ScourgeBringer (Xbox One)

There is a pretty familiar shape rogue-like games take. To finish the game the player will try again and again to progress through the stages, collecting upgrades that increase their capabilities to make it easier to make it further. If they die they’ll lose those upgrades, but there are often separate permanent upgrades to acquire that give you a greater edge for the next plunge in. Luck plays a large factor in your success though, the exact upgrades as well as the layout of the levels you need to beat randomized so some runs can be practically hopeless unless you’re exceptionally skilled or they’ll end up easy you don’t really need to try. The ever-changing nature of each playthrough but the appreciable progress is likely why the genre caught on when indie games began embracing it, but ScourgeBringer, despite featuring many of these familiar elements, never reaches that point where the upgrades can trivialize the task at hand nor will bad luck hold you back from success. In this rogue-like, the way you’ll finally be able to face off with the end boss is simply by developing your skill enough that you can make it through, the pick-ups along the way helping but not lessening the need to increase your abilities as a player rather than as the in-game character.

 

While this might dissuade some people who desire the rogue-like elements first and foremost, ScourgeBringer does marry together its focus on skill and the benefits of gathering both temporary and permanent upgrades. In this side-scrolling action platformer there is a heavy focus on aerial combat, the game’s heroine Kyhra rarely wanting to be on the ground for long since dodging and attacking will almost always involve weaving through the air swinging your blade or firing your gun. Kyhra’s slashes will let her hang in the air as she unloads them into the many flying foes she’ll face, and while she does have a double jump and wall climb, the aerial dash is not only the best means of closing the distance to a foe, it is a satisfyingly snappy way of zipping around the battlefield. While Kyhra’s in-game appearance is of an incredibly small figure whose appearance is dominated by her huge flowing white hair, there is still some exquisite aerial ballet to be performed as you dash from foe to foe to keep up your attacks and prevent them from retaliating.

 

Mastering this mobility is key to handling the plentiful foes found in ScourgeBringer, even the earliest enemies aggressive and often packing some trick like moving in quickly or firing energy bullets. One of your attack options is a slower slam with your blade that perhaps benefits more than other maneuvers from your gradual permanent skill increases, its ability to deflect bullets already useful but this stronger swing able to evolve into something that lets you smash enemies into each other or even plummet down towards the ground in a hurry. There are definitely many moments of fluid combat where you can burst around the battlefield and make interesting attack decisions to hold your own against the tough opposition, but there are two little areas where the speedy fighting hits a minor snag. The first is that your incredibly vital dash maneuver is prioritized as an attack and you do not really have any other means of moving out of the way in a hurry. Some attacks like lasers or large enemies throwing themselves about can require split-second reactions and if your dash was free to move you where you desired then you could leap out of the way, but instead it’s more likely you’ll dash right into the enemy while trying to escape them to make yourself an easy target. It is more something you have to train yourself not to do and a missed opportunity rather than something that holds the action back, but perhaps a bit more of a common interruption is how enemies will fire their projectiles.

Enemies in ScourgeBringer, be they something as simple as a cycloptic fly or as huge as the toxic mechanical spider boss, have tells that are meant to show you that you either need to stun them with your slam attack or get moving to avoid what’s about to happen. However, in the hectic action of a room brimming with enemies who are all showing their tells around the same time or a boss fight where the bullet attacks can fill the screen and even be left over from the previous attack, it’s rather easy to try and slip through the attacks, move in for some slashes of your own, and smash into an attack that is just being unleashed. Exclamation marks over foes are used to indicate the more important attacks at least, but since many fights will have small enemies to pester you with shots you can’t focus your attention on their subtler tells and dashing right into their face as they fire feels like an unfortunate result of having battles where you so often need to be zipping around and unleashing attacks quickly to have a hope of making it through the fights with minimal damage.

 

These two little roadbumps don’t ruin the combat though, and the items and upgrades can often make it so you can accept when these situations arise. Your guns are also a useful tool for potentially dealing with some of those foes who might pop a shot in your face if you try to get in close, but their use is more for occasional peppering into combat rather than a core piece of the aerial slashing action. Your default gun is already a fairly decent weapon, accurate shots that can take out simple enemies with very few bullets and since your weapon system recharges by participating in combat, you can expect to get a few refills in boss battles or the tougher rooms. Picking up new guns on a run is one of the upgrade types you’ll lose if you die, but an interesting aspect of them is that even what seem like strict upgrades might not always be preferred. Sure it can be nice to have a minigun, but the rapid fire means many shots will likely miss a foe despite the increased damage and bullet output. Lasers can rebound off of walls to hit multiple foes, but they won’t pack the same punch a single shot from the rocket launcher can pack. Even the Mini Nuke, something that sounds like the top gun, fires a slow moving bomb whose blast radius isn’t too big, so its high damage output is balanced by situational usefulness and a long recharge. Their range of usability and the fact few guns feel strictly superior means that when it does come time to spend some of the blood you collect from defeating enemies, deciding between a shotgun or assault rifle can be a more personal decision tied to things like whether you would like an extra tool in your pocket when facing a boss or a room full of baddies.

 

Speaking of the shops, that’s just one of the many ways you can get small but useful abilities and tools for taking on the game’s six difficult and ever-shifting realms. The Chiming Tree you return to whenever you die is a literal skill tree where you can spend the special Judge Blood for permanent boosts, some of these small but meaningful like having more health, others mild like small bonuses to strength under certain conditions, and some permanently altering your move set like adding Fury as a slowly charging option to freeze time and rapidly slash foes as a good panic button or way to assure a surge of damage in a tough fight. None of The Chiming Tree’s bonuses truly take the edge off the difficulty but help nudge you slightly towards more success or give you a neat new trick to throw into the mix occasionally, and the Altar Blessings you find are fairly similar. There is always one altar in a realm and it provides a few upgrades to pick from that only last for that run, perhaps the most impactful being lightly reducing the max health enemies have or the full life refresh that can help out if you’re struggling to find health restores as random enemy drops or store items.

One thing about a fair few blessings, upgrades, and other similar boosts is that they contextualize their skill increase as some percentage increase to a stat like damage, reload rate, or the length of temporary invincibility after taking damage. While some upgrades have clear impacts like increasing the size of your smash attack, these technical improvements are of the sort where you definitely are getting some sort of boon but it can be hard to see the impact of it during play. Part of this is definitely that the deeper into the realms you go the tougher enemies will reach the point where such boosts won’t make the biggest difference in how many hits it takes an enemy to die, and truthfully, when you are in close your rapid swinging means that having to do two fewer slashes isn’t a huge change to how you’ll approach fights. Having these extra boosts feels like the kind of tiny advantage that can add up without the player truly perceiving the impact, and the ones with visible and distinct effects don’t upset the game balance while providing something that is more tangible so you won’t dismiss the entire upgrade system as frivolous.

 

Still, as you move from room to room clearing the foes inside to reopen the exits of those single-screen battlefields, it will be your actual competency with the battle mechanics that decide if you make it to the next screen. The difficulty won’t be eased too much by extra tools and skills but they do have an impact, but even after you’re kitted out you might still need an edge and the game has some surprisingly friendly settings to tinker with. Game Speed is probably the most appealing to people who might be dissuaded by the game’s reliance on speedy fights with so much to dodge, but this mostly refers to the speed of the bullets fired and leads to an interesting situation. While you can reduce the Game Speed in small increments, if you set it to 0% then the bullets enemies fire will emerge from them and move incredibly slowly. It seems the game can still maintain some difficulty despite this as these slower bullets take longer to disappear while the rest of the action remains the same speed, becoming more like aerial mines you need to avoid or clear. The ability to have more health drops feels like a good compromise in terms of providing a small mercy but not undermining the intended approach to action, but invincibility definitely feels like it’s just there if you want to finish the story after too many frustrations or, alternatively, want to see one of the different endings.

 

ScourgeBringer’s plot involves Earth being attacked by a massive floating monolith that seems intent on clearing the whole planet of life. While people have tried to enter the machine before to study or destroy it, no one has ever left it after, no doubt because of the hostile life within and the powerful Judges who oversee the various realms and fight anyone aiming to delve deeper. Kyhra is trained to be the best hope for destroying whatever is inside this titular menace, and for a while, you don’t get much more to explore the story. You do have a man to speak to at The Chiming Tree, some shopkeepers who might have things to say, and the left behind records of others who explored the monolith, but it’s not until you reach the later bosses do you start to get concrete answers or the means to better understand how things fit together. It’s certainly not a game looking to sell itself on the plot but it has a pretty appropriate framework, the challenging gameplay appropriate when you consider that you’re trying to stop full extinction of life on Earth by entering the weapon responsible for it.

THE VERDICT: While the permanent upgrades and run specific boosts and items won’t have the biggest impact on a player’s success in ScourgeBringer, that works to its advantage. This action title is about learning the deadly aerial dance required to zip around and defeat rooms packed with enemies or take down bosses who can fill the screen with attacks. Extra abilities and beneficial pick-ups are more like little nudges to success or in the case of the guns a tool you can pick based on what you think will truly help rather than trying to optimize your power. Your power in ScourgeBringer comes mostly from how well you can execute its battle mechanics which are mostly incredibly tight. The dash of randomization won’t lead to any insane runs since skill is king, but it does help to hone you into the kind of weapon that can eventually make it to the deepest depths of the monolith on mostly your abilities rather than the ones a video game character happened to scoop up.

 

And so, I give ScourgeBringer for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. ScourgeBringer definitely focuses on the player’s gradual growth, but it’s less because of what you grab from The Chiming Tree and more how repeated runs begin to train you into a player who can begin to respond to situations appropriately. That does lead to some inevitable pushes through familiarity and boss fights that lose their luster, but once you get to the skill level needed to reach later areas you can start pushing through the familiar content faster and begin work on learning new foes and how you need to move to overcome the tricks. The fact rooms can be so packed either with creatures or the attacks of bigger baddies does mean little changes like the dash attack having utility as a dodging dash could have improved your options, but the aerial combat is otherwise smooth and exciting. Whipping between enemies, smashing them into each other, and slashing away all the while gives the game a great energy even when the foes are simple, and while the guns are more adjacent to this fighting style than a perfectly fitting piece, they do find their usefulness as an alternate option or one that can help ScourgeBringer squeeze around its mild attack telegraphing hiccups. ScourgeBringer didn’t necessarily need to make so many of its upgrades and boons so small in impact, but they do end up being a solid fit for the action since they do provide some benefits without removing the difficulty that seems like the game’s main appeal. It would certainly be nice if more were tangibly impactful, the percentage increases in such swift fights hard to register as a true difference, so more creativity in regards to ones that could be visibly discerned or some way to better notice the impact of the small skill increases would help to make grabbing goodies a more meaningful part of the experience.

 

ScourgeBringer smartly dodged being defined by things like its Altar Blessings or shop items though. While gaining small edges against tough bosses or the increasing dangerous enemy rooms is nice, ScourgeBringer’s big draw is the fast-paced aerial slashfests and it was better to not break them with anything too powerful. Many rogue-likes may have the idea your skill can overcome unfortunate luck, but ScourgeBringer will always come down to skill with very few boosts feeling like they drastically alter how you play, even things like Fury more a nice option in your pocket rather than a necessary tool to beat the game. Growing from a novice who can lose to the first area’s simple bugs and bullet patterns to weaving through portals on walls to take down foes with sweeping lasers is definitely more satisfying because you know that for all the little goodies you grabbed along the way, the reason you are as effective as you are is from you refining your understanding and gameplay execution.