Wretch: Divine Ascent

Summary: A fun auto battler with a good core base, but sorely missing a lot of QoL options that would be great to have added in the near future.


Positive:
- It's Backpack Battles but with more visual flare
- Great price point for the content available
- Combos system is very refreshing and a fun thing to experiment with
- Builds seem to be fun and variable, having done a few runs now
- Upgrades feel solid and impactful
- Combat is fun to watch

Negative:
- Unable to edit settings during the tutorial, which you are thrown into on your first startup. Because of this I was semi soft-locked due to incorrect resolution size and had the bottom half of my screen missing. Eventually I noticed the small "Skip" button in the top-left corner to bypass the tutorial and get into the settings menu
- UI could use improvements on the Shapes and Colors used to represent things. Some of them overlap in style and are a bit difficult to understand at a glance
- UI is very text heavy, and a lot of effect descriptions could be summarized to be more concise
- There are a lot of small camera zooms during combat that gets a bit nauseating; I'd like an option for a static camera view of the field
- No option to slow/speed up combat until the replay is available to watch (Possible I missed an input for this because I had to skip the tutorial? Nothing on-screen at least)
- No option to re-bind PC controls
- No options to change Click+Hold to drag items into your inventory to a single click to pick up + drop

It's okay and I really like the visual representation, but I wish heroes were actually different from each other apart from their extremely limited amount of attack items.

You have a hero with a long glaive? He'll just walk into arm's reach range and get face pummeled w/o even trying to use the reach advantage.

In games like Backpack battles or Bazaar each hero plays VASTLY different from each other, while they still have a shared pool of neutral items, their core items offer different builds and subclasses

In this game all you have is neutral items and that's it, most of the items just add buffs/debuffs/attack damage with only a few offering at least something build defining. The combo system is interesting at it's core but it's really shallow and doesn't develop into anything worth thinking about. Just slap a bunch of attacks together and that's it.

Could be a cool backpack-battles like game but the mechanics are super janky. The battle replays are awful at explaining what actually is taking place, making it near impossible to analyze why a game is won or lost. I.e. Attacks can be tagged with the "Cannot be interrupted" attribute, but will still be halted sometimes if you get hit midswing. Why? Hell if I know. Pulling off and breaking combos feels more random than it should be, and highly dependent on minor differences in cooldown speed. Two similarly built characters will largely be determined by who gets the first strike advantage since most battles are won in either one or two attack chains. The only exception being completely broken and invulnerable armor stacking builds. TLDR - game needs more mechanical polish and balancing to promote more interesting fights that lie somewhere between burst and invulnerability.