Purgatory: War of the Damned

Purgatory: War of the Damned pitches itself as a multiplayer first-person shooter set in a fantasy afterlife, where players learn spells, level up an avatar, and fight across varied environments. On paper, mixing FPS action with RPG progression in a purgatory-themed arena sounds like it has potential. In practice, the execution falls well short of that premise, and the game's review history makes that hard to ignore. The core loop involves acquiring spells and building out your character's power over time, which is the hook that should appeal to anyone who likes RPG progression layered onto action combat. The setting at least offers some atmospheric flavor - purgatory as a battlefield is a concept with real creative room. But flavor does not carry a game when the underlying systems feel underdeveloped. With only 24 Steam reviews sitting at 25% positive, the player base has spoken clearly, and those are not numbers that suggest hidden-gem territory. The multiplayer dependency is a significant practical problem. Games like this live and die by population, and a title that launched in Early Access in February 2015 with this review trajectory is not going to have healthy matchmaking in the current year. If you cannot reliably find opponents, the spell variety and leveling system become largely theoretical features. Build variety only matters if you can actually test your builds against other players at a consistent clip. From a writing and world standpoint, there is not much depth on offer. Purgatory as a setting has genuine narrative possibilities - questions about identity, damnation, what kind of person you were before you ended up here - but this is a multiplayer arena shooter, not a story RPG, so those threads are not pulled. That is a legitimate design choice, but it does mean the world feels more like wallpaper than something worth caring about. For the RPG-curious shooter fan, there are simply better options available at every price point. If you want spell-based combat with meaningful progression, the genre has moved forward considerably since 2015. This one reads like a prototype that never graduated into something fully realized, and the Early Access label - still attached years on - tells its own story. Skip it unless you have a very specific reason to be curious.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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