[section_title title=Gameplay]
GAMEPLAY
Seraph starts as it means to go on, a short cutscene and then straight into running, jumping and shooting. The first few levels introduce you to the core mechanics and the demons themselves, from then on you’re on your own. Demons are distinct enough that a quick glance tells you what type of attack and movement you can expect from them. It’s a classic list of attack types too jumping slash, fireballs, homing energy missiles, poison.
Just as you learn out a way to deal with a particular demon the difficulty moves up making things harder again. Fireball demons suddenly gain a fireball shield, homing missiles get faster and turn quicker, eventually demons get healing abilities and shields of their own. The mechanics behind it seem simple enough, but it feels overly artificial as you can game the system by dying to slow, or even reverse, the increase.
The story is so light as to be barely there, but each part carries extremely heavy handed religious overtones. Every time a cutscene between characters appears you can just skip past it all to get back into the action. As long as you read every fifth conversation you’ll still be able to keep up with what is going on. I tried to read every conversation, but each character you meet in cutscenes covers the same ground.
Most games now have an rpg-lite upgrade system, Seraph is no exception. You can target a particular attribute such as health or damage, but really you’ll just blindly drop shards of increasing rarity into the slots to get all of the advantages. During your first playthrough this is a necessity to try and keep up with the difficulty level, but they carry over so subsequent runs can be completed easier.
