As a huge fan of pretty much everything roguelike, I’ve been fascinated to see the variety of games that transformative formula has been applied to in this generation. While I’ve typically enjoyed it most when paired with shooters, we’ve seen loads of deckbuilding strategy and other types of games adopting it as well. Since there’s no doubt that Hades clearly stands at the top of the roguelike hill where top-down slashing action is concerned, I’d say that it appears other developers have been reluctant to try to compete with that monster. Thankfully, Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade is here to try to take on that challenge head-on.

Sporting a pretty distinctive visual style and color palette that often helps to accentuate the detail of its formidable and consistently cool bosses in particular, I like the fact that the developers put some effort into ensuring the game would set itself apart from the competition. Thankfully there don’t appear to be any performance hiccups associated with this either, making the effort well worth it. I also appreciate that there are 3 characters to choose from, each with some variations in how they play, though I do wish you could give them a quick try rather than relying on a description before moving on to the game.

Moving on into the gameplay itself, for the most part your general moves and combos feel pretty good, but I did find that consistently pulling off the parry counters in-game was a challenge. I’m not sure if I just didn’t have the proper feel for the timing from when the yellow circle would appear over enemies just about to attack, or if the window for pulling it off is just so tight, but given how critical that skill is to your ultimate success that was frustrating. What helps to try to compensate for that would be your choices in perks as you progress through stages, or as you unlock alternative weapons which help you to tune the gameplay more to your preferred style. Once I’d equipped different weapons my perk options finally began to feel more varied and interesting, but I’ll admit that some of them were hard to wrap my arms around in terms of how effective they’d be based on their descriptions. 

Overall, there’s quite a bit to like here, and the gameplay is generally satisfying, but overall the somewhat locked in repetition of the stage layouts and enemies did knock the experience down a bit. I do appreciate the odd variety of enemy types, and how some of them are absolutely unique in how you end up needing to fight them, but I wish the game would shuffle things up between runs a bit more. The highlight is the game’s bosses though, which do typically take a little time to break down and understand before you’ll be able to take them out. The overall experience can be a little uneven, and perhaps a bit more predictable than I’d prefer, but it still represents itself well in the space.