Review #182: Rengoku - The Tower of Purgatory

 Why would you go the Ghosts and Goblins route? Whyyyy!?

 I love hack and slash games. I love Rogue-likes. I love dungeon crawlers. Rengoku is a game that mixes the three genres into a very curious game. It lacks ambition and polish, but it's actually kinda good.

 The Story is fairly weird, but you play as ADAM, a robot, that finds itself inside a Tower, and is compelled to climb to the top. On each floor Adam will meet another sentient robot and share some words, slowly exposing the game's narrative. It's not the most engaging or original of stories, it's not even the kind of story that moves you to push onward, and the dialogues are laughable, but for this kind of game, I think that's alright. Plus, the art direction is amazing, and every time you defeat a boss you unlock a ton of badass concept art, and this art is actually worth it. These androids are hybrids of weapons, such as guns or swords(Some had magnums out of their heads! Heck, some have CANNON HEADS. BADASS.) and some very demonic looking details, the art direction is truly awe inspiring.

 The core gameplay is fairly simple and disappointingly repetitive. You must visit each room of each floor at least once and defeat all the androids in each room. Once all rooms have been visited, a Warp Points opens up allowing you to tackle the next boss and so on for eight floors. All floors look basically the same, the only thing that changes are the colors. The rooms too have nothing distinctive about them, and you'll see many repeated shapes, probably due to the fact that floors are randomly generated on each playthrough. You can grind, if you so wish, by traveling around, as androids will occasionally respawn. There's no puzzles, no intricate level design with multiple floors or objects, just corridors and 4 by 4 rooms with up to three different enemies and sometimes boxes.

 And despite all that, the gameplay manages to pull the game forward. Y'see, you can customize Adam with different body parts(Left Arm, Right Arm, Head, Chest and Legs) and there's a ton of different weapons. You can have a Blade on your arm, a Saw on your head, a cannon on your other arm and a flame thrower on your chest. These weapons are loot, randomly dropped by fallen enemies, ingeniously, the parts they may drop are the parts they were using against you, these robots are just like you, and you grow stronger as you defeat them. The system is gets a lot more involved, you can have up to six slots on each body port, and you can equip as many weapons as you have slots, some weapons occupying a different amount of slots. Plus, you can't switch weapons, ADAM automatically goes to the next weapon after it runs out of ammo/energy, so there's strategy involved in how you want to set-up your setup. Even more interestingly, there's different types of damage(Heat/Quantum/Impact/Bullet and a few others), and using a type to defeat enemies makes it grow stronger, not to mention that you have to keep in mind that weapons over heat, and different weapons over heat at different rates, over heating a weapon means you have to wait until it cools down before you can use that weapon again. It's a very fun and engaging system, I had a blast coming up with a setup that suited my style and trying out new weapons.

 Enemy drops are random, but you can increase your chances by attacking them after they lose all their HP, called "Overkilling", it doesn't guarantee a drop, but it increases the chances, sometimes you might even get more than one drop! All enemies drop "Elixir Skin", and you can sell weapons at Terminals for more Elixir Skin, this currency is used to upgrade the various defensive capabilities of ADAM, as well as buying more weapon slots for your body parts. As fun as customizing ADAM is, the combat system is very simple, if at times sloppy. Movement is done with the digital pad, and you can lock on with the L button, the camera was never much of an issue, as you can set it behind ADAM by tapping the R button. Still, there's no real "combo" system, which makes the combat very plain. Still, the different weapons made is somewhat fun, just don't expect a deep action game. There's not much strategy involved either, I only had to switch my equipment to meet my needs on the last boss, otherwise I had no trouble just going with my custom setup.

 The game is a bit on the easy side, however, it is a bit punishing. On each floor there's a single Terminal, which is the only place where you can save your game, upgrade ADAM or customize him. It will also restore all your HP and ammo. As forgiving as that sounds, every time you enter a new room, all doors will lock, and you won't be able to go back, or forward, until every android has been killed, this is a non-issue if you decide to grind, as the next time you go through a room, you can justa void the androids and head straight for the doors. Regardless, if you die outside of a Boss room, you will lose all your equipped weapons and get dropped back to floor 1. This means that you have to return to the room in question if you want to retrieve your weapons, unless you die on your way, in which case they are gone for good. I was fine with this, except for the fact that you are dropped back to floor 1. You don't even have to explore the floors again, just hit the elevators, which is an annoyance since it's very time consuming due to the load times. They should've just started you back on the floor you died, since there's absolutely NO DANGER what so ever when going up through the floors, which is very puzzling as to why they did it... maybe, originally, they planned for the elevators to be outside the terminals? I don't know, but it's a very poor design choice. Speaking of poor design choices, the game lasts about three hours... but then you have to play the whole game again, just a bit harder, in order to fight the real last boss and earn the ending. I liked the game, but not THAT much.

 I'm gonna be blunt here, the graphics just aren't up to snuff. It's really cool how every equipment piece changes the character's appearance, but when you compare the in-game characters to the artwork, they are just so disappointing. After defeating a boss, and checking the concept art, you'll see just how little resemblance the in-game models have to the fantastic artwork. Plus, the corridors all look the same, with nothing remarkable about them. This is not a good looking game. The soundtrack offers very simple beats, but at least they are very fitting, it's loud, it fits this post-apocalyptic world of fighting robots.

 I had more fun with Rengoku than I should have, the game is definitely more than the sum of its parts. Unpolished combat, bland and repetitive level design, questionable design choices... but the concept behind the game the game shows promise, hopefully Rengoku 2 can do more with it. Rengoku is fun, just nothing worth writing home about.
 6.0 out of 10