Keeper’s Toll – PS5 Review

Keeper’s Toll is this week’s stab at the old Vampire Survivors-esque roguelike style game and it comes to us by Stingbot Games who, like most of your favourite 1980s thrash metal bands, hail from the Bay Area in California.  And as we always seem to say, when this genre is done well it’s one of our favourites but PSN is also full of poor examples of it too, so where does Keeper’s Toll stack up?

There’s nothing here in terms of a plot or even a tutorial.  Instead you just pick your character, from a choice of six, and are plunged into the first of four arenas.  Now, that might seem a bit light compared to other games in the genre but having recently reviewed Soulstone Survivors, we’re kind of pleased to have everything streamlined a bit.

The characters on offer are a good mix of melee, ranged, summoner and area of effect types and they all handle quite differently.  However, it’s in how they act that Keeper’s Toll tries to stamp it’s own ideas on the genre.  You’ll be used to the classic auto-shooting style of Vampire Survivors or Brotato (the two best games in the genre) but this game does try to mix things up a bit.

We started with the Ranger, your classic bow and arrow type of player and when starting a run with them you’re offered a choice of two control schemes.  You can either aim with the right stick or auto-fire left or right (not aimed at all).  The Necromancer has a flail type weapon that rotates as you move, in a sort of physics-based way, or you can just have it auto-spin.  What you don’t get though is any kind of auto-aiming on your main attacks.  It’s a slightly awkward mix between being an auto-shooter and being a twin-stick game and it might have been better if the game settled on just one.

Once you get used to that weirdness, the game starts to follow some more traditional mechanics.  You’ll have mobs of enemies attacking you and when you defeat them, they’ll drop a glowing item that’ll help level you up.  Max out a level and you’ll be offered a choice of weapons, upgrades or perks.  It’s what you’ve come to expect.  Thankfully all your secondary attacks are auto-firing/auto-aiming, so that’s good.

What’s cool is that each character has their own unique set of new attacks to earn.  The Pyromancer gets all manner of fire attacks, lots of area of effect and slow-cooked incremental damage, while other characters get new attacks that suit them.  Our favourite was the Necromancer who gets a whole suite of summons such as skeletons, gollums and giant hands.  Anyway, whoever you pick, it’s nice to experiment and see what they are capable of.

And at the end of a run you can upgrade the character you’ve just played as or invest skill points in general improvements.  However, rather than just giving you the brute force options of damage, attack rate and so on, these are a little bit more generalised.  It makes the upgrading a lot less satisfying but it does mean that you don’t just get to grind your way to success by adding more and more attack power.  We’re on the fence about it because it doesn’t foster that addictiveness that we’re used to but maybe the balance of the game benefits from it.

Rather than the time-based levels of other games in the genre, Keeper’s Toll tries to keep their four levels interesting with various events that pop up along the way.  From sub-bosses, corridor sections and challenges that require you to stay in one place (or follow a light source around), this does keep things interesting.  That said, sometimes the boss battles can be a real sticking point which can be annoying if you’ve been playing a level for a long time and then get smited by some boss prick with devastating attacks that you don’t get much of a chance to learn.  It’s also particularly annoying if you die with health flasks on your possession.  We’d rather the game gave you lives or had you auto-drink a health potion than just kill you.  Especially as the drinking animation takes a little longer than we’d like.

The game is published by eastasiasoft but is far from being one of their usual one hour Platinums.  There’s a lot to do here (but not too much) and a good level of challenge and so this will last you a few days more than their typical releases.  And we liked what the game did.  The events, the setting, the characters, the weapons and perks.  It all came together quite well.  This isn’t the best game in the genre by any means but it’s better than most.

The presentation is a mixed bag though.  There are some interesting character designs but the 2D pixel-art style is drab even when compared to other games of this type.  Sure, Vampire Survivors looks terrible at first but it eventually becomes a bright and colourful assault on your senses where as Keeper’s Toll always seemed quite staid.  It’s okay though and the action is reasonably clear to read even with lots of enemies on the screen.  We liked the music too even if it didn’t really suit the game.  It’s sort of moody dance music rather than the epic faux-orchestral sort of thing that might suit a game based around magic and supernatural armies.

But overall this was pretty good and it’ll be a game we’ll keep going back to in an effort to beat it with every character.  We’d have preferred if it went a bit more traditional with some of its mechanics.  There’s a reason why Vampire Survivors had auto-aiming and more stats to upgrade and so the chances the game takes maybe don’t come off here but it’s still a decent stab at a genre we like.