REVIEW | Mystic Gate (Tidbit-style)

We love all sorts of games. Sometimes it is hard to cover a game in our traditional review style that’s why we have tidbit-style reviews. These shorter reviews cover games that deserve attention too but simply don’t fit our good, mixed, and bad template. In addition, they get a monthly summary article to give them even more reader attention!

Mystic Gate | 70%
Publisher: Eastasiasoft Limited
Developer: Eastasiasoft Limited, ZOO Corporation

A gate created by the gods suddenly appeared in the human world, adventurers from all over are ready to face whatever is on the other side of it for the reward of one granted wish. You play as one of two twins who wished for eternal life two hundred years ago in The Great War. Your current wish? Death.

Mystic Gate is a bullet hell roguelike that plays a lot like Enter the Gungeon, but it does manage to have a few differences. You will need to collect keys to open the door that leads you to the boss on each floor, but thankfully they are always straightforward to find. There are several similarities between the two games, like room layouts, overall gameplay, camera angle, pits you can push enemies into, and objects you can destroy by walking over them.

The tutorial is presented to the player through text bubbles that pause your game and feel like a non-friendly way to teach you how to play, but it’s not a huge issue, as they only show up a few times. Just like in Enter the Gungeon, there’s a hub area, except you cannot choose a different character to play as, but you can check missions, which gives you currency to buy skills, weapons you’ve found, enemies you’ve discovered, and all the 32 passive and 12 active skills you can buy.

There are 77 weapons you can find in chests or buy in shops, but all of them seem to never completely run out of ammo, including throwables, because you can always reload and continue to use them without collecting any ammo anywhere, this didn’t seem to make the game a whole lot easier though, as there are a bunch of enemies to defeat and bullets to dodge.

Visually, Mystic Gate doesn’t look bad, as it does have interesting-looking enemies/characters, but I do believe that it could have looked better. Rooms have some details to them, but when comparing them to Enter the Gungeon‘s rooms I can’t help but feel like they are a bit too much on the simplistic side, and that can be applied to almost everything else.

There are different songs for each area, they vary from calm songs, like the one from the hub area, to more energetic ones that include electronic and rock songs, which are used when you’re inside the portal. I think it does sound good, but it also feels a bit tiresome to listen to at times.

Mystic Gate is a good roguelike that can be pretty fun to play, it does have aim assist to make it a little easier to play on a controller and also includes local co-op, but it doesn’t stand out as much as it could when it comes to overall presentation. If you like Enter the Gungeon you will like playing it, but I can’t say it would be a better pick than just playing its inspiration, as it doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from it, and is inferior in some aspects.