I’ve been playing a lot of Roguelikes lately, and I am always looking for vibrant, colorful games to play. Dandy Ace immediately caught my eye when I got a look at it on Steam not too long ago. It reminded me of several things I love, including Persona 5, Hades, and other Roguelike games I’ve enjoyed over the years.

In Dandy Ace, you play the titular character as he explores a labyrinthine mirror palace, in which he was imprisoned. The green-eyed illusionist Lele has imprisoned Dandy Ace and his two assistants inside the mirror out of jealousy. Dandy Ace is a more beloved magician, and Lele resents him for it.

As a result, you must explore each level, using magical cards as skills and abilities to progress through and ultimately find your way to Lele. The combat is fast-paced and requires quick thinking and fast reflexes. There are three types of cards. Pink cards are offensive cards, blue cards are mobility-focused cards, and yellow cards are utility-focused, usually having some sort of status ailment attached.

You can carry four cards to use as attacks/abilities, along with four slots for augmenting/upgrading those four cards with other cards. By putting another spell together with the one you are using, you can add damage, add status ailments, or change how the cards work altogether.

As you progress, you collect keys that enable you to unlock alternate paths to new areas. This lets you (in time) mix things up and make your runs more varied. The areas are interesting and colorful, as are the enemy and boss designs. It is a really great progression to keep things fresh.

Before I go any further, I should also mention that there is a “Twitch Mode” for people who stream. This allows Twitch chat to vote on various things to help or hinder your runs. As you might expect, since this is a Roguelike, each time you die you start back at the beginning.

However, between levels, you are able to use mirror shards to unlock permanent upgrades, as well as new cards. Between levels, you can also equip trinkets that add passive effects. This might be things like damage reduction, movement speed upgrades, or even extra damage if you go long enough without taking damage.

Unlocking new cards is only possible if you find a blueprint for the card during your run. If you die before reaching the end of a level, you lose that blueprint. The problem with this is, the difficulty isn’t exactly easy, even on Normal mode, so getting that permanent progression is an uphill grind.

The issue lies in multiple things. For one, mobility cards only allow you to dodge, unlike in other Roguelikes where you may get temporary invulnerability during the dodge. I can’t tell you how many times I have died just from trying to dodge through an enemy. Also, the game lacks a feature like Hades’ God Mode, to put people at a lesser skill level (or people with slower reflexes) on an even playing field with others.

It does have some nice accessibility options such as subtitle size and the ability to set where the subtitles show up on screen though. The voice acting is nice, the character designs are really cool, and visually the game is a treat. However, it does feel like it caters more to a more masochistic player than most.

As many things as Dandy Ace draws from other games, I wish some of the more user-friendly features would have made it in. Specifically things like Curse of the Dead Gods’ option to pick a starting loadout from multiple choices, or Hades’ hub that allows you to focus on progression between runs as opposed to after the first section.

I am not a newbie Roguelike player, but I have a really difficult time with Dandy Ace. I think one reason is that, unlike most Roguelikes, there is a degree of chance as to whether your run will even get off the ground. If your starting cards aren’t ones that are particularly good or ones you can craft a suitable build with, you might die before reaching the second area.

With that being said, there is room for some really promising (and really insane) card builds to be put together if you stick with it. I think Roguelike veterans might choose to stick with Dandy Ace just for the style and the fact that it plays very well. However, people new to Roguelikes are likely to get frustrated and stop, long before they get to the good parts.

So while I find Dandy Ace to be a charming, interesting Roguelike, I think it still needs some proper TLC. Some quality of life additions, maybe some varying difficulty options, or even some rebalancing seems to be in order. I love the ability to tailor your build, mix and match cards, and just change things up on the fly. However, Dandy Ace does take a turn for the frustrating pretty quickly.

With great voice acting, enemy design, visual style, and controls, Dandy Ace is a solid Roguelike. It isn’t perfect, mostly due to its difficulty curve and lack of certain quality-of-life things to manage difficulty spikes. If you are a Roguelike fan though, I can see you getting a lot of mileage out of this one.

A PC review copy of Dandy Ace was provided by NEOWIZ for this review.

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Dandy Ace

$19.99 USD

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Beautiful Visuals
• Customizable Combat Loadout
• Great Voice Acting
• Fun Premise
• Twitch Mode for Streamers

Cons

• Difficulty Spikes
• Needs a Bit of Quality of Life Improvement
• Feels Like Some Things are Missing