Combat has a weightiness that rewards patience but might feel sluggish to some—especially Staff of Sloth players—and the tutorial could do a better job of making a strong first impression with a more detailed guide of the game’s core mechanics. 

Your mortal life has been judged sinful, and your soul’s fate is to be punished for all eternity – but an uprising is brewing among the damned! Press on as a renegade in the immortal rebellion against God’s final judgment, and fight for your eternal life. Pick-up and raid

Once raids start, players can fan out and proceed either alone or with others as they vie to take down hellish monsters and acquire treasures, heals, and powerups in order to clear the raid. Destroy enough monsters, reach the biome’s boss, and slay it to move onto the next.

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Dodging enemy attacks is a massive factor in a game like this, akin to a bullet-hell title at points, so this is a big win in my book for better situation readability.

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While that isn’t a massive amount of time to pump into a roguelike, I think I managed to grasp the title’s unique gameplay loop and the direction the developers want to take it.

are visually breathtaking, blending medieval manuscript aesthetics with nightmarish, apocalyptic imagery. Thunder Lotus’ hand-drawn style is rich in 33 Immortals Gameplay detail, from illuminated script menus to grotesque, hellish landscapes straight out of a horror series—complete with mutilated devilish bodies around the map.

I thought my experience with ARPGs would be enough to push back against this enemy horde alone – I was wrong. It’s once I found other Rebel Souls (fellow players) to tag along with when my journey through Hell became a bit more manageable.

and shifts the focus from individual mastery to coordinated survival. Victory isn’t just about how well you fight, but how well you fight together.

The studio is already teasing a third gate for runs that will take place in a heavenly land, but this is slated to arrive later in 2025.

Every time I perished in a run, I was already thinking of how I could make the next better, trying not to rely on the chance-based item drops. In the beginning, I simply wanted to rush to the boss level, so it was all about using valuable resources to report to nearby Torture Chambers and finishing them as fast as possible. Once I had my soul’s ass thoroughly beat, I slowed the pace down and made sure to get some personal upgrades in between the dungeons, which meant sticking with groups that were farming enemies and world items instead of just the dungeons.

was conducted on a pre-release copy of the Xbox version provided by the developer and Microsoft. The game was played on a Windows PC.

You start a run by picking a weapon — justice sword, sloth staff or greed daggers — and each has a special ability that only works when three players stand together and activate it. It’s different for each weapon, but the effect is consistently grand. I stuck with the Staff of Sloth, a weapon that flings purple balls of magic and whose special ability slows enemies across a large swath of the battlefield.