City of Brass is a roguelike game developed by Uppercut Games. To separate itself from other games within the same genre, the developers have chosen Arabian Nights as inspiration for the game’s setting. They also made the game in a first-person perspective, instead of the usual top-down camera. But what else does City of Brass offer to convince players to try out this game?
Story
The game opens with a short cutscene that shows your character finding the mythical City of Brass, a secluded settlement that is filled with treasure, up for the taking. However, when entering the city, you’re immediately greeted by undead corpses and dangerous genies. They have only one purpose, to stop you from reaching the center of the city and lifting the curse that has taken a hold of the City of Brass and its citizens.
After the initial cutscene and some unspoken dialogue by undead corpses in the tutorial, the game stops telling its story, making it clear that the focus lies on the roguelike gameplay. While I usually don’t have a problem with games that have little to no story, I must say that my overall experience with City of Brass could have been improved by further developing its story. The premise is interesting and the not-so-often used setting could have been used to explore the Arabian Nights mythos. Imagine reaching a level where you come across Scheherazade, the narrator of One Thousand and One Nights, to give one example. Further exploring the world and story of City of Brass wouldn’t automatically made it a better game, but it certainly would have made its flaws less noticeable. What flaws am I talking about? Well, unfortunately, there are quite a few.
Gameplay
Basically, every roguelike on the market focusses the most on their gameplay. After all, the selling points of the genre are often the grinding but rewarding combat, randomized levels, and overall fast gameplay. While City of Brass is designed with these elements, they’re unfortunately not polished enough to make the gameplay fun or addicting. It initially plays like any other roguelike: you run through procedurally generated levels while killing enemies with your sword or whip, avoid traps and pick up treasure to upgrade your equipment. The faster you clear a level, the better your score and the more boosts you get to use in your next playthrough. Unfortunately, after clearing a couple of levels it becomes apparent that City of Brass’s gameplay needed some more work before releasing it.
Walking in the game is slow and feels like ice-skating when playing with a controller, while jumping just feels inaccurate on every platform. This results in the pace of the game feeling slow in its entirety. Another problem is the inaccuracy of your sword (or other melee weapons) when fighting enemies. When you’re swinging your sword, it often doesn’t match the targeting reticule, making it difficult to hit enemies in the head for an instant kill. This is odd since the whip does hit where you aim the reticule, even at far distances, which is why I’ve had way more fun using the whip than my melee weapons.
Weapons aside, the enemy variety and attacks are not that great either. Most enemies behave the same, with the exceptional genie throwing magic towards you. They also look the same, with the only difference being their heights and colors in clothing. That’s why, combined with the inaccurate movement and attacks, the gameplay of City of Brass is not that much fun to play. But the flaws don’t end there.
Visuals and art design
While writing this review I came across several people praising the game’s visuals, which I agree with but with a big exception. The art style is well-designed and really brings out the beauty of Arabian architecture, especially when you’re playing a level during the night. The darkness of the night is combined with an excellent lighting engine that accurately displays shadows and rays of light. This was most noticeable when I picked up a lit lantern and threw it towards an enemy. The shadows and light rays behaved accordingly to the speed and angle I threw the lantern with. Yet, for some reason, the fire effects in City of Brass look like they are placeholders for the actual effects. But that is not the exception I mentioned earlier.
The exception to the otherwise great visuals is how the levels themselves are designed. Every level looks the same. You start in a street with some ornaments, you continue through streets with ornaments and end in a street with ornaments. The levels could definitely have benefitted from a more varied level design, like including bathhouses, markets that are designed like a maze, treasure vaults, bazaars, prisons, etc.. Repetitive level design is never good in a video game and City of Brass is certainly no exception. Yes, roguelike games often have a low amount of different types of levels, but I have yet to play one that looks the same throughout its entirety.
Conclusion
City of Brass is at best a mediocre roguelike game that probably won’t convince many people to try it out. The setting itself is promising, but the game doesn’t do much with it. The most underwhelming parts are the gameplay and level design, which are the most important in roguelike games. Most of the issues could be improved with patches and updates, but that depends on the developers’ dedication. As of now, I can’t recommend this to anyone except fans of the genre who want to try the unique Arabian Nights setting.
