Ex Sanguis – Tactical roguelite from the creators of Othercide

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Considering Ex Sanguis is coming from the same developers who made Othercide, and you can definitely feel those similar vibes – the aesthetic, gameplay, and graphics are all there. The big difference? Othercide was dark, but Ex Sanguis is much brighter.

Combat definitely has some really interesting ideas

Now, I know this was just a playtest, a quick glimpse of what the game will offer, and I had just enough time to finish one playthrough. But honestly? It felt like I genuinely wasted an hour of my life. It was lifeless, plenty of bugs, and the gameplay felt pretty unbalanced. When I say unbalanced, I really mean the pace of this game is just atrocious. I’m sorry, but the enemies keep respawning and respawning, and you’re just stuck repeating the same skills over and over again. It’s way too long and could definitely be much shorter.

Enemies don’t need to keep spawning endlessly. Just hit me with a scenario that evolves as I play – from weaker to much stronger foes. This constant respawning of the same enemy types completely kills the whole roguelite vibe. It feels like they purposely made the game longer just to gather more data from the playtest.

The combat definitely has some really interesting ideas. I actually liked the delay abilities that activate after some time. There are also abilities that can hit multiple targets, you can heal each other, buff each other – it truly has all the tactical and strategic stuff needed to make things interesting. In fact, strategy is super important in this game, and thankfully, Ex Sanguis does a great job emphasizing that. Since there are so many enemies, you definitely can’t just spam abilities. Sometimes, you can even just wait a turn for them to get closer to you.

Very repetitive playtest that didn’t show much

I get the idea behind “bursting” your characters. Basically, if you hit a certain point, your characters overheat. This means instead of waiting, say, 50 points for their next turn, they have to wait 100. But here’s the cool part: when they’re in that overheated state, you can literally spam your abilities until your AP runs out. So, it’s a really great way to get out of desperate situations. You can even use it to buff teammates or heal up while you’re waiting for other enemies to approach.

The enemies, on the other hand, feel super repetitive and quite strong. I’m really not a fan of them having abilities that force your characters to overheat. It’s just a bit too much, especially when you only have three characters on your team and there could be ten enemies on the map. Now imagine that on normal or high difficulty… yeah, you get the point.

The maps were also overly repetitive, literally just two shapes recycled over and over. And the boss area was even more disappointing because there was no actual boss to fight. It just felt empty. Another really great thing about the game is the skills you upgrade after each level. You can pick from up to three new skills that give you either passive bonuses or entirely new abilities, and they each have different rarities. Honestly, there are more interesting abilities in this game than interesting enemies.

Needs more polish

Without a proper tutorial, though, you’re pretty much left to figure things out yourself. And the UI was definitely confusing at first; it just didn’t make sense until I played a lot more. Oh, and I can’t forget the bugs: characters getting stuck, abilities never actually going off, and the AI being pretty dumb and not making logical decisions. It definitely needs some polish.

So, in the end, Ex Sanguis has a ton of interesting ideas, but it’s definitely not there yet. The game really needs to speed up its gameplay, the enemy variety is lacking, and the combat is a real mix of good and bad. I can absolutely see the clear resemblance to Othercide – it looks great and runs great, just like its predecessor. Hopefully, this game turns out to be even better than expected.