Bravery and Greed is a sidescrolling roguelite beat ‘em up by Rekka Games, in which you fight your way to the runes needed to unlock a dwarven vault with untold riches inside. Adventure mode sees one-to-four players taking on five dungeons to steal the dwarven treasure, with specific dungeon layout and rewards randomized. Each room you enter hides a small platforming challenge, a fight, or a reward, with fights being the most common occurrence.
Each of the four character classes has an upwards attack, a downwards attack, a neutral attack combo, a hold attack, and a projectile that can be used a few different ways, and all of these are substantially different between classes. You end up relying on some attacks more than others, but there’s just enough attack variety in both type and purpose that spamming the attack button isn’t always the best strategy.
The equipment you find has a diverse range of effects, from summoning skeletons when you kill an enemy to adding damage to certain attacks, and keeps each run feeling unique. There are also four mutually exclusive gods selectable at statues who give random perks per run. Since you can only pick one god per run and each god has a modest selection of perks, you’ll see the same perks over and over if you pick the same god on every run. Even so, the way perks interact with your character class, equipment, and the random order you get them in grants each run a slightly different play style.
At its best, each fight is a chaotic, but not mash-filled battle against a variety of enemy types that require you to dance through the battlefield. At its worst, it’s still pretty fun, just a bit too easy without enabling the Arcana-based run modifiers.
Speaking of which, at the end of each run, you’ll unlock new equipment and run modifiers based on how much gold you collect and what hidden objectives you complete. The modifiers mostly make the game harder or add minor mechanics in exchange for bonus gold. The game had enough variety and unlocked quickly enough that I didn’t feel trapped by the upgrade system, but I didn’t unlock everything and can’t say if it stays rewarding for dozens of hours.
The coolest part of the game should be the co-op, but from my limited experience with it, the co-op is a bit too chaotic to see what’s going on. In general, enemy animations and effects are just clear enough to react to, but when there are two or more people creating multiple sets of effects and moving the screen around, it gets a bit wild. Although you’ll definitely have fun with it, it feels less skillful and more mashy than the single-player.
The game’s animation looks good in motion, although I found the enemy designs generic, and the music and sound effects are unremarkable but do the job.
The light platforming is the one part of dungeons I haven’t mentioned because it’s forgettable. It’s a bit clunky since you can’t adjust your jump in mid-air, but you eventually get used to it and it’s easy and brief anyway. It’s also worth mentioning there’s a Horde mode, as well as a PVP mode to fight your friends in, but they’re fairly barebones.
Bravery and Greed isn’t outstanding, but it’s a better-than-average roguelite with chaotic combat and fun upgrades to mix together, as well as co-op. If that sounds good to you, it’s worth a few hours of your time.
Bravery and Greed is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC for $19.99.
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