Rampage Knights, at the time of writing, is an early access game.

I never liked the idea of early access games. Frankly, the practice is a little disgusting. I'm not one of those people who don't realize that game development is a business. I'm completely aware that their bottom line, as a business, is to make money. What I don't agree with is a practice that is pretty exploitative and borderline criminal. If I hand over my money to a business I should expect a reasonably finished and worked product. You're not guaranteed any of these things when you buy into early access. The reality is that you're paying for an incomplete product with only the promise that they'll finish it in the future. They are not obligated to do this either, regardless of their track record.

Although, I get the positives of early access. Aside from being the first to try out a game, you'll be able to get involved with the development process, start a dialogue with the developers, tell them what you want to see in the game, and if nothing else you'll be showing your support— either the developers themselves or for a game that you want to see finished. What disturbs me is the idea that a developer wants you to pay to beta test their game. If they actually needed help it would've been in their best interest to make the beta as accessible as possible. I get that smaller developers might also need funding along the way, but it shouldn't be a burden on the consumer. If they wanted to solicit donations from their fans there are plenty of ways to do that.

So look, if a developer expects me to pay for their game, I don't really care if it's early access, I'm going to treat it like a finished product and review it as such. I usually don't give bad reviews, but I was not impressed by Rampage Knights. It's a cooperative, rogue-like beat 'em up— a mix between Castle Crashers and Rogue Legacy. Frankly, there isn't much incentive to play Rampage Knights over either of those games, and their respective genres are already pretty saturated.

A lot of features in Rampage Knights in missing, but I suppose that's a given. It was indicated by placeholders in the menu and in game, but I would've preferred if they just didn't include them. It would've streamlined interaction with the game and create the illusion that it was somewhat complete. The core game mechanics seemed to be there, however. Combat was okay. It was a one-button affair but there weren't any variations like combos or light and heavy attacks. Throws seem to occur randomly and if a monster is down you can stomp on them for extra damage. You are able to do a charge attack but its primary use is to break an enemy shield and isn't practical for anything else. There isn't a way to block, but you can roll to evade attacks— although it wasn't that useful. Rampage Knights is pretty unforgiving.

I'm fine with a higher difficulty game. I'm also fine with permadeath. What I'm not fine with is that I found myself relying on luck with every attempt. There isn't a progression system either, so there aren't any rewards for going far, neither are there really incentives to try again and get better. When you die, you start from square one— no checkpoints, no saves, and no guarantee that you'll find health restoration items. It was actually a little irritating finding a drop that would restore 5 health points when enemies do a minimum of about 8 damage anyway.

At least there isn't friendly fire, sort of. You can hit a teammate, but they won't take damage. However, you might open them up to be attacked if you stun them. Admittedly, I've outright killed a teammate by unintentionally knocking them off a ledge. For a game that describes itself as "cooperative" first, the cooperative play is pretty poor. There's no means for teammates to work together other than dealing damage to enemies— in fact, the revive mechanic is for the remaining players to kill 10 monsters. What's worse is that item and money drops aren't shared, so if anything there's incentive to work against each other instead of with each other.

Rampage Knights was a lot more frustrating than it was fun. It hardly had any substance, and what was there might have been functional, sure, but wasn't great. There are plenty of other games that do what Rampage Knights tries to do but a lot better— and they're finished products! Maybe they might improve it in the next couple of months but as it stands I'm giving it a 5/10.