Title: Leap of Fate
Developer: Clever Plays
Status: Early Access
Official Site: http://bit.ly/1JbPBp1
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1JrJtwv
Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a
look at the Rouge Lite bullet hell game, Leap of Fate, the first game developed
by Clever Plays. Leap of Fate has you participating in the Trials of Fate to
become the most powerful mage alive or if you fail, doomed to become a
permanent part of the Trials themselves.
Each level of the trials is randomly
generated via a deck of cards with varying difficulties from 1 skull to 3 and
varying loot drops so you will have to weigh up the risk and reward for each
level. The levels themselves are fairly small and compacted with obstacles
making your manoeuvrability extremely important along with the extremely fast
paced gameplay. Luckily though you do have a dedicated dash ability that allows
you to dash to your mouse cursor and with the damaging dash upgrade it can also
be used as an extremely effective offensive move damaging every unit you dash
through. The dash does consume mana though so you will have to use it sparingly
especially as mana is also the resource used for your Glyph Ability. Speaking
of which, your glyph ability begins as your characters defualt but you can change
out this Glyph for others that can be found randomly in loot drops or special
loot levels as well as being obtainable through the Glyph skill tree. The
alternate abilities can be anything from spawning in a powerful ally to help
you, placing a turret or even this rather interesting dual revolver ability.
Each levels theme and enemies are unique to
the current stage of the trials you are attempting and are based on your
characters worst fears. The first stage is based on the rooftops of New York
with the majority of enemies being humanoid. Some of the other stages though
include Egyptian themed levels with crazy flying mummies to fight against and a
Laboratory theme with venomous snakes and resurrecting doctors. Later on in the
harder difficulties you will also come across bosses to defeat that have a
significantly larger health pool and unique attacks to become accustom too.
As well as the boss fights there is the introduction of level modifiers for
example this ice modified level that makes it difficult to move around or the 1
shot 1 kill modifier that applies both to the enemies and you. Death in Leap of
Fate will have all your progress through the trials and abilities gained, lost.
You do have one chance to resurrect for each trial run but it does cost a fair
amount of Karma that is the only resource that carries over for each new run.
There is some progress that is permanent for each character via completing
certain achievements within the game that will unlock abilities permanently.
The skill system in the game is divided
into 4 separate trees. Passive Skills, Attacks Skills, Glyphs and Mobility
skills. You don’t have access to these trees all of the time, instead, you need
to find special skill tree cards in the random cards your dealt and even then
the skill tree card will only be dedicated to one of the 4 different skill
trees. You do however receive one free skill that you get to pick out of 3 by
reaching the end of one of the stages so if you do get dealt a bad round with
no level ups you can still get stronger, not to mention that you can also find a
clockwork key in each stage that will allow you to purchase 1 of 3 cards that
include health, glyph and skill cards. Each of the skill trees are fairly
in-depth and are somewhat unique to each different character with over 80
different skills that you can obtain just for the one character.
As for the look and feel of the game, it
actually reminded me a lot of the similarly card based Rouge Lite, Hand of
Fate, however Leap of Fate does have a much more cartoon style look to it. The
game is being developed for mobile devices alongside the PC so there are some
aspects from mobile gaming that have transitioned over. For instance the game
plays at a 4:9 resolution with black bars on the side while also have some UI
elements crossing over like this prompt to leave the level. All that aside
though the game has been ported really well and plays great on mouse and
keyboard.
Other features of the game include 4
characters that will be available to play on release with Aeon the shadow mage,
Big Mo the Technomancer, Mukai the spirit channeler and finally Rasimov the
rouge occultist. Currently in the early access version Aeon the Shadow Mage and
Big Mo the Technomancer are the only characters available to play. Each
character will have their own back story and a set of 3 alternate endings to
the game depending on your play style. These story sections are played out via
these comic book style cut scenes that can be viewed once unlocked at the
character screen and are averagely voice acted but do have intriguing story
lines. There are 3 difficulty levels currently available to play with the easy
mode being more of a tutorial to the game and is even unplayable after you
complete it, normal mode introducing most if not all of the game mechanics like
boss fights, level modifiers and so on and finally Hard Core mode which will be
extremely difficult to defeat as even normal is quite hard to even get half way
through the trials.
Altogether Leap of Fate actually really
surprised me, having not heard anything about the game and is extremely fast
paced fun. Accompanied by the rouge lite deaths the game can really invest you
into a run and be devastating when you do finally die, losing all those
upgrades and progress. The artstyle is bright and colourful which is a nice
change from so many dark and dreary games of late. If you like fast paced
bullet hell type games with punishing death mechanics, rewarding successes,
random encounters and a great amount of replay ability then Leap of Fate is
definitely a game to check out especially once all the other characters are
released.
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