Developer: OverPowered Team
Publisher: Alternative Software Ltd
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
Profane – Review
Boss Rush games are already ruthlessly-hard games as you need to do your best to push forward. Well, Profane takes this up a notch by adding a time limit to the bullet rain that’s waiting in each battle. With twin-stick controls, the game plays really smooth, but the difficulty is definitely not suited for everyone as the tutorial already starts at an insane difficulty. This game is sure to make you scream a lot of ‘profane’ things after dying time after time.
Story
In Profane, you play as Talaal, the last herald who is the embodiment of God’s seven masks. She is hunted by her siblings who want to absorb the power within her mask. She must fight through many monster bosses to keep herself alive. When playing, you won’t focus all that much on the game’s story as you are too busy trying to beat the bosses you’re up against. The progression of the game’s story is very dependent on how good you are, because it won’t progress until you’ve beaten your next opponent. The long pauses between the story scenes make it hard to even follow the story because the story only progresses with a few words appearing on-screen before the next battle starts, so there’s not much depth to be found in this aspect of the game. Chances are high you’ve forgotten the words you’ve read before you started the next boss fight because of the difficult progression. Eventually, the game makes you lose interest in its story and lets you focus on battling bosses, which is the main aspect of this game anyway.
Graphics
Profane’s graphics look quite nice and detailed with a colorful 3D art style. The colors are very pleasing to the eye. All the particles look great and Talaal herself looks quite awesome with her blue, flaming design. The effects of skills you unlock along the way look quite impressive. For example, by activating the skill ‘Singularity Beam’, you will shoot a massive laser beam towards the enemy, and it looks very cool and firing it will give you a euphoric feeling for just a second as you need to react fast to keep dodging after you’ve finished firing it. The environments of each battle are designed around the characteristics of the boss you are fighting, and they all fit perfectly. Each arena is basically a circle in which you can move freely to dodge all incoming dangers. In each battle, you are fighting against Talaal’s siblings, but while Talaal looks like a humanoid with a mask, the bosses are big extraordinary beings that don’t even look a bit like her.
Sound
The menu is accompanied by a great piece of music that is definitely going to excite you to play the game. This music won’t return anywhere in the game as the rest sounds totally different. When you enter the game, the background music is very calm, creating a bit of a ‘silence before the storm’ moment. When entering a boss fight, you will hear some classic battle music that progresses in intensity as you defeat the boss’ health bars and the difficulty rises.
Gameplay
Profane is a 3D boss rush Bullet Hell game based on time. In each battle, you are practically invulnerable, until the time has run out. When time runs out, it will take one last hit to die. In each battle, you get a few minutes to take the boss down. Each time you’re hit by an enemy’s particle, you will lose some time, so basically, the time you have left is your health bar. Unfortunately, there is no way you can recover time, so you need to be careful and use your time wisely to successfully kill the boss.
The difficulty of Profane is insanely high and there are no difficulty levels to choose from. Even the tutorial, that makes you start fight fighting against a boss called “Tutoriaal” is much too hard to be called a tutorial. This tutorial also lacks any instructions about your abilities, but you really don’t need a tutorial as the only thing you can do in the tutorial is move around and shoot. While these are the only controls you can use, this game is very hard to master as the number of particles shot at you at the same time is huge, while the area you can move in is quite small when having to dodge all these particles. What’s even harder is trying to keep your aim right while dodging because you also need to defeat the boss as fast as you can. To make matters even worse, is that when you’ve defeated that hard first boss, you’ll discover this was ‘easy mode’ all along because the next bosses are way more difficult!
Each boss will have their own set of moves they use against you and they also have multiple health bars you need to drain. The first one will start with three, while the second one already has four. When you manage to take one health bar down, a short cutscene will show the boss powering up in anger, changing and upgrading their whole move-set, making them even harder to defeat. The first health bar is always relatively easy to drain, but the last one can be so hard to let you die a lot before you finally manage to drain that last one as well.
When you’ve finally managed to defeat the first boss in the story mode, you will unlock skills. There are two types of skills you can equip, active and passive skills. Active skills are skills you need to activate at the cost of your time and passive skills will be active when the battle starts. The active skills mostly feature attacking skills while the passive skills offer some more protection to stay alive for a while longer. By utilizing the unlocked skills, the game could get a bit easier to play, but not all that much.
Profane features a few game modes to play. The story mode is the standard mode to play which lets you fight against all the bosses one by one and lets you unlock skills gradually. The arena mode has all the skills already unlocked, so you can choose all the skills you want. The daily challenge lets you fight a specific boss with a few preset skills once a day. You can only take part in this challenge once a day. Then, the last one is the challenge mode. This mode is for those who think this game is ‘peanuts’ and like to challenge themselves with an even harder game mode. Challenge mode is basically story mode, while only having one life to spare. When you die, it’s game over and you need start all over again.
Conclusion
Profane is definitely one of the harder boss rush games available as of now and it even offers a bigger challenge with its challenge mode for those who live for a challenge. The bosses’ movements and attacks change constantly when you drain their health, increasing the difficulty even more. Profane offers a huge challenge for gamers, while it plays very well as we didn’t notice any bugs in all our playing sessions, but Profane could also lead to some aggressive reactions as you tend to die quite a lot in this game. If you’re in dire need of a challenge, Profane is exactly what you’re looking for, but if you’re searching for a game with some ‘fun’ gameplay, a nice story or a relaxing playtime, you should stay away from this game!
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[…] a year and a half ago, developer OverPowered Team released a twin-stick bullet hell game named Profane. Shortly after launch, Profane was removed from the eShop and Steam shortly after launch due to […]