Just finished(*) v0.1 and I have to say I'm pretty happy with the new combat stuff. For the first area the game definitely feels more balanced than it did in previous builds and felt much more lively with the addition of the whole Interact stories and new character. However, I found the game beyond this point to be incredibly frustrating. Enemies such as the Bloodsucker, the Taur (forget his name) is virtually unbeatable, and the boss in the Bell Tower is also completely unbeatable as far as I can tell. Not to mention the enemies here simply feel far too powerful for the player (or perhaps I built my character very poorly? Either way, it was too frustrating to go through and do it all again).
My major complaints revolve around enemy's special abilities. Unlike the player, they seem to be bound to no limits, meaning Bloodsucker can use Leech as many time as random chance desires. I had several runs where she simply used no other attack than Leech, completely preventing me from beating her whatsoever until I died or fled. I feel getting hit by Leech six times in a row like I did is a little unfair. Additionally, the Taur enemy simply game overs the player the second he gets to use Deluge regardless of defending. Every time I faced them, it was simply deal as much damage as possible before being blasted into your save point. As far as I can tell, there is no winning- but again, perhaps I just suck. To be fair, this genre of game is fairly new to me.
Moving on to the boss, I attempted to beat him around 40-50 times with no success. The general pattern seems to be something along these lines:
If he uses his heavy attack in the first 2-3 moves, restart- no chance to win.
If he does not use his heavy in the first few moves, use multiple hit attacks to break his barriers (I used Deluge, as I had nothing else that could do so). But, no matter what, he gets 2-3 more, deals damage (usually too much to bother continuing the fight if he doesn't outright obliterate you), and leaves you in a cycle of trying to break his barriers and deal enough damage before he uses all those Revelations on you and sends you to the next restart, which is guaranteed by the time you get them down for the second time, anyways. Perhaps with a higher vitality build than mine it'd be slightly more feasible, but from my attempts there is literally just no way to do the damage necessary before being killed, or maybe I just suck that bad and wasn't patient enough, but regardless this was my experience.
In reference to the point system (vitality, attack, luck, speed, etc) it seems there is very little and thus no reason to utilize anything but vitality and attack since speed doesn't appear to contribute much and luck is, well, luck. Perhaps give them a bit more purpose, or buff them slightly to be valid build options?
In conclusion, everything after the first boss seems rather poorly balanced, the Taur, Bloodsucker, and Angel are impossible or incredibly annoying/RNG-based to beat, and some of the stats seem rather useless options.
I apologize if this all sounds very nitpicky or if it's just outright wrong, I certainly can't look at the game's code and see what everything does to make a perfectly sound judgement thus just have what I experienced playing to go off. I say all of this because I do enjoy the game and would love to see it improve and grow! I hope this helps going forward, and that more players come forwards with some (perhaps not so lengthy) reviews! Thank you to the dev for putting time into this game.
(P.S., perhaps playtesting these updates would help? I'm not much of a dev, nor am I super great at analyzing things, but I truly believe it would help!)
Thank you again!