Put down your flagon of ale and raise your pitchforks! It's time to explore an unforgiving world In Celebration of Violence
The Basics
CoV is a roguelike exploration game where you journey through portals and kill people, things, and, well, pretty much everything as you try to survive in a world where most things you see are trying to inflict grievous bodily harm on you. Wild animals, guards, bandits, being caught on fire, starving, poison, bleeding out, the list of death dealers goes on. You can also get achievements that can unlock new characters with varying loadouts to mix things up.
Story & Flow
To put it bluntly, and to quote the Steam Page: the story is vague and largely nonexistent. There just isn't really anything there at all, and CoV instead leans on gameplay over story.
There are a variety of weapons, potions, and magic spells you'll encounter as you play the game, most of which are picked up through breaking purple crystals. However, most weapons move like a sloth wading through molasses in the winter. Weapon attack speed is one of the things you will need to upgrade over time in order to survive.
And here is where the bulk of CoV's gameplay comes in. To win at this game, you must attack, dodge, block, parry and manage your energy, or you die. And, in later stages you MUST die. The longer you survive, the more experience you will retain between deaths, and spending that experience on a new life will grant you a slightly better character for the next run. Health, movement speed, weapon attack speed, overall strength, and more can all be upgraded between deaths. However, this is not accumulative, as every time you start a new run, unspent exp is lost forever.
This is one of the problems with CoV. It dances between unfair and brutally hard very often in the early game, and I can see it turning away new players who do not want to deal with such a steep learning curve. This does not mean that the game is Dark Souls or even Bloodborne, as the randomness factor and deliberate focus on dying to get better takes away from this comparison. However, once you start getting your character upgraded, slowly but surely the game becomes more manageable.
Graphics & Sound
CoV is presented in a super simplistic pixelated style, reminiscent of Magicite or ClaDUN. The simplistic art style doesn't allow for much in terms of detail, but there is a customization screen. You have options aplenty to make your square 'hero' however you want, those options just may be a pixel here or a shade of gray there.
The sound design is well crafted, and it really hammers home the desolation and hopelessness of your surroundings. Surprisingly, the sound design is better than the graphics, given the limited style to work with.
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