Prelude Dark Pain Review
Prelude Dark Pain brings tactical combat in a grimdark world.
Prelude Dark Pain. Credit: Firesquid, Gamersky Games
Art is spectacular and heightens the grimdark world. The art reminds me of Darkest Dungeon and the characters have unique abilities in combat. Before combat, there is dialogue between the characters in text boxes and you build alliances with other groups. Art is the best aspect of the game, but other aspects such as combat and UI could be improved. Each attack or skill has unique sound effects, leading to more engaging battles. When your characters or enemies reach low health, they will appear worn down.
Before combat, choose which characters to use with a max of 5 per battle. Position matters because if a unit blocks your path, you cannot move in that direction and initiative determines turn order. Unfortunately, the party screen is not easy to navigate and switching a character involves removing and re-adding the one you want. There are several classes to choose from including support, ranged DPS, and assassins.
Too many menus to manage your party. There are separate menus to change skills/passives, change party formation, etc. It feels more like a management game with this level of inefficiency. I would suggest reducing the menus to make the game more accessible. There should be a summary page to easily view characters stats, levels, and equipment rather than manually viewing one at a time.
The combat animations are satisfying and defeating enemies gives experience and possible components to craft your equipment. However, some fine tuning would help with making the fights feel smoother. For fights with several rounds, it should specify how many waves to fight. This will allow the player to plan how aggressive to be and figure a strategy to complete battle bonuses. There is no penalty for losing a boss fight and it can retried as needed. Each fight can take from 20 minutes to about 1 hour. End turn should auto end if all actions have been used on a character such as defend, attack, and skill. Also, player needs to choose which direction to face adding extra actions to an already cumbersome fight.
In general, bosses have specific conditions and can snowball quickly, so fighting them at least once gives the player a better idea of how to defeat them. Before starting the first boss, there should be a warning to explore the map to add additional characters to your party. An early frustrating boss had an ability that summons more enemies and that dragged the fight even longer. An optimal way to defeat bosses is to collect stronger equipment and power-level your party so you can easily deal with the boss/level mechanics. Fights do not scale to current party level so you can increase attributes and skills to make fights easier.
Prelude Dark Pain. Credit: Firesquid, Gamersky Games
When using the forge to create equipment, player is forced to scroll through each item to check if you have the required materials. It would be much easier to only filter equipment you can craft at the time. When equipping new items to a character, you have to check each character and choose what to equip manually. There are multiple attribute keywords to learn, but the player is only allowed to check on the attribute screen, resulting in more back and forth work to ensure the correct equipment is used. Lastly, when you level up, it should direct player to the level up party screen rather than making the player go to the menu to choose skill points to increase. Furthermore, there are no indicators or reminders that a character has unused skill points.
Prelude Dark Pain. Credit: Firesquid, Gamersky Games
There are still some bugs in version 0.3.9 I played. This is not surprising with an early access title, but they need more testing to assist with getting the game up to speed. For example, when I hover over the skill menu, the skill screens still remain on the screen blocking visibility of the battlefield.
Players that enjoy turn based combat or strategy games may enjoy this game more, but the early access release leaves the impression that more testing is needed. Overall, there are too many frustrating aspects such as prolonged combat, clunky menus, and changing equipment. The stellar sound effects and visuals cannot make up for the menu annoyances and lack of UI polish. The game road map previews more changes and fixes, but the game is still a long way from feeling intuitive and fun to play considering the game is priced at $19.99.
Prelude Dark Pain
A tactics game with potential, but is lacking the accessibility features for enjoyable and seamless combats.