Succubus is an arena fighter, where you fight off hordes of enemies most of the times. There is a bit of exploration between the fights, mostly for some collectibles. I would highly recommend playing a location first in story mode. In normal mode and with the starting armor the protagonist is surprisingly fragile, but later armors will help in that regard. The main reason to choose story mode is because a lot of locations will have a gimmick mechanisms, and observing / figuring out it in normal mode might be too much ā most of the times there will be endless enemy respawning until you complete the gimmick task. For example, you must kick enemies on chains, to load those chains to unlock a gate. The hints / task is listed in the upper right corner, if you seem to be stuck in endless waves, probably you have to resolve such a gimmick. Once completed a location, you may return freely to it any time. You can change the difficulty before entering a level, but not after that. The game has a predominant red palette ā lava, blood poodles, red mist. Even the default protagonist makup / hair / paintings are reddish. The graphics of the game is reasonably detailed. The animation of the enemies are a bit stiff. There will be tons of execution / gore animations, separate ones for various weapons. When an enemy gets a yellow outline, it can be executed. Executing has itās own weapon dependent animation, there will be several for each type of enemies and weapons. By execution, you gain a small amount of health. Also it is always in slow motion, breaking the pace of the game nicely, giving a small respite in action. Generally speaking, you will always want to be on the move to avoid damage. Even just wading through forward on enemies decreases the chance to receive damage a lot. Standing still and parrying is not this games style. There is a fury mode, when the time slows down, and you deal claw damage. It triggers automatically at your first death on a level, after which you regain two dots of health. Die a second time and its game over ā or technically, you are returned to the hub, without unlocking the level. Theoretically fury can be triggered on your own too, but its resource accumulates slowly, and I generally could manage without it. There will be however a level, where you must use it. When you have to destroy some nests with eggs, without triggering this slow-down mode, it will be nigh impossible to guide the egg to the nest without some enemy making it to explode prematurely. Speaking of eggs, those will be required in some fights. Their handling is very bad, it took me a lot of time to figure out that kicking them towards the target was about the best way for me to move them. The game has background music, mostly some chello melodies, but nothing too memorable. At least it didnāt get grating. The wave phases have their own combat music, if it doesnāt stop at the end of the fight it means there remained a few enemies somewhere in the arena to be killed. The protagonist is voice acted, with the voice of an old hag. It sorta/kinda fit the scenario. Most of the voice acting is done by the tempter / corruptor. He will appear on certain points, and do some monologue. It was a bit illusion breaking when I unlocked its entry in the bestiary, as it described it as a shade, seemingly a common entity. I preferred when it was a more enigmatic entity, given the amount of voice acting assigned to it. There is no manual save while on the location. Sometimes there will be a checkpoint on longer levels, but there will be only one or two, and some levels will have none. Once completed, the location is unlocked for later replay, and the next locations become available. In total there will be around 20. The game has a main hub. Various screens can be accessed by interacting with different items in it, though the utility ones are easily accessible even by pressing Esc. The hub can be visually upgraded, but I didnāt bother with that. There are several themes for it. The summer theme is notable because changing the lighting to it will replace the default background music with a chill raggie one. After completing the final fight, the hub will change. I preferred the forlorn one, but after that fight it will change from daytime to night, and it will be filled with more action. I would highly recommend buying all the new armor available after completing a location. Those armors are basically the various builds. Some are more magic oriented, with low health, others have more health, but you move more slowly, some have a lot more dash options. Each comes with a default magic spell setup. You cannot exchange those with the already experienced ones, but you can roll for a new random one ā but not necessarily better. There are also better weapons to buy. Generally you can use the starter ones in story mode, and wait till have enough currency the buy the best tier of that weapon. It is important to buy a max level weapon with ranged option, as that will help a lot during certain boss fights, like the harpies. For me it was the spear, but there are other options too. For example your very first weapon is a ranged one. You can equip 3 weapons before entering. Sometimes you find a weapon in the level, which will be your 4th weapon. Completing the level you will get that weapon unlocked. By the end of the game, I chose the claws as my first slot, they fit the theme of the protagonist. The second one was the whip, which turned out to be much better at dealing with multiple enemies than the scythe. The third one was my reliable spear, with its ranged attack. Once on the level, there is no minimap or area map. But if you are not sure how to continue, there is a key for highlighting where you can continue the exploration ā a nice convenience. Each level has around 3 task assigned to it. It can be as easy as killing 20 lesser demons (basically stomping helpless babies, though they restore some health too), but can get more hard, like complete the level on hard mode, or with only a low amount of damage taken. If you complete those, the area around it will get a golden infill on the map. I assume doing it for all levels will unlock the perfectionist achievement. Speaking of achievements, the game is very generous in handing them out. Completing the game should give you 66%+. The collectibles in the game actually serve a purpose. The totems will unlock entries in the bestiary. The posters will unlock pages in a comic. Granted, that comic is a bit dull, with Vydija being a gladiator fighting in an arena. The default game is the censored one in the store, probably for rating reasons. The uncensoring of it is free, but must be done explicitly by the user. For this you have to download the free Succubus Unrated DLC for the game, and go into OptionsāGeneral and uncheck censoring. You know if it is working by the uncensored intro and mosaic free main menu. Speaking of adult content, yes, the game will have a lot of it sprinkled around. That doesnāt change the fact that this game is an arena fighter at its core. The version I played already has gone through a number of patches, and as such was a script error free experience for me. If some part required the infinite spawning of enemies, it happened every time for me. It still had an annoying UI handling error. There was a tendency for a movement in a direction to remain stuck when I wasnāt pressing any button. Generally happened related to dashes. When faced with it, I had to press and release the corresponding direction button to make it stop, a very tedious āmini-gameā. Sometimes enemies got stuck outside the border of the game zone. Splash damage might reach them, but otherwise only exiting and restarting the level from the beginning will help, as only killing all enemies will unlock the doors to progress. The game actually crashed for me, but only once, in the final palace level. Replaying it went without issues.
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