Bravery and Greed was provided by Team17 for review. Thank you!
Get ready for a vibrant co-op Beat 'em Up with roguelike elements weaved in! Bravery and Greed will start you off by picking one of the 4 unique classes, each with their own set of moves and skills, and go through the land killing enemies and taking their gold. Throughout the stages, you’ll find yourself augmenting your skills, getting new gear, and upgrading your abilities through shrines you find, becoming more and more powerful the more you play.
Bravery and Greed is a game I really enjoyed playing, even though there were a couple gripes I had with it. It has beautiful, vibrant visuals and pixel graphics, which work so well together here. The combat feels unique from each class and I enjoy the roguelite systems. I think it is unique that it is split into the skillsets Chaos, Life, Order, and Darkness and you get new abilities depending on which skillset you choose. The gold you get in the game goes into a progress bar to unlock permanent item unlocks and abilities with them now appearing in the world.
There are also unique game modes in both PVE and PVP. PVE gives you the Adventure mode, where you go to each stage and fight through, sometimes solving puzzles, and the Horde mode, where you fill fight leagues of enemies, getting new gear and upgrades as you go. PVP has free for all and team modes, which I think is quite unique for a game like this. Personally, I love the Horde mode, but Adventure mode is pretty great too.
While I enjoy most of the characters combat, the mage one feels a bit off. The special attack he has creates an entity that can attack enemies, which seems cool, but you can't move while the entity is attacking. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if you could control the summoned ally a bit more, but the only way it moves is by attacking. I also wish there was another permanent buff or persistent system that goes between runs. It would be cool to have a permanent skill tree to upgrade the classes or gold to be used to buy permanent gear or stat boosts. Each run felt within its own world, which is fine, but I would have liked to see more.
I had a good time with Bravery and Greed regardless and, luckily, the game runs extremely well on the Steam Deck without any changes necessary!
Right out-of-the-box, Bravery and Greed runs at a flawless 60 FPS with an average 9.5W battery drain, almost never breaking 10W! This will get around 3.5-4 hours of batter with no issues whatsoever.
There were no visual bugs and controls felt fantastic. The game also supports the 1280x800 resolution, so we get the entire screen's worth of game! But, there is one glaring issue I wanted to discuss.
One of the big features of this game is the co-op play, which is a lot of fun when it works, but there are some issues with that on the Steam Deck. Testing this with Cryobyte33, we could not manage to connect to each other once Steam Deck to Steam Deck. Every time we tried, we would be booted out or the game would freeze and crash.
We also tried PC to Steam Deck and it did work a little better when he hosted on his Deck and I joined him, but unfortunately, it crashed his game as soon as we started loading into a stage. We are really far away from each other, so it could have been distance, but I would be surprised if that was the issue. Luckily, I do enjoy playing the game solo and still found the fun, but going in looking for a new co-op game might be an issue on the Deck.
Overall, Bravery and Greed is a really fun game. I loved the visuals, vibrant ones will always get me, and the gameplay felt fun with some enjoyable roguelite elements. The mage character's moveset feels a bit lacking, and it would be nice to have some more permanent progression, but I had a fun time with the combat mechanics in general. While co-op would be fantastic to have working, the game does run well on the Steam Deck without any issues and since I did enjoy solo play, I would still say it is worth trying out.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Bravery and Greed is an enjoyable and vibrant 2D Beat 'em Up that has some light roguelite elements. And thankfully, there is going to be no problem with performance on the Steam Deck, but co-op has some issues connecting.
