Star Fire: Eternal Cycle: a pretty roguelike and a scroller had a baby

Who doesn't love a good ol' roguelike game, where you can hack and slash 'em, level up, and cause insane amounts of damage to your heart's content? And what about getting bit by bit of your level as you scroll through it, like the good ol' days?

Today, we're looking at Ethereal Fish Studio's Star Fire: Eternal Cycle, which was just released on September 8th. This beautiful game is a neat combination of a sidescroller and a roguelike, which makes the game pretty fun and fairly easy to understand.

Let's take a look at its pros and cons.

Star Fire: Eternal Cycle review

The Pros:

• Star Fire: Eternal Cycle is so pretty: The graphics truly stand out and look absolutely glorious as you slash or blast the baddies away. The animations for the attacks are also pretty cool, and they steal the show as you power up and use them.

• Plenty of different weapons to choose from: You start with three awesome weapons: the flamethrower, lightning fist, or gold axe. As you play, you unlock more weapons like the quake hammer, frost bow, shadow blade, and more, and each of them does their own awesome attacks and specific amounts of damage.

• The music kicks ass: Because who doesn't want to sound like a complete badass as they're roaming about and blasting creatures into pieces? Though it does get a little repetitive, the music does stay on par with the game and just makes the experience cooler.

• "What're you buyin'?": You can shop for Talents as you gain different types of points needed to buy different kinds of skills, and for any other items like a Flaming Stone of Wrath, or insectoid cores. Just be aware that refreshing the items and core shops will take your gold.

• Choose your own path: When clearing a level, the player is taken to an area where they can choose where to go next, depending on the room just cleared. For instance, some rooms give you the choice of entering either the Mirror Challenge (helps the player level up faster) or Core Plunder (an area to defeat alien insects for attributes and more gold), while others might redirect the player to treasure rooms or Body Enhance (dropped items increase your max HP). You can kind of craft your own way down as you slay insects and make it look pretty.

The Cons:

• Could use a tutorial: Star Fire is a pretty straightforward roguelike game, but a tutorial wouldn't have hurt. Things like combining insectoid cores aren't really explained and were things I had to figure out as I played.

• Could use more attacks: There are three different attacks a player can use in Star Fire - light, heavy, and rage attacks. Light attacks have the shortest cooldown time and can be used pretty repetitively, while heavy and rage attacks take a second to recharge, which can make the repetitive smashing of the light attack button a little boring. As you level up and gain more attributes and talents, your base damage also goes up, but it'd be nice to unlock different types of attacks or have a little more variety in what one can do rapidly.

All in all, Star Fire: Eternal Cycle is a fun roguelike game that is both pretty and solid, and it's definitely entertaining. As a fan of fun roguelikes, I do recommend adding this one to your collection.

You can snag Star Fire: Eternal Cycle on Steam.

Pixigonal was given a free copy of Star Fire: Eternal Cycle in exchange for an honest review.