Summary

• Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior struggles to balance the elements of combat and puzzle, resulting in clunky gameplay.
• The game lacks rewarding gameplay and exploration, with limited gear options and little incentive to replay levels.
• The combat fails to evolve over time, with shallow equipment options and increasingly tedious enemy encounters.

Sand Door Studios’ Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior has the gameplay of an action-adventure with only notional aspirations towards being a puzzler. This dynamic never fully coheres, though the game's method of incorporating prerecorded clones to solve increasingly larger isometric combat encounters is definitely one worth exploring. We’ve seen this concept in games before, and it immediately makes sense here, but Lysfanga loses luster as its arenas grow bogged down with ideas and restrictions, all while main character Imë stays primarily the same. It's a game which feels ultimately stifling, despite some interesting mechanics.

Imë is the armored Lysfanga of the New Kingdom Antala, empowered by the Goddess of Time and tasked with protecting her realm from a mysterious new threat. She sports familiar hack-and-slash action-RPG controls both in and out of combat, and can swing her blade into simple combos and repeatedly dash-dodge on a short cooldown, with combat relegated to specific zones throughout each level. After entering battle, players equip one active spell, a rune which affords a special effect, and an ultimate-like power which can be fired off after doling out enough damage.

Lysfanga’s visual aesthetic and presented mythology combines aspects of Mesoamerican art, Japanese yokai, and Persian armor, along with some more generic fantasy cues. The levels themselves are quite spacious, though the lack of a map or com in the HUD can make searching for hidden objects a chore, and it can be hard to reorient from a mid-level reload after spending time away from the game.

The Best Warrior To Have At Your Side: Yourself

One of the first battles in Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior feels most descriptive of the games’ central thesis, with the player stood in front of three lanes of static enemies, creatures known as "Raxes." From here, Imë can spend one time-restricted “life” vanquishing those in the left lane, another defeating the Raxes on the right, then use a third to finish off the last ones in the center and solve the encounter. On the screen, all three of these attempts eventually fire off simultaneously, with each path the player forges laid out onto the next.

The system introduces some fun but fairly obvious techniques using these subsequent ghosts or “remnants.” Players can beat down a tough enemy over multiple attempts and remnants, though it’s possible to mistakenly draw aggro, which then risks hustling targets out of the way of previously lethal damage at the hands of past remnants. Certain Raxes continuously heal and revive each other, so Imë will have to make sure they all go down at around the same time, and shielded enemies can block attacks from one remnant while another hits their vulnerable backside.

Whenever the player’s HP or combat timer hits zero, they start the fight over from the beginning, but can also trigger a tactically early “death” at will. There are only a few remnants to control at the start, but collecting shards in each level adds more and more backups to the reserves, to the point where we regularly employed up to ten in the longer battles near the end of the game.

Each encounter in Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior can be reactivated on the spot to score-chase toward a faster solve but, even with the given par completion time, there’s no punishment for failing to meet it…or, more importantly, any reward for besting it. Personal leaderboards and the opportunity to directly revisit past fights eventually unlocks as a bonus feature in the hub, but the game struggles to conjure any reason to replay them, other than to simply test player skill.

Attractive Levels, But There's Little Need To Explore

Screenshots of Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior may imply a wide map rich with exploration opportunities but, sadly, there isn’t much to see or seek out. Navigating off the beaten path can result in some lore, spherical “motes of magic” which act as currency, or a treasure chest; the latter contains either alternate outfit colors for Imë, an equippable rune (though these more impactful treasures are rarely if ever hidden out of the way), or a remnant shard.

As a result, the game frequently struggles to make its gameplay rewarding. After the hub area is unlocked, there are hints that Imë will eventually obtain gear crafted by a golem – these magical voiced automatons make up the majority of the game’s NPCs – but this is a total misdirect. Instead, a blacksmith golem is recruited much, much later in the story, who then serves as the primary way to spend those collectible motes of magic. What do they provide in return? Nothing but simple armor re-colors. It’s just a complete whiff of a late-stage unlock.

Lysfanga’s visual aesthetic and presented mythology combines aspects of Mesoamerican art, Japanese yokai, and Persian armor, along with some more generic fantasy cues.

At least the environments are nice to look at, even presented as somewhat familiarly generic to settings we've seen before. There are ruptured technology-infused temples, jungle-choked ruins, lots of elaborate stonework and yawning doorways to through. Characters and enemies are mostly captured in a simplistic style with minimal detail, but there are gorgeous character portraits for dialogue sequences, as well as painted art in menus and cutscene stills. The primarily zoomed-out perspective recalls the fantasy stylings of DOTA or League of Legends, and the environments do possess some distinct personality and color choices, but they remain mostly forgettable once the game shuts off.

The Combat Fails to Evolve Over Time

Even with an interesting concept to start with, Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior quickly decays, mostly due to its unsteady foundation and raw simplicity. We’ve witnessed the mechanic of incorporating clones of past attempts a few times before – like in 2013’s indie hit The Swapper – though the game’s ARPG controls presents this puzzle concept alongside combat which feels more akin to Hades, Curse of the Dead Gods, and other “jump-less” fixed-perspective action games.

However, many of those games are strengthened by their creative randomness, with a rotation of armaments, boons, and permanent upgrades to individualized builds. In Lysfanga, it’s entirely possible to beat the game with the equipment found in its first hour. Runes and spells are not built equally, the majority of them are hardly worth the swap, and they don’t scale or evolve over time. Aside from the three weapons which unlock at key points in the story, no equipment can be hot-swapped once combat has begun, so players always need to commit to a strict loadout for each fight. It’s easy enough to restart, but being unable to switch - or even combine the effects of more than one rune or spell - causes the action to feel inescapably shallow.

Furthermore, while Imë herself maintains a simple moveset, enemies grow more and more complicated, eventually extending the combat into tedium. By the third and final act, matches can include any of the following: color-coded monsters that can only be defeated by an opposite-color Imë, a shielded enemy which blocks dashes, aggressive red mobs who can barely be stun-locked, and lizards which teleport before dying, which often means a later remnant must track them down to deal the killing blow. It’s as if the enemy’s potential continues to expand while the players’ remains in traction.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

2.5/5

With no reward for besting completion times in Lysfanga, it’s easy enough to get just good enough to get by, with some extended encounters feeling like a chore to replay. Even after more remnants are unlocked by the end of the game, fights simply grow longer, not smarter. Ultimately, these upgrades fail to act as a coherent part of the game's integral combat puzzle and feel more like “free lives” to spend on brute-forcing a whiffed attempt.

Maybe it's that Lysfanga can't figure out how to square the circle between a combat game and a puzzle game. The game is never sufficiently challenged on either term, with the combat often clunky thanks to its combo commits and random AOE damage, and the puzzle aspects faint and fiddly, mostly concerned with restricting the already-limited gear selection or arbitrarily expanding enemy HP. Its worldbuilding remains quite interesting with some characterful style throughout, but Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior needs more satisfying goals and rewards to inspire its players onward to the next loop.

A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.