Taken for a Quickie | City of Brass

---

A roguelike Arabian Nights adventure from the former BioShock developers at Uppercut Games, City of Brass finds itself on the receiving end of our latest Quickie.

---

by Sam Sant

---

@SlamShotSam

---

Developer: Uppercut
Games
Publisher: Uppercut
Games
​Platforms: Xbox One,
PS4, PC
​Players: 1

---

Arabian Nights, eh? Such an underutilised setting nowadays!

It really is! Especially considering the rich, established groundwork. City of Brass fills the Prince of Persia-shaped void in your library, even if its procedurally generated levels don’t quite match up to their handcrafted equivalents (as you might expect).

Is there permadeath? Being the other roguelike staple and all...

There is, in addition to other trappings like a Spelunky-style timer to keep you moving and ensure that you don’t lose too significant a time investment on any failed run. There are a few persistent forms of progression that further take the edge off being banished back to the beginning, but, if that’s something you’d like to avoid in general, the Burdens & Blessings system allows you to fine tune the level of difficulty to your exact liking.

So, what are we up against? Am I going to need those Blessings?

City of Brass is just as challenging as most of its roguelike brethren, largely due to the fact you’ll face equal resistance from trap-riddled environments and the varied swathes of enemies that lurk within them.

Yikes. How d’ya combat those foes?

With careful employment of your dual-wielded sword and whip, the latter having a good reach than can be used to trip, blind and disarm enemies with lashes to the relevant extremities, which presents opportunity to close the gap and use the former to deliver weighty melee blows.

Alternatively, you could utilise throwable items within the environment or manipulate enemies into triggering traps with the push and pull abilities. There’s really a lot at your disposal, making experimenting to discover useful combos a tactical highlight.

That sounds great, but what about the systems surrounding combat?

Exploring involves some light platforming and plenty of pilfering, as you grab artefacts used to purchase upgrades and services that’ll (hopefully) help you eke closer to making it out of the titular city alive. Initially there’s something slightly cumbersome about the controls on console, especially in comparison to the far more fluid PC version (which also looks noticeably sharper than even the Xbox One X build), but some options menu tinkering and time to adjust should set you straight.

Is it something you’d recommend, then?

Provided you’re willing to spend a little time grappling with those initial control gripes on console, absolutely. City of Brass has an opulent aesthetic and satisfying mechanics that’ll keep you coming back, always met with an engaging new challenge to surmount.