Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory

An oddball Fromsoft-esque title with a similar sort of interplay between loadout, upgrade currency, and death mechanics. You play as a robot that can be equipped with weapons/armor on your head, arms, chest, and legs. Pressing the corresponding face button uses the equipment mapped to that body part, although the leg equipment is exclusively passive (the cross button is mapped to your chest). Using equipment raises the heat gauge for that body part, and when the gauge is full, the equipment is disabled until the gauge has fully drained. There is also a total usage limit for each weapon, which more or less acts as ammo. Double-tapping in any direction causes a roll or dash with full i-frames, each of which raises the legs’ heat gauge. The game is arranged into a series of floors in a tower, with the full eradication of enemies on each floor leading to a boss fight with a portal to the next floor. There’s a single place to save, restore one’s health/ammo, upgrade player stats, equip weapons, and change areas at the center of each floor. Upgrades to health, defense, maximum heat gauge, and weapon slots are conducted via “elixir skin” you receive from killing enemies or “restoring” (selling) equipment. Killing enemies occasionally drops weapons as well, with certain weapon “combos” activating “overkill” after death that supposedly raises the drop rate. Upon death, the player is sent to the first floor of the tower with all active equipment permanently lost, although all previously opened portals remain.

That final bit about death destroying your build seems intriguing, but it never quite commits to the idea. Each floor is randomly generated, which implies that the game might work with a roguelite structure, but upon death you’ll find that none of the floors reset, and you can still traverse back to the floor you died on without setting foot outside of the save room on any of the others. You’ll usually have enough equipment and elixir squirreled away to throw together another build, but the best quality stuff all comes from drops, and if you had something rare that’s lost, enjoy revisiting previously cleared rooms with a disappointingly sparse enemy spawn rate to grind back your equipment. Going the full roguelite route (build is destroyed, can piece together a new one but have to climb up the tower again) or Souls route (can run back and grab your equipment at the drop point) would’ve maybe fixed this; their solution instead is to turn off the death penalty for the boss fights and let you try them endlessly for no punishment, a complete cop-out. On top of all of this, the game doesn’t autosave, so after a certain point I just fell back on save-scumming and continued on my way.

Some of the bosses play with “natural” cover in the fights, giving you both room to play around the gun-centric gameplay that dominates the second half. The moment-to-moment tactics rely heavily on raising the heat gauge on the boss’s legs to keep them from rolling. [src]

Thankfully, some of the other Fromsoft-adjacent choices bring some mechanical appeal to this otherwise unremarkable title. The equipment customization and variety is incredibly flexible in terms of restrictions on body location and how many slots each weapon takes up. With extra slots on a body part, additional weapons can be loaded in as backups in case the primary weapon runs out of ammo. Using the limited elixir to determine the distribution of talents to each body part permanently affects the build in a meaningful way. For instance, a player might give the left arm extra heat and the right arm slots to create contrast between a safe and consistent weapon on the left and a deadly but quick-to-overheat weapon on the right. This is augmented by the fact that every single enemy operates via the same build system and equipment that you do, including the bosses. Finding boss weaknesses through exploiting a underutilized elemental system and observing the separate tactics of each involves repeated build customization much like Armored Core. The dodge/roll is also exceptionally useful, as it’s not only extremely responsive, but it also creates momentum that can be preserved while executing attacks if said attacks are buffered into the end frames. Gliding around an enemy in sync with one another and narrowing down openings where one can unleash their weaponry is fluid and rewarding thanks to the generous cancel windows for rolls juxtaposed with stiff, deliberate weapon animations.

I highlighted the bosses because they’re bespoke and well-designed; the weak random generation of the rest of the game lacks this. Each floor pulls different dull rooms from a pool of ~20, duct-tapes them together, and stuffs them with randomly built enemies. Clearing out each floor quickly becomes monotonous through the repeated room layouts and lack of curated encounters. What’s more, the weapon balance is incredibly skewed in favor of guns, as individual bullets deal nearly as much damage as melee attacks with a rate-of-fire many times faster than a sword slash or hammer strike. The game opened as a somewhat challenging experience when I actually engaged with the melee, but it quickly became identical from enemy to enemy as soon as gatling/machine guns became available, which turns basically every encounter into a DPS race thanks to free heals in the save room and safe runbacks. Virtually any decent build will converge to primarily using guns if you want to compete on the mid-to-high range floors, and those who choose to play by the rules with regards to death will be forced to scour lower floors for guns in a game with sparse enemy spawns on cleared floors and low weapon drop rates. It doesn’t help that using a particular class of weapon (for example: Bullet) levels up your damage output for said weapon, further pushing your build in favor of whatever weapons you most often kill enemies with, and turning your head-shotgun/arm-turret monstrosity into a complete buzzsaw the longer you churn through the combat.

There’s a thin story woven here about robots with no destiny other than to fight, doomed to provide entertainment for a spectator species that has long since died out, but there’s little outside of these occasional conversations that builds out those sensations. [src]

That being said, the groove of combat in the later areas where enemies can live longer than a few seconds benefits greatly from the intuitive, smooth control scheme and variety of different enemy types you’ll encounter. It helps that the bosses tend to get exclusive weapons that spices up their particular encounters and makes reaching one a bit more exciting than the usual grind. This was fun for about three hours, upon which I reached the top of the tower and was instantly booted back to the bottom to restart again. Yep, to reach the true final boss requires a second playthrough, and the layouts seem more or less identical to how they were on the first playthrough. Surprisingly, there’s a completely new weapon pool to work with, giving those interested in further experimenting with their kit some juice to keep on playing, although while the enemies reap the benefits of this, they seem to not have had their health buffed to compensate. I did two full floors on this repeat run out of due diligence and was disappointed to find that their bosses had barely changed at all from the first run. Even finding online information at all on the second run is difficult; the sole GameFAQs guide lists only weapons for the first run, and I couldn’t find any reviews that mention a second run at all.