Devil Peach Soda

It's been 1,000 years... I've been waiting for over 3 years for this to come out, and while the first impressions left me a little confused, I've come to be fairly comfortable in the basics now and can safely say this game even upon its initial EA release is Fun. This type of puzzle game is something I've basically never touched before so everything shown to me feels pretty novel. hell, integrating parries into a game like this is a very fun idea for encouraging the player to be aggressive as well as strategic. I'm not fully sure it gets there, as I don't really understand how to consistently parry most of the attacks, but it's very satisfying when you get it. That's something of particular note. Satisfaction. There is a high amount of feedback for each action and its effects so unless you just shoot a ball that simply lands instead of attacking the one it's targeting, there's a good sense of 'weight' behind everything you can do. the soundtrack is very high energy as well, contributing to this being an experience which is supposed to get you feeling involved in your actions (pretty please release these tracks as well, I wanna listen to them while I work). Of course this is an early access release, nothing is perfect. there are some audio bugs around pausing, like if there is a followup sound to an action but you pause before the followup, it'll play anyway after a few seconds. I found once too that pausing managed to desync the attack sound for an archer, making it not actually play a sound after I had unpaused, but I haven't tested it to see if it happens consistently or if it was a one-off occurrence. I also share the sentiment of other reviewers that an option to scale the ui is heavily needed, as some elements are just tiny. being able to do 2x or 4x scaling would be very nice. One other thing, which is by all means a wishlist item: much farther down the line I think it would be fun to create some kind of versus mode to this, or perhaps a local co-op mode that makes the field wider to account for the second player. Do I expect it? No, and I imagine that would be very complicated to implement in a way that is balanced or satisfying for each player. but it sounds fun to me! all in all though this is good, I look forward to playing it more as it continues to be developed. I also just realized as I was typing this review that Krad's name backwards is dark. So scary...