Ampersat Gameplay Preview

Ampersat is an action heavy dungeon crawler that brings to mind the old school Gauntlet series. Enemies will be constantly spawning from monster closets until you destroy them. The game’s premise is neat as well. The letters from your village have been captured, and you must free them from the dungeons in order to bring back complete sentences.

The action of Ampersat does get pretty hectic once you get past the early levels. The screen will be filled with fast moving enemies and it is very easy to get overwhelmed by sheer numbers. I got around this by carefully pulling in a few enemies at a time. This clears the level out enough so that you can destroy the monster closets much more easily. It also seems like each monster closet can only spawn a certain amount of enemies before becoming depleted and despawning from the level.

In order to fight the enemies, you have a melee attack, two spells, and a dash move to help you dodge enemies. The melee attack felt a little cumbersome to use so I relied heavily on spells. Spells, along with other equipment, have a small chance to drop from defeated enemies. Each spell has a different elemental affinity and you’ll find yourself switching between spells often as each enemy has different weaknesses.

Since there are so many enemies and they move rather quickly, you do have to stay on your toes and weave between them while dodging projectile attacks in order to stay alive. It didn’t feel too difficult if you stayed calm and only aggroed a few enemies at a time.

The dungeons are divided into floors, with the main goal of reaching the stairway leading to the next level. Each floor is on the small side but they do have optional objectives such as finding hidden treasure chests and completing words. Some even have puzzles to solve and different mechanics in play. For example, on one level, I had a giant boulder rolling towards me Indiana Jones style and I had to destroy towers in order to slow it down and cross the bridge safely.

Once you free the letters, they will return to the village and you will start seeing sentences being filled in. This is used in a neat way because even the item descriptions are missing until you free enough letters. This creates a risk vs reward situation where you could take a risk and buy an item without reading the item description. You could get something terrible or something great.

The game also has a simple skill tree that includes benefits like shorter dash cool down, greater element damage and resistances, and etc.

Overall, Ampersat is a pretty decent dungeon crawling game. It was a bit difficult to get into at first but once you start unlocking new spells and equipment, it does become a lot easier. The game opens up and becomes more enjoyable.