by Amr (@siegarettes)

• 3000th Duel 
• Developer: Neopopcorn Corp
• Publisher: Neopopcorn Corp 
• Switch, PC

With forgettable stock fantasy enemy designs and featureless level design, you’d be forgiven for writing off 3000th Duel off first impressions. It plays with several popular tropes of modern game design, with a non-linear map structure, and a combat loop that borrows the RPG systems and corpse run format from Souls games. A Souls-like Metroidvania if you must. Despite that it doesn’t capture any of what makes those games beloved, and they even feel at odds with anything interesting about the game. 3000th Duel barely has an identity to itself. 

What brings life to it is the game’s combat, which doesn’t shine much when dealing with the fodder enemies or traversing the world, but is plenty interesting during boss fights. The bosses themselves are familiar tropes, but their designs are a step above the regular mooks, and their patterns and difficulty helped keep me engaged with the simple, but enjoyable combat. Beating them obtains a new power, which doesn’t totally alter the way you play, but provides more interesting options to play with. 

There isn’t much to latch onto with 3000th Duel, but despite that I found myself returning to it, if only to see what the next ability or boss would have in store for me.