Salt and Sacrifice

• Genre: Action Platformer
• Time Played: 35 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Could be tightened up a bit for me personally, but it's probably right for the intent, which is for you to grind and beat bosses over and over again, which is maybe more fun to do for multiplayer, but I don't like grinding or playing multiplayer games online all that much.
• Pleased/Disappointed: It was fun, but I think I left Salt and Sanctuary with a much higher opinion, even if this game did have some improvements over the last.
• Why I played: I liked Salt and Sanctuary a ton and was hoping for more of that experience.
• Recommend to others: If you liked Sanctuary, I probably would. I would recommend Sanctuary first if you never played either.

Salt and Sacrifice was not exactly the sequel I personally had hoped for. There were some ups and some downs. The ups are the grappling hook and other tools you get for the platforming aspect of the game. In fact, there are a couple little optional areas that really make good use of those tools and I honestly could have gone in for more of those, but like many of these games, those are just thrown in as an extra. I appreciate it being there though.

Instead of one giant metroidvania map, it's broken up into a handful of smaller(but still large) maps with a hub world. Your main goal is to hunt mages, which are just like really tall guys that summon minions and have a gimmick of their own. The way you hunt these mages and with how they structure their multiple levels and hub world, along with the weapon crafting that utilized the parts of the mages makes me believe they took more than a little bit of inspiration from Monster Hunter. 

I think I saw a lot of reception that mentioned multiplayer was the way to go with this one, and maybe that's what I'm missing out on because while I did like it, it was too grindy for the type of punishing game it is. I can see how, like in Monster Hunter, trading the bosses aggro would really change the dynamic of the game, making it a bit less dangerous and a little more about the dance of those mechanics. If there was a single-player only version where your HP was buffed just a tad and crafting/upgrading armor/weapons/items had half the requirements, I think this would have been an A+ experience for me. It was still pretty good though, I just can't help but see where it could have been better.