Hey All,

Yep, I jumped on the HoT bandwagon too after seeing Hive account@pusen's video about it. For $5, I've already sunk 10 hours into it. I've unlocked all the characters and levels for now, but the game is only in Early Access. Even now, 10 hours of (great) entertainment for $5 is a steal. Compare it to a movie and popcorn, for example. Most reviewers on steam have 20-30 played.

My game play vid is a collection of clips from a recent run with the Sorceress that tracks her power growth from a lowly level 1 to a level 60+ death machine. It also shows the defeat of the final two bosses of the level. I break down the sections below the vid.

Humble Beginnings

I had recently unlocked the Sorceress, and I had a bunch of quests to do with her. Quests are goals to accomplish while playing like "Deal X damage with Lightning Strike." Quests unlock new levels, new characters, traits and abilities. Each quest completed also increases your experience gained in the level, so you can level up faster and be stronger all around.

For this run, my goals were to deal 750,000 damage with Meteor Strike and 500,000 damage with Electrify. Electrify is the passive of lightning damage. You can see some monsters with blue lightning on them for a second or so and then they get hit for another 100 damage. To do enough damage, I want to hit lots of enemies, have high on-hit effect chance, and use the passive the guarantees that critical hits will apply electrify.

I have a limited selection of gear that I've collected, but the items I'm running focus on attack speed, movement speed, and critical strike. My amulet also helps me find potion ingredients. My armor (the shirt) gives me a 3% chance to heal 1 hp each time I kill an enemy. That doesn't sound like much for most games, but you are killing 10,000+ enemies per try in this game. It's a lot of healing.

Getting Stronger

First, apologies, but peakd doesn't seem to respect time stamps / start times of embedded videos so I'll just call out time stamps if you want to jump around.

At ~40 seconds, I jump forward in the run. There's a slime boss that needs defeating. Each time you kill it, it spawns a smaller version of itself. I just about always go for move speed, so you can see that I'm significantly faster. I've also picked up two new skills. Dragon Wave occasionally spits out a firewall and Transfixion shoots out arrows that can apply fragile (fragile monsters take more damage).

I also continue to pickup piercing, which for the sorceress makes her chain lightning bounce more times. Luckily, I also find the Meteor Skill, which I need for my quest.

Final Form

At 1:48 I skip ahead fairly far in the run (character level 50). I've collected the maximum of 6 skills and have upgraded them heavily. If it's hard for you to understand what's going on don't worry: it's hard for me too! 🤣 That's part of the fun. The game gets pretty frantic. I turn on auto attack and auto aim when I play. It helps me focus on positioning, and if I ever need to aim, I can just use the thumbstick and it will override to aim where I say. Controls in this game feel very nice.

I also track down the last ingredient in this level (the green item on the ground). These are part of another meta progression system: potions. In my upgrade screens, you may have noticed some. There is a vendor in town you unlock and can bring ingredients/bottles to in order to make new potions:

Being able to re-roll bad upgrade options and apply good ones 2x makes a big difference in ultimate power level.

Final 2 Bosses

From the 3:00 minute mark until the end of the video, it's me beating the final two bosses. I also take a newly-discovered item to the well. This is the mechanic for unlocking items: you can send 1 item up the well each run. You can't use it anymore that run, but you will then be able to pay the item vendor to unlock it for all future runs. A fair trade.

In addition to items and potions, you also have passive stats that you can upgrade for gold. I'm a big fan of rougelits in general: the meta progression gives a sense of purpose/accomplishment to each run.

The last 5 minutes of any run are incredibly hectic and fun. If your meta progression is super advanced, you'll be able to just sit still in the first three levels of the Early Access. Each new level is significantly harder, though, and I'm trying not to get too overpowered before new content is out. The challenge of trying to survive is the fun part (for me).

You'll also see that I do complete the quests I set out to in addition to a few more. All in all, a very successful run!

Conclusion

This game is a blast. Unless you just absolute hate Vampire Survivor style games, you'll have a great time with it and be happy you parted with your $5. I now I am. I'm also looking forward to seeing new levels, characters, and items added to the game. I'm going to do my best to hold off on pushing too much harder for the time being. I've beaten all 3 levels, and I don't want to snooze through the 4th level when it's released because I'm overpowered.

Hope you give it a try and enjoy it!