Aethermancer is a monster collecting roguelite that brings a lot of creative mechanics, monsters to collect and has excellent pixel art graphics. We play as an Aethermancer, a person who can travel between worlds, collect various monsters and use them in the fight against enemies. Some roguelite mechanics are definitely reminiscent of Hades, but the game is mechanically very unique.
We explore a randomly generated world and can use simple movement mechanics to find items, monsters and NPCs, but also to discover better positions to start a fight. The game has fun elements of surprise where some enemies are hiding and if they successfully ambush us they have advantages, and if we react in time we get great advantages against them. Also if we start the fight with our attack we get additional resources at the beginning.
Battles take place in turns and are mostly played as 3 vs. 3 battles. Battles use a resource system where monsters of various elements generate a resource of their element, and with their basic attack they can generate more, while with complex attacks they spend the same resources to perform or power them up. In battle, we always play first, which allows for the execution of various combinations and gives a great advantage to various strategies so that we can prepare a defense, or disable some enemies before they can react.
The game has various creatively designed monsters that we can find in the wild and catch, and as in some other monster capture games, we initially choose one of three monsters that will always be available to us. We hunt monsters by incapacitating them in battle using the element they are weak to and then with a special item we are guaranteed to catch them. This is where the problem arises in the early stages of the game where we don't have enough resources, and it's hard to decide which ones we want to catch. However, in the end we have to collect everything? As the monsters become stronger, we unlock different passive and active effects, and this enables very fun combinations already in the early game.
If a monster loses HP in battle, it leaves our team but remains in the collection, and we can summon it later, or set it as an option for a starting monster in the main hub with the consumption of resources. Each map contains one altar where we can spend the souls we collect to summon one monster if we lack it in the team. When we lose all monsters in battle, we return to the hub where, as expected, we can spend resources and buy permanent upgrades.
The variety of monsters and their attacks is great for early access play, but through the first couple of attempts (and one successful victory over the final boss) it felt limited for a large number of playthroughs. Despite the limited number of monsters, the combinations we can make with the available creatures are a lot of fun and we managed to discover some good and almost unstoppable strategies very early on.
The visual design of the game is excellent, and the pixel art of the NPCs and the environment creates a unique atmosphere. The monsters themselves have unique enough designs to stand out from each other (and monsters from other games) which is very important for games like this where we need to remember what to expect from various enemies.
One of the game's downfalls is something that perhaps comes as a basic expectation in the monster collecting/breeding genre due to other games, and that is that there is no evolution. Monsters learn new abilities, gain higher numbers, but visually remain as we found them in the wild. A minor tiring element we encountered is a key part of Aethermancer's design, “Corruption”. Through fights, our monsters are slowly corrupted and for each point of Corruption they have less HP at the beginning of the fight. Through maps we find methods to reduce Corruption and some monsters have methods to remove corruption in various limited ways. But in the first few attempts, Corruption can often be the reason for losing the game. It seems that this mechanic is there to weaken teams that are not looking for a solution to corruption and to make us think about when we want to go into fights and when it is better to just continue to a new map.
All in all the game is a very fun experience with plenty of reasons to revisit as in other roguelites, but also the variety of monsters, their attacks and passives adds a lot of extra elements with each new attempt. I can definitely recommend the game in its current state, but I'm really hoping for new monsters as the game gets closer to full release.
A copy of the Early Access version for review purposes was provided by the development studio moi rai games and the publisher offbrand games
