I have a fair bit of dungeon-crawling, hack n’ slash experience in my gaming career, as I mentioned in my review for Diablo II Resurrected. Thousands of hours running Baal and Hellforge runs gave me the idea that I would always enjoy this kind of gameplay. With Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior, I had an opportunity to find out if I still had the patience and ambition to take on the genre.
Starting off with the concept, Lysfanga begins with you taking control of Imë as she embarks on a quest to save her kingdom, running through swarms of enemies along the way. At first look, it sounded pretty tame, but once I got into the game, I found that there is a very interesting dynamic that keeps Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior interesting—the ability to rewind time and take on enemy encounters in multiple different ways.
The combat is solely focused on this concept, and it actually brings a lot of thought and strategy to otherwise somewhat mindless combat. At its core, Lysfanga sees you walking through the map, taking on enemy encounters independent of each other. In each encounter, you are required to plan out your attack on each monster you find, because you only have a certain amount of time to get in as much attacking as possible before you’re ‘killed’, and have to rewind time to have another go.
The fun part is that whenever you complete a “turn” (for lack of a better term), your ghost stays with you and fights the path you just took, so you can go focus your attacks elsewhere. This is extremely helpful as there are a lot of encounters with pairs of enemies that have to be killed simultaneously but are situated across the environment from each other.
“Visually, Lysfanga looks fine. The environments are nicely detailed and easy on the eyes, but a lot of them look too similar.”
As you progress, you’ll gain new weapons and new companions that give you runes, spells and weapons to make your life easier. These upgrades do simplify combat, but the caveat is that you can only have one spell and one rune equipped at any given time. They can be switched out when you are outside of an encounter, but once you enter a fight, you’re locked to that particular rune or spell until you either win the fight or back out.
One of the issues I had with Lysfanga was scaling. There got to be a point, unfortunately, earlier on than I would have liked, that while the enemies were getting a little tougher, the fights were becoming harder due to the number of enemies I had to face rather than the difficulty level of the enemies themselves.
This can be assisted by increasing the number of your ghosts, or “Remnants,” as the game calls them. You are able to increase this number by locating Remnant Shards as you progress through the map. Four shards increase your Remnant count by 1, and sometimes, it makes a world of difference to have that extra copy of yourself running around.
I found that early on, I had to really strategize how I wanted to approach a fight, planning out where I would go first and who I would attack first to give myself the best chance to win the encounter. Once I got to the point of having 5+ additional Remnants running around, it became more about making sure I got everything, because the sheer number of enemies became a lot to remember who I fought already. When you kill an enemy, a little skull will show above their heads for subsequent attack sequences, but sometimes there are over 20 monsters to eliminate, and when there’s one remaining, it is hard to find that one.
“There were a few times during my playthrough of Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior that I felt that things were just too repetitive.”
Speaking of indicators of how much there is left to kill in a fight, on the left side of the screen, you get a little box that says there are X number of monsters alive, and you have killed Y number of monsters. This is a huge help when trying to figure out what is left and if you will beat the encounter at the end of the timer. Each encounter has an expected time to complete, kind of like a high score, that you can go back and try to beat with better upgrades and more experience.
There were a few times during my playthrough of Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior that I felt that things were just too repetitive. I’d beat one encounter, progress on the map a bit and end up in another encounter, beat that after about 20 minutes, progress and hit another encounter. Apart from the fights, there’s nothing else to do. Sure, there are alternate paths to take that will lead to upgrades, but they are not all that common, so the environment becomes very linear, and it’s hard to tell where I have been and where I need to go.
Visually, Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior looks good enough. The environments are nicely detailed and easy on the eyes, but a lot of them look too similar. The colour palette used in a lot of the dungeons is too similar to tell what Act I was in. The enemy design is pretty decent, though. I enjoyed the cartoonish look of a lot of the monsters, especially the ones with huge eyes and tiny bodies.
All in all, I enjoyed Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior and will continue to play it to beat all my times. The game is designed to be played using a controller, despite being on PC. If you need a bit of a dungeon crawler, then Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior is a good option and has a decent story. There is enough humour from the companions to keep things interesting, and the combat is simple enough to be easy to pick up and go.
