Vambrace: Cold Soul

Vambrace: Cold Soul is an engaging and intriguing offering for roguelike fans, mixing fantasy, anime, and horror. Unfortunately, barebones combat and a somewhat inconvenient user interface can hamper your enjoyment.

Vambrace is an interesting game with a nice story but with a bad interface and some difficulty spikes, especially in the first few hours.

Overall, Vambrace: Cold Soul is a fun game that's brought down by little things that lead into bigger issues over time. I appreciate a good challenge, but there's often a fine line between a challenge which is fun to overcome and a challenge that feels unfair and unrewarding. Where Vambrace shines is in its world building and storytelling which I enjoyed the mystery of. The map, however, can freeze out in the icy ghost towns for all I care.

Vambrace: Cold Soul is a great love letter to Darkest Dungeon. The art style is very well done and the story intriguing. The character classes manage to show great variety in their kits within their limited options. While the game encourages tactical retreats to replenish resources in town, it provides no incentive to invest in your party members beyond their gear. This ultimately makes your squad feel shallow and very expendable. For fans of games like Darkest Dungeon, this is a title worth looking into.

A decent attempt at providing a compelling Darkest Dungeon-like game that stumbles due to the lack of combat depth and some balancing issues. The game is worth a try as soon as the developers have had a chance to tweak their formula.

Vambrace is a successful evolution of the mechanics that made Darkest Dungeon such a hit, but despite its beautiful art style and interesting setting, the repetitive gameplay and lack of meaningful achievements make the experience for more tiresome than challenging.

Bloober respects the formula created in the original for this sequel, changing the scenario, but keeping its horror approach. That means a lot of linearity, repetitive resources and jump scares, but also a few lessons learned.

A relentless roguelite with a solid foundation. Beautiful but grindy, it lacks a complex story, deep characters, and emotional impact.

This is the definition of unfulfilled potential. Vambrace: Cold Soul may look competent at first, it may even spark your interest, but underneath its nice visual overcoat hides a bad story and unappetizing gameplay.

The roguelike nature of Darkest Dungeon combine with more substantial narrative and exploration, and a Korean manhwa aesthetic. Unfortunately, the mechanics of Vambrace need work. Your squad of mercenaries is largely disposable, there's too much randomization in terms of progress, and there are several issues with the user interface. Perhaps a sequel can bring the gameplay closer to the excellent aesthetics, but Vambrace: Cold Soul doesn't come together completely.

Although the developers' love for the craft and medium is on full display at all times, Vambrace: Cold Soul does suffer considerably from just how much it proudly lifts from other titles. Rather than carving out a new path for itself, this rogue-like is more than content playing its homage straight, leading to one of the most derivative battle systems this generation. This isn't to say there's no merit to the project. The atmosphere is top notch, and only heightened thanks to a great score and gorgeous visuals, but this title never quite manages to carve out an identity of its own. It boasts an engaging story that's presented well, but its thoughtless gameplay will be too hard for most fans of the genre to stomach.

Sky-high ambition meets sub-par execution in this roguelike fantasy-epic. Vambrace: Cold Soul delivers a large helping of worldbuilding but fails to provide engaging gameplay to accompany it.

Too much in the game depends on random checks on everything with not enough variables or interactions on the player’s side, giving you always a bad hand. It feels like you’re preparing for an arm-wrestling contest but someone breaks your wrist before that. With luck - and only with luck, mind you - you can make progress but all the trouble (read: multiple retries) you go through will no doubt make your head hurt. It’s as if there has been no play testing at all to see whether playing Vambrace is any way meaningful. If the developers themselves would realize what’s wrong with the game, it still wouldn’t help.