Hades was one of the better games I played last year, and I have been half on the lookout for a similar experience (at least gameplay-wise) since I finished it. Earlier this year I played Curse of the Dead Gods…and it was perhaps one of the worst games I’ve played this year, and it put me right off looking for another roguelike. I was going to pass on Dandy Ace for a while after reading it was essentially “Hades with Persona aesthetics” in a preview but…well, I often intend to pass on things and end up getting them anyway. I’m not sure if that’s a problem or not. Depends on how well it turns out I suppose!

This, fortunately, turned out better than Curse of the Dead Gods did.

I actually really enjoyed Dandy Ace, although I can’t help but feel like it’s an incomplete game…or, if not incomplete, then not measuring up to its full potential. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I actually love the depth of the gameplay on offer here – the cards are sufficiently varied to be interesting and offer numerous ways to play, and that you can swap them around at any time in the menu means you’re not locked into your choices, which is absolutely delightful – what might not work for one enemy may work better for another, and so on.

It doesn’t *quite* work out that way in practice, but being able to shift one of my secondary cards onto a different primary card to make room for another I wanted to use instead was something I appreciated a lot when I played this, because cards that were generally useless as primary cards because of their attack speed had some great secondary effects. I would never have used Toxic Cloud as a primary attack card, but given that it applied poison if it was assigned as a secondary card, it was one I would immediately use if I acquired it. There weren’t many cards I would deem to be completely useless, and that’s a rare thing in a game like this.

The RNG nature of the starting power-ups is extremely annoying though, because it either inflates the difficulty or goes a long way towards completely trivialising it. Because status effects in this game are straight-up broken, and when you combine one with a pink projectile – especially Five of a Kind, which sprays in a wide arc and can be used five times in quick succession, as the name suggests – you have a very easy way of cheesing the game. Stacking status multiple times on an enemy and letting the damage just burn their health off is by far the best way to get through this game.

This is, in my estimation, a pretty tough game though – it makes you work for your victories. Even with optimum setups enemies hit hard and fast and there is that obnoxious delay in healing that is present in so many action-focused games so you need to be careful. But I think that’s fair: it’s easy to become overpowered in this, and there has to be a balance somewhere. It can tip towards frustration with a bad loadout, but…well, that’s RNG for you. I enjoyed the tension this game generated with the constant locked rooms and swarms of enemies on the whole!

But as much as I enjoyed this, I don’t really feel motivated to go back through it and try the higher difficulties. It’s plenty difficult as it is on Normal in terms of how hard enemies hit on top of the RNG elements, and…well, is that it? With Hades I was motivated to go through it nine times because each time I was rewarded with additional narrative, or at least some new dialogue. Dandy Ace doesn’t have that at all, so it feels very much like a one-and-done sort of title, and even if it took me nearly 10 hours to finish it – thanks to several bad starts and a need to upgrade and unlock a few things for survivability – it doesn’t change the fact that my first (and final) successful run was only about 45 minutes long.

It was satisfying to go through, but it doesn’t have a very high replay value because of the lack of content. I suppose this is something they could amend in later updates, but it’ll have to be substantial – and free – to get me to revisit it. It’s not something I regret playing, and I think it was worth the lower asking price, but it’s just a shame something so aesthetically pleasing and brilliantly designed is so bare bones.