I’ve been hooked on Hell Clock since it was released last month. Few games nail what I want out of a loot-driven action RPG like Diablo, and Hell Clock pulls it off while also having the roguelike-driven improvisation of games like Hades.
Hell Clock is a game that wants you to break it, and its only flaw is that there’s nowhere to go after you’ve finished the campaign. Before the newest patch, it only had a mode called Ascension that would let you restart the campaign from scratch with an increased difficulty.
The developers at Rogue Snail posted an update not long after the game’s release saying they were aware that players like me would love a way to face tougher monsters with our established characters. The studio wasn’t lying when it said that it was prepared to move fast with updates, because that major extension to the campaign is here, just two weeks after Hell Clock came out.
Now, when you finish Hell Clock’s three-act campaign—which is quite good, mind you—you can crank the difficulty up like you can in games like Path of Exile and Diablo. The Abyss world tier restarts you in act 1 and makes just about everything harder, but it also gives you access to more powerful gear. And when you beat that, you can step into Oblivion for an even tougher challenge.
I gave Abyss a shot with a build I made that covers the screen in lightning orbs. Basically, I have the ghosts of dead soldiers following me around with hundreds of orbs rotating around them like a party of saw blades that can cut through waves of monsters. Everything was smooth until around Act 3 where the enemies weren’t instantly getting torn apart. For the first time since finishing the campaign, I had to consider survivability and tweak my gear accordingly.
That’s what I live for in action RPGs with flexible enough skills and loot to make puzzling out problems like that part of the fun. It wasn’t hard to fix my issue, but it’s a promising sign that the options exist at all in a game that didn’t even launch with extra hard modes.
Rogue Snail mentions in the update post that how you balance your character’s defenses is high on its list of things to expand on. Currently, it mostly amounts to stacking one specific stat until you’re immortal, so I can see why it would want to add more depth.
It also said it wants to rework how gear upgrades function so that you’re not forced to replace everything. Right now, if you find, say, better gloves, you can’t keep your old ones when you replace them, which restricts you from being able to try new builds. I imagine the original design was meant to lean into the roguelike nature of the game so you’re not sifting through an inventory full of gear, but it’s kind of a pain to use in practice.
Further in the future Rogue Snail has plans to add a whole new endgame system that will resemble Path of Exile’s endless series of dungeons that ramp up in difficulty called maps. A crafting system, new character animations, and a paid expansion with a fourth act are coming too.
If it can pull off what looks like an incredibly busy next several months, Rogue Snail might have an action RPG worthy of pulling me away from Diablo 4 soon.
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