▲ Recommended
17 hrs
It's not bad, and honestly does better for its genre than a lot of its competitors (though admittedly there's a lot of chaff out there). The classes have the best mechanical design in this game, followed by some bosses, then with other things (e.g. races, equipment) being just functional but unspectacular. The Hate/aggro mechanic is fairly unusual to see, and it's a nice thing to have here though it's a little half-baked.
A couple of things hold it back from being great, though:
1) Very limited control over gearing in the endgame; while crafting is a semi-reliable way to get what you need for a good chunk of the game, you can't craft above a certain tier of equipment, so it eventually becomes obsolete and you're entirely reliant on random equipment drops to improve a character's power. Crafting is also limited to what materials you choose to use in the process, which only affects raw stats.
2) The combination of crafting and enhancing/rerolling/modifying is too limited in functionality. There are a number of things you can't change about an item outside of RNG, such as the number of upgrade slots, any skill enhancements it comes with, and modifying/rerolling affixes beyond one (you choose one of each and that's the only affix you can change), which again means you're largely reliant on RNG to get a good initial item, even in the endgame.
The combination of 1) and 2) serves to artificially extend playtime in the same way that ARPG loot treadmills do, with the same sort of problem that usually involves. I hit a hard progression wall after the 5th parallel stage, where the stats from craftable equipment became insufficient to move on.
3) You can program a few conditionals into when your characters use their skills, but this is probably the worst implementation I've seen out there (though it's a good thing to have included in the first place). There isn't nearly enough diversity in the triggers (notably lacks things like enemy HP%, #enemies remaining, if the target is a boss, etc), and while it's nice to be able to set two conditionals to one skill, the fact that it's hard-locked to an AND operator makes it almost completely useless (OR is a much more useful operation in this context).
4) The loot filter has a similar issue - you can auto-sell items if they are of a certain rarity or below AND at or below a specific level. I was running multiple squads, and I was unable to filter out a combination of low-level items of any rarity and high-level items of low rarity. The loot filter would be much, much better if you could set multiple rules, instead of the current situation where there's very little granularity in what you can filter out.
5) Racial skills are undertuned. It's not that races don't matter because their stat multipliers are pretty significant, and yet their skills are pretty much universally filler.
6) More of a personal nitpick, but all of the character art is just big booba ladies. Like, that's fine for people who like that, but the dwarves don't look any different from humans, and there's no variety in the beastfolk (though they're pretty bad anyway). Some different body types would go a long way to giving these characters more individuality. Being able to set our own custom art would also be great, though that defeats a bit of the core dress-up theme.
GeneLoot is far from perfect, but it has a solid foundation and core game loop that made it worth playing for as long as I did. It's a long way from reaching the heights of something like Lootun, but it's a nice diversion for 10-15 hours if you like this sort of thing.
A couple of things hold it back from being great, though:
1) Very limited control over gearing in the endgame; while crafting is a semi-reliable way to get what you need for a good chunk of the game, you can't craft above a certain tier of equipment, so it eventually becomes obsolete and you're entirely reliant on random equipment drops to improve a character's power. Crafting is also limited to what materials you choose to use in the process, which only affects raw stats.
2) The combination of crafting and enhancing/rerolling/modifying is too limited in functionality. There are a number of things you can't change about an item outside of RNG, such as the number of upgrade slots, any skill enhancements it comes with, and modifying/rerolling affixes beyond one (you choose one of each and that's the only affix you can change), which again means you're largely reliant on RNG to get a good initial item, even in the endgame.
The combination of 1) and 2) serves to artificially extend playtime in the same way that ARPG loot treadmills do, with the same sort of problem that usually involves. I hit a hard progression wall after the 5th parallel stage, where the stats from craftable equipment became insufficient to move on.
3) You can program a few conditionals into when your characters use their skills, but this is probably the worst implementation I've seen out there (though it's a good thing to have included in the first place). There isn't nearly enough diversity in the triggers (notably lacks things like enemy HP%, #enemies remaining, if the target is a boss, etc), and while it's nice to be able to set two conditionals to one skill, the fact that it's hard-locked to an AND operator makes it almost completely useless (OR is a much more useful operation in this context).
4) The loot filter has a similar issue - you can auto-sell items if they are of a certain rarity or below AND at or below a specific level. I was running multiple squads, and I was unable to filter out a combination of low-level items of any rarity and high-level items of low rarity. The loot filter would be much, much better if you could set multiple rules, instead of the current situation where there's very little granularity in what you can filter out.
5) Racial skills are undertuned. It's not that races don't matter because their stat multipliers are pretty significant, and yet their skills are pretty much universally filler.
6) More of a personal nitpick, but all of the character art is just big booba ladies. Like, that's fine for people who like that, but the dwarves don't look any different from humans, and there's no variety in the beastfolk (though they're pretty bad anyway). Some different body types would go a long way to giving these characters more individuality. Being able to set our own custom art would also be great, though that defeats a bit of the core dress-up theme.
GeneLoot is far from perfect, but it has a solid foundation and core game loop that made it worth playing for as long as I did. It's a long way from reaching the heights of something like Lootun, but it's a nice diversion for 10-15 hours if you like this sort of thing.
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