in the mind for something utterly odd and compelling given a reasonable level of effort to understand it, you might wanna spend the $15 to at least have an opinion on it.
