Game Review: Plague Breaker

By J.D.

Players: 1
Platform: PC

Plague Breaker is a new retro styled roguelike from developers Wozzy Studios in what appears to be their debut game. Players take on one of four classes: Fighter, Mage, Rogue, or Hunter, and then try to venture through a castle to defeat monsters.

I’m not entirely sure on anything more specific than that. The game seems to be going for a very minimalist story, with some breadcrumbs dropped by the resident mystery man every castle in video games seems to have. He meets you after defeating bosses, but it’s usually just running down the basics of the next boss like: “Oh, the next boss is smarter than the ones you’ve fought before. They use the environment so you’ll have to be smart.”  In this case “using the environment” just meant they occasionally knock over the bookshelves that were pretty easy to dodge in between rounds of spamming attacks at it.

I could forgive the vague or even nonexistent story if the gameplay were satisfactory, but it’s not. From the description the influence of the Castlevania series is obvious, but Plague Breaker sadly doesn’t live up to the lofty heights of its inspiration. Movement, especially jumping, is too floaty for my liking. The game has a mantling system but with little feedback on when that’s happening. It makes it super difficult to time ranged attacks while in the air. The procedurally generated levels are too dull and similar with very little other than a few scattered enemies, two vendors, and the occasional treasure chest to keep you company before you reach the boss door.

Some bosses are just basic enemies but much bigger, and with a much larger health bar. And speaking of health bars, I don’t know if it’s a bug or not, but multiple times I ran into an issue where the enemy’s health bar appeared to be empty but it took one or two more hits before the enemy finally died. By default these fights are also zoomed in significantly, so if you don’t want to readjust your understanding of ability and weapon range every boss fight, you'll want to turn that off in the menu.

After felling the boss, you level up and get to pick a new skill for your class from its skill tree. There are some interesting options here. I mostly played the Hunter and they gain the ability to have arrows pierce enemies, fire multiple arrows, add Fire/Ice/Poison damage to their arrows, or become immune to that kind of damage as part of the skill tree. There’s some potential for interesting builds but because you only level up after bosses rather than after getting a certain amount of experience from killing enemies or exploring, you’ll only get a small handful on most runs. I quickly fell into a routine for going for piercing arrows, followed by multiple arrows to handle enemies I couldn’t normally hit even with a decent understanding of the game’s jumping. I followed it up with elemental damage reduction because of the bosses’ use of lots of attacks with elemental damage and it made the game a lot easier.

In addition, after hitting certain milestones like beating bosses with different characters, you unlock new items to be found in chests and at shops. At the time of my playing, the way I learned this was through the achievement pop-ups on Steam rather than anything else in game. While it was understandable for the new classes, it felt kind of strange for the unlocks to be announced that way rather than an end of run rewards screen.

Sound is another spot where Plague Breaker drops the ball. Sound plays a vital part in how most players experience a game like this, but this game has the bare minimum of sound effects. There are no sound effects for jumping, landing or mantling. A lightning bolt summoned by a Mage barely makes any sound. Characters like the aforementioned mystery man and shopkeepers speak but there’s no sound to reflect that and the UI can get too small even on my monitor right in front of my face. The background music is the only part of the game’s sound that I would describe as satisfactory with catchy retro-style tunes. Another thing I like about the game is its retro pixel art style. It’s not doing anything amazing but it is nice to look and it and nothing is too far out of place.

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If I had to pick one word to describe Plague Breaker it would be “unpolished”. I can see the potential for a much better game but it isn’t there yet. If this were a student or game jam project, I would be much more lenient, but as a commercial product out of Early Access I can’t really recommend this game to anyone except maybe the most diehard roguelike fans that need to play every one they can find. Everyone else is better off playing Dead Cells or Rogue Legacy 2.

For More Information On Plague Breaker:
https://wozzygames.com/plague_breaker/

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Gameplay: D+
Graphics: C+
Music: C
Sound: D-
Value: D

Overall Rating: D+

Pros
+Decent pixel art, presentation, and music.

Cons
- Generally unpolished.
- Poor sound effects.
- Dull, procedurally generated levels.
- Floaty controls.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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