At first the game feels pretty bland and not much different to Vampire Survivors but once you have unlock various items after about the 7-10 hour mark, there's a lot more going on and the game does successfully innovate on the Vampire Survivors formula.

currently the game will randomly crash to desktop without any notice or reason. I have been unable to finish a single run due to this issue and what little information there is to find about it regarding fixes hasnt worked.

Probably one of the most boring games in this genre, and it actually pains me to say that.

These top down bullet hell games are some of my favorite games on the market. Army of Ruin, Brotato, Magicraft.. the list goes on. In my search for a great duplicate to these games I come across Halls of Torment. The overwhelmingly positive reviews peaked my interest for sure, so I purchased it. At face value, the game is interesting enough. The diablo 2 aesthetic is nice but man oh man is it a grindy mess.

This game has a ton of potential but it is missing the ONE thing that makes these games great, and that's CHAOS. Every single time you level up you're given a list of upgrades to choose from, but the fact that they are ONLY passives is such a weird choice for a game in this genre. The entire 30min long match you're just searching for a tough enemy in hopes that they drop a new attack, and those are SO few and far between. It honestly makes this game so much more boring than it needs to be.

Now I have no doubt that it gets better as you go along, but I'm 2.5 hours into this game already and I'm still overwhelmed by boredom. Will I continue? most likely, in hopes that it gets better. I'd like to think that all 20,000 positive reviews aren't wrong, but so far I'm just not seeing it.

Last thing I would change is the sound design. I mentioned before that chaos is what we seek with games like this, and sound design plays a major factor in that. This one isn't the worst in any way, but it's a long shot from the best. Make the attacks sound like they hit like a freight train. Half of them don't make noise at all and it just adds to the boredom factor.