A creative rogue-lite where breaking the game is encouraged | PC+Mobile (Cloud) - Core Devourer

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✨Overview

Core Devourer is an upcoming rogue-lite survival top-down shooter of what seems like a mash up of two of the best rogue-like games in the genre: Risk of Rain 2 and Vampire Survivors. I tested the Demo recently — and with the limited gameplay I experienced, I can say there is indeed potential in this game, if they can get the pacing and the mechanics right upon release. ⭐️Score: 7/10

Pocket Playfest: An Indie Celebration 2023 Winter Edition

In a recent hands-on exclusive experience this past weekend, I had the privilege of testing a handful of titles on TapTap's experimental cloud gaming service, setting the stage for this 16-day event where indie game developers show-off their creations exclusively on the TapTap mobile platform — fully playable PC games without the need for an actual PC, Android/iOS version, or the need to download the games and install them. Granted, you’d need to have a reliable internet service to be able to stream these games, and preferably are located in US and Canada for consistent play and latency, at least for now.

🔗Join the Playfest >> https://www.taptap.io/events/playfest2023winter 📅 Schedule Dates: December 23, 12 AM PT - January 7, 11:59 PM PT. Playfest Winners & Player Rewards Announcement: January 8, 12 AM PT.

For my personal cloud gaming experience in this specific, please see further below in the review.

🎨Graphics and Art Style

The visuals of Core Devourer looks really close to Risk of Rain 2. The game utilizes a low-poly style 3D environment with a stylized and somewhat cel-shaded aesthetic. In fact, if I had been shown this without knowing the title, I would have thought its a new Risk of Rain game. There is something relaxing for me in this type of art style, and I like it. 🎮Gameplay

Core Devourer is set to take players in an exhilarating sci-fi roguelite experience where the primary objective is to confront colossal hordes of droids, absorb their cores, and ascend as the most potent cybernetic entity on the planet. The game features procedurally generated maps, with randomized power-up choices gained from killing enemies and gathering EXP. These power-ups include, but are not limited to, spawning turrets and drones or adding elemental damage to your guns, such as ice, electricity, and fire. I can already imagine some builds emerging from this, judging from my early experience with the various power-ups. The weapon system is touted to be vast, featuring a multitude of weapons called Cores with unique powers and effects. As you progress, unlocking these weapons will become integral to refining your combat strategy. Augmentations serves as the skill-tree upgrade system. Crafting powerful gear and experimenting with augmentations and components will allow players to “create game-breaking builds”, yes, breaking the game is encouraged. Most of the Augmentation and Components system as still locked for the Demo, so I wasn’t not able to delve that much into these aspects. ⚔️Combat

The game is a twin-stick arena shooter where you clear the open map of all robots and bosses. There are varying degrees of automation with the aiming, you can play as a twin-stick shooter and aim manually, let the game auto-aim the closest enemy, or let it auto-fire at enemies. However when using autofire, your movement takes a hit, as firing slow down movement and you cannot control when to stop firing to gain that extra speed. You CAN cycle through the different modes to effective turn on and off auto-fire, but I would have preferred a dedicated toggle button for it. Additional, you still can’t play it ala-Vampire Survivors, because you still need to activate your secondary and dash abilities. Movement alone is not enough, an option to at least automate the secondary ability would have been a good alternative. The health system is unforviging, as it only gives you three lives. No health points. As soon as the enemy or a projectile touches you, you lose one HP. and I could not find any mechanics that helped with this nor had my lives restored during runs. Overall, the combat is challenging, fun, and encourages experimentation. However, there are some frustrations during the early game experience. The game starts quite slow in the first 5-10 minutes of runs, with the most basic starting enemies already requiring multiple hits to bring down, and the character moving annoyingly slow. As soon as you get more power-ups, only then your power can finally spike enough to be able to enjoy it. This is unlike other games like Vampire Survivors where the starting enemies only take a single hit to kill, allowing a smoother run progression. ⚖️Conclusion

Core Devourer has the promise of delivering an engaging roguelite adventure with a distinctive visual style and innovative gameplay mechanics, taking many best parts of both Risk of Rain 2 and Vampire Survivors. However, the success of the game upon release will depend on the developers fine-tuning certain aspects, particularly the pacing and balancing of early-game challenges. Nevertheless, it’s a game worth looking into if you happen to love its obvious inspirations.

☁️General Cloud Gaming Experience

This past weekend, I had the chance to be chosen as one of the testers for an experimental cloud gaming service by TapTap, and I must say, it holds a lot of promise. The quality is seriously impressive - we're talking sharp HD resolution, not like your typical streamed game. Looks and feels native and doesn’t feel like its streamed. The performance is also smooth (60FPS), with good frame timing (by visual observation only, as there was no tool to monitor this). There’s currently no way to play at a native 16:9 with black bars, as the screen is stretched out to the phone’s screen. 📶Cloud Latency

In my experience, my latency during the test phase was around 200ms --- only because the servers are currently located in United States for now and I'm connecting from asia. Even then, It’s still a bit playable, especially for games that are not latency sensitive like point and click games or those with simple controls. Having said that, it’s just a matter of server location and having lots of servers. It’s understandable since this is just a testing phase with limited servers. If a datacenter is nearby, I am positive that I’ll have a smooth and fluid experience, same with those living in the US or Canada. It works like a charm on 5GHz wifi, but the experience took a hit on 2.4GHz, so won’t recommend that. 🕹Cloud Touch Controls

Now, onto the user interface. I'm a fan of how each game has its own custom on-screen buttons, tailored to the specific control scheme. It works like a charm for simpler games, but things get a bit tricky with more complex ones. 🔃Cloud Accessibility

Accessing the service is a breeze - the Instant Play integration is right there on the game page, next to Download/Steam/Play buttons. Loading times are impressively fast, and I love that I can minimize the TapTap app and return to the game still streaming. Progress is not yet saved between streaming sessions, so it’s clearly just for testing purposes. Overall, it's been an interesting experience, and while there are some kinks, the potential here is exciting. Definitely surpassed my expectations.

🌩Specific Cloud Game Experience

Core Devourer is semi playable on cloud gaming, fully playable with the auto-aim mode but becomes unplayable in manual aim mode since there’s no way to aim using the given touch controls. The game is highly latency-dependent since you’d have to evade the swarm of enemies in real time, with an unforgiving health mechanic that only gives you three lives that get consumed at the slightest touch.

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