Bravery and Greed is a dungeon-crawler, hack-n-slash, roguelite game by Rekka Games, and it’s the perfect thing for you if you’re in the mood for something that can keeps you occupied for a very long time because of its high replayability and its perfect co-operative focus that will make this game great to play with friends.

Bravery and Greed is not an extensive narrative-focused experience. A strong narrative focus would probably only harm the game because this is the game you want when you need to jump into some quick action for a while and you don’t want any commitments. The levels aren’t too long and they’re highly replayable because of the choices and gold that can be attained.

True to its name, Bravery and Greed is all about that gold. It’s all about accumulating that lovely wealth that you can use to make your characters stronger and more capable across runs. The basic setup goes like this. You are an adventurer who goes through one level after another, each culminating in a boss battle that rewards you with new things to unlock next time around. Whether you live or die, you are constantly gaining new things that can be found in later runs, and there’s an incentive to try them again and again.

The randomized nature of what exactly you’ll find and what kind of a map you’ll fight through gives you a good incentive to keep trying. You never know what you’ll find this time around. However, gold carries over unlike the level-based upgrades you attain. This means that Bravery and Greed doesn’t have that common roguelite problem where it feels like you’re just playing the same game repeatedly with mild variations between runs. Instead, you’re starting anew every time, but you’re also constantly progressing. It obviously isn’t at the same level, because it simply doesn’t have the same kind of budget. But you can think of it like Hades, where you restart each time while you also get to grow stronger with each death and/or victory.

To further mix things up, Bravery and Greed gives you some choices. You get to choose from several classes. They’re very standard classes, as they effectively amount to warrior, wizard, rogue, and amazon classes, but each of them has very different ways of playing. For instance, the rogue has a speedy dagger as a primary weapon and a bow as a secondary weapon, whereas the amazon has a sword and a throwing weapon that comes back to her.

This means that you’ll learn which you like most and then mainlining the hell out of them. Each of them also has mild cosmetic differences that you can apply, and this comes in the form of various garish colors that the characters can wear. This is obviously because strong colors are perfect for co-op action where you want to be able to tell which character is yours on the screen at all times, but it’s also fun to have your wizard decked out in the finest pink threads on the market!

So, once you’ve picked your class, you enter the world and fight your way through it. We’ve already briefly touched on the combat, and it’s a system that’s sure to keep you occupied as it’s fast, requires a ton of dodging and/or parrying, and it’s just a frantic mess of enemies everywhere. It’s also great to use one of the characters to uppercut enemies into the air and send them flying. A great thing! But Bravery and Greed is also an exploration game with platforming elements.

Sometimes, you’ll be forced into rooms with various traps, such as spikes or swinging blades, or simplistic puzzles that keep you occupied for a few minutes. And you want to explore the world because, while retaining gold across runs, you start anew with regard to equipment and upgrades. You attain these by exploring and finishing off tough enemies.

Bravery and Greed sometimes pits you against a horde of strong enemies and defeating them gets you a nice chest to open and steal whatever’s inside. Still, more often, you need to look around for various shrines that allow you to gain some powerful abilities, such as decreased damage taken or imbuing attacks with elemental abilities. You also need to scavenge for potions, and as the bosses can hit quite hard, you’ll probably want some of those when it comes time to tackle the big bad and claim your prize.

Not to mention the fact that Bravery and Greed is fine with death. Death is not punished, and you can hop straight back into the action within seconds. It allows for a good loop to form where you’re dying a bunch, but your deaths allow you to inch closer and closer toward success. The general enjoyability of the central combat loop is also enough to stave off any kind of irritation that the bosses may present.

Furthermore, the bosses aren’t very difficult. They can be a bit tanky at first, and you need to learn their movesets, but once you have that handled, they’re not hard. This is not a Dark Souls kind of game. Don’t expect to die all over the place and be forced to learn from your mistakes. It’s more the kind of game that you play for an hour, die once or twice, and then play again tomorrow. It’s pure and simple fun.

Bravery and Greed is also best with friends. Now, for the review, it’s rather difficult to find people to play because, you know, the game hasn’t been released yet, but the single-player mode gives the perfect indication that this game is best played with friends. Sometimes you can save companion characters that will then follow you around as AI friends, such as wolves and archers. You unlock more by finishing levels and by dying, just like all the other upgrades!

As soon as you rescue any of these AI companions, they’ll follow you around and help you fight, and the battles become far more manageable. It’s a lot easier to make your way through when you have some friends. So, if you have the chance to play this with some actual people then definitely give it a go, because Bravery and Greed was made with multiplayer in mind.

But that’s not all. Bravery and Greed is one of those games that has tons of content. So, not only do you get an adventure mode where you constantly unlock new items to find, upgrades to attain, and equipment to use, but you also get a horde mode, a PvP mode, and a team PvP mode. This thing is chock full of content and should keep you occupied for a very long time.

If you need a game that’s fun, has fast, enjoyable combat, good variety, and replayability, then look no further than Bravery and Greed. It may not be a visceral, narrative-oriented game, but sometimes you just want to do some looting, some slashing, and some boss bashing. And Bravery and Greed has you covered on that front.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed