As I have mentioned many times in the past, I am not a fan of the rogue-like concept in a general sense. I don't like to play games that never have an end. There is no objective other than to grind and grind until you can unlock more stuff that you are probably unlikely to ever use and then grind and grind some more in order to be able to unlock more stuff.
The entire concept behind a game that never ends is something that has never made much sense to me and I have found this to be the case ever since I spent a couple of years on MMO's only to years later look at what I have accomplished and feel like I wasted a ton of time. In other video games you at least have a tough boss to work on, some areas to access later, or something difficult in front of you that once you get past it, that is all there is to it, but in rogue-like games, even if you have beaten every possible boss or path in the game, there is always something else to do. Perhaps this appeals to some people out there and for people that enjoy the gameplay this is very economical since there is no subscription fee and once you pay, well, the game lasts as long as you want it to.
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People have a lot of nice things to say about this game and I'm not going to say they are wrong, but I just feel like someone is going to need to enjoy the rogue-like CONCEPT before they even try to enjoy Curse. I don't think that it is a good enough game to rope in new players to the genre. If you have never played a rogue-like, which I think is unlikely if you are reading this, go play Hades. That was the first rogue-like game that I ever played all the way to completion and actually tried to get better at it and wasn't just mad button mashing.
I played Hades for ages and would probably play it again. Curse is likely something that I will stop playing in a few days even though there are some aspects of it that I actually like more than Hades.
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For one thing, in COTDG your quests are not something that must be completed from beginning to end the way that it was in Hades. This was something that always kind of annoyed me about that game. Even if you got really good at it and lost in the final seconds of the boss battle with the main boss Hades, you had to go through the entire game again. in COTDG you can choose just the one path to go back to a particular boss and along most of the procedurally generated maps, the minor enemies are pretty easy. I'm saying that it isn't going to take you an hour or more just to be able to have another crack at the boss that got a couple of hits in at the end.
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I've only attempted the first 2 bosses in the game and neither one of them are particularly difficult. Their attacks are much slower and are telegraphed pretty slowly and are therefore easier to dodge. The bosses in Hades were sometimes extremely quick because there was no limit to how much you could dodge. COTDG has a limited stamina meter and this is probably why the bosses were designed to be significantly less difficult.
Now let me clarify. For total completion of the game you will have to go through 3 total areas and 4 total bosses eventually leading to the final boss, which I have never seen and likely never will as I don't think I will put as much time into this as would be required for me to do so.
If you got that game for free with your PS Plus account, I don't see any particular reason to NOT play it but for people like myself that don't really enjoy the endless grind of rogue-like games, this one is probably one that you will want to leave alone. There is definitely a learning curve in this game and I don't think that running the same dungeons over and over again is going to hold most people's interest long enough to truly master the controls as well as all the available weapons in the game.
Due to a lack of interest on my part with the rest of my library at the moment I will probably play this for few hours more but honestly, I don't even know why I would do that since this isn't my style of game.
if you enjoyed Hades there is a good chance you might like this even though it is essentially exactly the same game. I wouldn't pay any money for it though. Sorry devs!