I’ve been flitting between several games lately, but one that I’ve kept bouncing back to is Wielders of the Essence, a new bullet heaven from the team behind Songs of Conquest, Lavapotion.
Wielders of the Essence is a bullet heaven roguelite built around quick runs, characterful magic abilities, and light RTS elements. On that last point, at times it can feel almost like an auto-battler, given how much combat is being resolved around you.
During missions, you control one of several amphibious wielders and then head out into one of five different biomes to kick ass and chew, well, flies, presumably.
Each run is short and succinct, but the systems built into each attempt are really well put together. You start with the eponymous wielder, but soon you’re offered the chance to recruit a supporting unit, and it’s not long before you have several followers hopping around after you.
After that, you and your little posse rove around the map, looking for objectives to capture, enemies to fight, and spells to upgrade. Win or lose, it’s back to the swamp to take stock of everything and prepare for your next run.
In Wielders of the Essence, you’re playing as the amphibious people from Songs of Conquest, and it’s their swamp that you’re working to restore. That said, despite not playing the original, I still found my objectives here quite clear. In fact, not knowing anything about the original hasn’t affected my enjoyment, to my knowledge; I just rolled with it and enjoyed how well-developed and cohesive it felt.
Incremental base building
The part of Wielders of the Essence that I like the most is the strength of the link between the metaprogression systems and the in-game action. The way you unlock your gameplay options through the incremental expansion of your base is just delightful.
In some games, metaprogression can be an afterthought; bolted-on menus to underline your character’s development but little more. Lavapotion has carefully layered in the expansion of your gameplay experience via the growth of your base, the aforementioned swamp full of crumbling buildings that you must restore to their former glory.
As buildings are constructed and restored, new supporting units become available, plus you can upgrade spells, boost your stats, and unlock new playable characters, all of whom handle a little differently from one another.
The incremental base building is then reflected in the options you are asked to choose from in-game. As you unlock new buildings, you can then pick from more units during play as you level up.
Similarly, you’ll get access to more diverse spells, and then improve them via the game’s upgrade system. There are some fun synergies to be found here, not just in terms of your spells, but also with your minions, who support different magic styles. After a while, you can mix and match spells across three types, and supplement that with a variety of supporting units ready to join your entourage upon request.
Some runs can feel a bit repetitive, especially early on when you’ve not unlocked much of the game, but once I’d earned a bunch of stuff, I started to enjoy trying out different builds as I worked to earn the resources I needed to continue with my base-building and complete my objectives.
Ribbit for your pleasure?
You really feel your characters growing in strength across multiple playthroughs, and that growth lets you push further into each biome. Each milestone you hit feels like genuine progress, but as noted, there’s also a bit of grind in there, too. Most of the time I felt like I had plenty of autonomy, but sometimes it felt a smidge too on the rails.
The pixel art is lovely throughout, and I really like the character designs. In fact, the whole aesthetic is really polished, which makes sense given how this is a spinoff. The only thing I sometimes struggled with is how busy the screen gets; the battlefield quickly fills up with dozens and dozens of enemies, and when you’ve got your own units floating around you, too, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that’s happening.
Other than that, I’ve been having a splendid time with Wielders of the Essence, which manages to blend capable bullet heaven action with smart design decisions and a very engaging meta-layer. I’m not sure it’s quite an all-time classic, but it does enough things differently and well for me to recommend genre fans hop on over for a closer look.
Wielders of the Essence is out now on PC (Mac, Win). I played the game via access kindly provided by Coffee Stain Publishing and their PR friends from the swamp!
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Story via the original publisher. Read the original article
