While the start of Into the Pit is unquestionably rocky, the follow-through is a blast, with fast action and serious pyrokinetics as monsters turn into blood splats decorating the walls. While the overall theme could have been dark and gloomy, everything lights up and the darkness becomes the backdrop for the neon-magical lightshow to illuminate. The variety of enemies and level types helps each run stay engaging, and while fifteen sets of levels plus the final area can feel like a bit much, there’s no need to try to blow through it all in a couple of days. Into the Pit is about action, after all, with only just enough story to get things moving. There’s a village in trouble and a ton of monsters to destroy by way of magical annihilation, and if it takes a bit to rescue everyone they’ll be fine waiting for a combat mage to do a run or two a day until the evil is finally dispelled.
I like Into the Pit a fair bit. The graphical style is nice, the combat is incredibly fluid, and the mechanics there are easy to understand, but also have a noticeable effect when spawning new dungeons. However, I also found it to be a little bit too easy for the most part. The game requires a lot of runs in order to rescue more villagers and max out your character, and it doesn’t do quite enough to keep you drawn in versus other similar games.
Good game overall, with some flaws.
- Enemies are bullet sponge. If you played Borderlands 2, you probably got used to this but it is far worse sponge now.
-New content unlocks slowly. You need to rescue 45 villagers in total to unlock all contents, every floor has 8 rooms, 1/8 chance of lost villager room appearing, and you need to clear 4 rooms before proceeding to next floor. Do the math for all 45 villagers I passed Calculus 1 with D-. (approx 80 hours grind to unlock all content. wtf.)
-Uh... Repetitive. Before unlocking the next content you need to grind at least 1.30 hours and it is boring, repetitive as hell.
-This is a fast paced game, and enemies comes from nowhere so game is kinda hard.
Pros:
+Kinda rich skill pool. It is still repetitive after the first 5 hours.
+Fast movement system from Quake 1.
+Free with gamepass.
+Sounds are good.
+Cant find any pros.
+Just buy a gamepass and play 3-4 hours.
It’s a fast paced shooter, that feels really tight as a first person shooter. It’s meant to be played in fast bursts, so maybe it’s the perfect exciting thing to get you pumped while commuting on the bus. Or the kind of game where you breeze through the dialogue, turn off the sound and play while listening to a 25 hour audiobook. Into the Pit is a well-constructed roguelike shooting game and if you’re the kind of person who hears those words and yells, “I’m sold!” then you will probably have a lot of fun. But it’s not going to make believers out of genre-skeptics.
I have a great fondness for roguelikes, but this one puts me in a weird place. Mechanically, Into The Pit is a welcome throwback to classic FPS games with the added twist of randomized elements to keep things interesting. However, the pool of random elements is too shallow and there are not enough interesting combinations to keep all but the most dedicated players interested.
It’s no doubt that Into the Pit draws heavy influence from the Doom franchise, with its old-school graphics, fast-paced shooting, and rock and roll heavy background music, but the core gameplay loop makes it hard to recommend as a rogue-like. It’s fully functional and fluid with snippets of fun thanks to its brief runs, but its lack of variation for dungeons, weapons, and bosses makes it difficult to stand out from others in the genre.
Into the Pit is a retro FPS/roguelike that's far less than the sum of its parts. It's got great action, but everything that surrounds it is questionable.
Into The Pit rolls out new content far too slowly. With player upgrades that are mostly changing numbers around and rooms that aren't hard to puzzle out, playing becomes an exercise in enduring repeated content before finally stumbling onto something that makes things feel fresh. Even then, what does unlock often isn't enough to truly fuel more runs. At the end of the day, Into The Pit is too repetitive to truly succeed as a roguelike and too skim on content to survive as an FPS without those trappings.
I'm not a tryhard at all... but this was by far the easiest roguelike I have ever played. I think I died 7-8 times throughout the entire game, until the true credits rolled. If you have any ability to understand combo potential and stacking upgrades, the combat becomes essentially meaningless because of the unbalanced power - but still fun (think Quake or Doom). I played the entire game with a single-shot sniper spell in my left hand, and a spray/shotgun spell in my right. I just stacked damage and DOT upgrades on top of those every time, and upgraded all the health support runes.
The game is also unfortunately very shallow in how it approaches randomization: you have a crystal for each zone (a zone is just a series of five layers of four rooms, then a boss - a.k.a. "a run") and you can mix two crystals together to make another zone that is just a mishmash of enemy types and textures from the two you used to make the new one.
Each zone has 3 villagers in it. You save all 3 by completing the zone. There are 45(ish) villagers in the game, but you only need to save 30 to unlock the crystal for the final zone and boss. That's the entire game.
I'm glad I got this on gamepass, and the only reason I kept playing until the end was because it felt like playing Quake or Doom. My total playtime was around 10-11 hours to see the credits. Most of my deaths were caused by things outside of my control, like getting caught on wall textures or being overwhelmed as soon as I spawn by what felt like an enemy spawn glitch.
Only purchase this if you are an FPS junkie and have absolutely nothing else to do with a weekend. Even then, just get gamepass, try the game a bit, and then play one of the better games on there for the rest of the weekend.
Into The Pit stumbles in two major areas: gameplay and progression. Fundamentally, it's "Quake but with bad visual design and worse level design?" and the progression is such a convoluted, grinding, unrewarding waste of time that the game seems to WANT you to stop playing it. We're immediately grinding for 'motes' which serve a variety of unclear functions, none of which improve the gameplay to the point of tolerability. You know those games that give you upgrade options like "Your projectiles move %1 faster" when projectile speed is functionally irrelevant? This is that.
There might be something fun somewhere in Into The Pit, but after several hours in the game, I sure haven't found it. It's been a long time since I experienced combat this unimaginative. I've maybe never seen upgrades this worthless. All wrapped up in a world where nothing is readable and it wouldn't look good even if it was. Into The Pit can go Into The Bin.
SummaryA fast-paced retro-FPS roguelite. As a member of a family of lore-hunting mystics you are summoned to a cursed village, drawn by rumors of a demonic portal. Dark magics have overwhelmed the village, It's up to you to rescue the survivors, grow your powers, and journey forth INTO THE PIT.