Daimon Blades - The Weird French Devs Have Returned

[ADN_VIII]

The professional strange developers, Streum On, are at it again with a prequel to the exceptionally strange but great fun game E.Y.∃. Divine Cybermancy. Titled Daimon Blades, you play as a warrior monk of the Secreta Secretorum bound to a daimon that is in turn bound into a weapon. Your mentor, The Hermit, has gone rogue and fled into the depths of the labyrinth under the Secreta's temple headquarters and is carrying on a ritual that will do something bad to reality.

Played as a hack and slash roguelike RPG, each run being a series of procedurally generated floors based on a number of different templates like deserts, sewers, deserts, baroque jails, and more. Every 5 floors you get a boss fight, then a rest zone, then an option to return to the temple or keep going into the depths.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

roguelike

So it will be shit. I hate modern devs, they just gave up on level design.

 

[ADN_VIII]

So it will be shit. I hate modern devs, they just gave up on level design.

It's actually really well made. The art direction is incredibly well realized and the tiles fit together really well.

 

[Divine Schizo]

I would have much preferred a true sequel do E.Y.E, and I hope that they eventually get around to making it. I'll probably give Daimon Blades a shot when it's fully released and polished, as the reviews I'm currently reading aren't painting a pretty picture on the early access release.

 

[Tablet County]

It's actually really well made. The art direction is incredibly well realized and the tiles fit together really well.

Yeah but why would you ever think positively about anything ever? Don't you know where you are?

 

[StacticShock]

about 600 or so sales for 20 bux, i wouldn't say it's a bad number considering strenum is a indie studio.
also on steam discussions there's a few E.Y.E ragebaits

 

[Captain Chromosome]

Played a few hours on release and beat the old man. Good bones for a dungeon crawler of its style, though a fair bit of the unexplained mechanics are annoying, mainly shield enemies and The Door, the latter being a slog of a fight, as well as certain unfair-feeling ones it's from larger enemies in the maps.
2H weapons all the way, baby. Looking forward to seeing the game get fleshed out.

 

[ADN_VIII]

shield enemies

Look for weapons with the "phased" attribute. For a damage penalty it bypasses enemy defenses including shields and armor. You also can't block or parry in melee (but can reflect projectiles) but hey, enemies can't block you. The shimmery golden effect is what it looks like.

 

[CasketBase]

Oh, it's those guys...
They have some interesting ideas and aren't afraid to experiment, but their shit's jank. Probably due to them being a small studio, also spending their time reading Lexicanum while high on shrooms and Fr*nch wine. Then again, a bit of jank by itself isn't a dealbreaker for me personally. Is it early access? I'll buy it once it's fully out, then.

Glad they're developing their own 40k-inspired setting instead of churning our whslop. Used to be a 40k fan, but these days? Fuck geedubs, IMO it's time to let Warhammer die and rot and fertilize the soil for something better.
Can you break this one like's character progression and growth mechanics like you you can in EYE?
Are there retarded OP abilities and fun weapons like there are in EYE?

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

Love me some StreumOn. Their version of roguelite progression is one of the handful I still like. I can see a couple internet boating accidents for Daimon Blades so I'll acquire it and test it out over New Years.

I'm keeping my expectations tempered partly because early access, but also cuz I think EYE's autistic OP god powers are the exception, not the rule, and they only come after shittons of grinding and learning exploits. I haven't played a lot of Hired Gun though so idk if that gets similarly extreme in the lategame.

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

Doubleposting because I actually got around to playing the early access build.

TL;DR: It's some extremely janky shit that isn't very satisfying to play, lots of features are absent, but it does look very fucking pretty. Basically a Vermintide clone or some kind of Extraction-ARPG. Beyond basic controls, the game explains absolutely fucking nothing about itself - just throws you in the deep end. Not my kind of game, and even if it was I probably wouldn't have much fun trying to solo it. That's basically as far as I'm gonna look into this. Worth pirating for the aesthetic so you can crank up the graphics settings and get some kino fucking screenshots for wallpapers.

Spoiler: Thoughts on EA build

The opening cutscene is just drifting past concept art with narration, but it does some interesting lore stuff (if you cared about that in EYE: DC), and it introduces the middle eastern Saif al-Haq branch of EYE to complement the western Culter Dei and eastern Jian Shang Di. The first page of character creation took about 4 minutes to slowly pop-in the UI elements and character model one by one, the 2nd page only took about 20 seconds to load the weapon models.

Once in-game, you can't pause even in Solo play. The tutorial had issues registering me doing the actions, like grappling and dashing. Combat is mixed: I went with Axe/Shield. Has chunky sound effects, but animations are too fast and weightless. There's blocking and parrying which feel equally weightless, although blocking automatically reflects projectiles (if it's only supposed to reflect on parry, the window after parrying is retardedly long).

Enemies spray a fun amount of blood, can be dismembered, and they ragdoll, but they're dentskull levels of retard. They just run at you in a straight line and take nearly a full second after reaching you to begin attacking. It feels very MOBA or MMO, with all your abilities like Dashing and your Grappling Hook having long timer cooldowns on their boring generic UI icons, and there's a literal "Ult" button at the bottom of the screen.

After tutorial, you end up in a typical Hub with NPCs where you hang out, upgrade stuff, and get quests. Or, you would, if those things worked. Can't even interact with the Training Master to practice combat. One NPC literally says nothing. The aesthetic is cool as fuck and very much feels like what I would expect if someone said "Divine Cybermancy but medieval/renaissance". There's a lot of voice acting, mostly from your Daimon weapon which talks every 10 seconds, and it all does a good job of making "EYE speak" sound like a real consistent language. It also has a nice option to ""Remembering[sic] the previous dialogue"" so you can go back and pick other dialogue choices. Which have zero impact, in case you were wondering.

 

[ADN_VIII]

A new boss fight dropped recently and I had a chance to try it out. I must admit, a giant tree that sits in a pit of lava and launches fireballs was not on my bingo card, but hoo boy was it a fun fight. The game content got updated with the art book as well, which I will attach as a PDF to this post because it's incredibly gorgeous. For a team of 15 people, Streum On hits well above weight in terms of design quality.