Quick Intro: Given the recent review controversies, I feel compelled to begin this review with a quick explanation of how I view things. For the score, I am judging the game in terms of how much I would recommend it to other players. That does NOT mean that I won't bring up other issues or thoughts that occur to me, even if they have no effect on playability. To me, a 3 is about average. A 2 is playable, but flawed. A 1 has near zero redeemable quality. A 4 is a great game, and a 5 is a must play.

Disclaimer: I have played several of Craze's other games but haven't taken the time to review them. I've found that they share a lot of their same pros/cons. They will likely be mentioned a few times in this review. Comparison to other Craze titles was NOT a consideration for the numerical score.

Aesthetics: 2/5
Edifice is graphically simple and relies mostly on the rtp, and edited resources meant to compliment the rtp. The maps are all competent, but none of them are particularly interesting. The characters are nicely animated, but their lack of unique design (being rtp characters and all) hurts them. A handful of characters even looked very similar and I kept on getting them confused in the menu.

Enemy characters are of an odd cartooney style that stands out. Doesn't lead to great graphical cohesiveness. Some bosses are also extremely large and take up too much of the screen.

Musical choices are good, but not particularly memorable. I was never displeased with the sound.

Plot, Environment, and Atmosphere: 1/5
Edifice is a roguelike. These are usually light on plot and don't focus on a linear campaign. I get that. It's not my favorite, but I can't punish Craze for that. However, what I did find is that the atmosphere led to be desired overall. A roguelike should include few cutscenes and little plot but should still present a certain atmosphere. Character banter could have helped - as it did with Demon Tower - but here the banter was not enjoyable, oftentimes confusing, and added very little to the game. Few characters had noteworthy personalities, that I could tell, and several never said a peep in the few hours that I played.

The nature of the changing maps and changing locations also hurt the atmosphere a lot. None of the maps that I saw offered a coherent sense of atmosphere beyond "Generic RPG Dungeon Type X"

Gameplay: 2/5
Of course, this is the category that makes or breaks a roguelike. To me, the mistakes that Craze made here are mistakes that constantly show up in Craze's games. If you've really really liked the gameplay of his other endeavors, you will likely have a better time than I did.

First, a quick intro: Edifice gives you 15 characters with 2500 HP, a handful of skills, and tells you to survive through X many floors without any healing. It sounded great, but it went downhill quickly.

I had several problems from a gameplay angle. For one, the characters are too interchangeable and forgettable. The one time (I'll get back to this) I had a death occur, I was completely and thouroughly routed. I never needed to switch characters. Once you start getting XP, most characters start to resemble each other and fall into only a handful of categories. You can pick any six characters and survive and only a handful (the witch, the arcanist) have a truely unique battlestyle (single-target devastating damage, and health-based magic, respectively) It left me feeling like my other 13 characters were all just standins and I really would have preferred having fewer characters with more meaningful choices between them.

As far skills went, not only were too many skills available to too many characters, tons were useless. There were several status effects I saw no need for (Sleep, Stun and Confuse are really all you need) Stat buffs and debuffs didn't seem to have much of an effect overall and were totally unnecessary. Too many skills did too many things and it left me with all sorts of moments where I'm shaking my head "Why?" I don't really know why every skill needs to set multiple status effects and have a ton of potential effects that never work out. Chance is, I'm picking the ability for its primary purpose. If I really want to silence a foe, I'm gonna cast a field silence ability, not an HP siphoning ability. Some skills are much too powerful or too useful. Tundra and Neuroshock come to mind as routing everything in sight.

Difficulty was incredibly uneven. I rarely took damage because between one casting of Neuroshock at the beginning of the battle, and castings of Tundra whenever it came up (I always tried to have two characters with it learned in my party) no enemy ever got to take action once my party got its first turn. This includes bosses. The huge damage boost from breaking sleep also means that if you get a boss to sleep and then hit them with a charged attack of their weak element, you might kill them in one or two hits. I beat several bosses, including the Czarina, without taking a single hit through status effects.

But then when I reached the last floor of my run, I hit a boss who could hit over 1000HP on my characters (and this was my second try, so I had a party designed to have high resistance to his attacks). He even took out one of my characters with a 2100HP critical hit. And he healed himself. And status effects rarely touched him and he cleared them all. Not only did none of my usual tactics work, but he cleared the floor with my party in a few attacks. It was a HUGE spike in difficulty and felt incredibly cheap.

A couple extra notes:
- I never found a way of finding enemy weaknesses other than casting spells at random and noticing. This SUCKS given the sheer number of enemies and the sheer number of characters and spells you have
- There does not seem to be a huge amount of rhyme or reason to the elements that enemies are weak to, or to what they use, or that of my party members. Combine that with the inability to change my characters on the fly, and everybody's weaknesses and strengths are just a pain in my rear. I never know who not to include. I never even remember who to include, exclude, or protect. FURTHERMORE, the most damaging attacks are all ones that hit my entire party. The only way I could have truly protected my party member with weaknesses would have been to exclude them from the fight, but I had no way of knowing that I should until it was too late. This felt cheap. I would preferred a system where I had the opportunity to say "Ok, X is weak to Fire, but she deals Ice damage. The enemy deals fire bus is weak to ice. Do I want to risk including her?" to one where everything is a total crapshoot. Half the time the battles where my party was randomized were easier because I was somehow just as prepared for those as for the regular ones.
- Skills that do multiple things/hit multiple times were better handled in some of the author's other titles. Here, a lot of the combinations were nonsensical, or just had no synergy. Why do half of these abilities have these effects? Why should I care?

Stability and Polish: 2.5/5
I hit several troublesome bugs while playing. For one, my essences (equipment) had an odd habit of multiplying (I hear that has been fixed, but I have not seen a patch for this yet. I guess Version 2 will include this fix.) The game froze on me once. The battle system's scripts caused crashes on me 3 times. Not good in a game where your only current saves are quicksaves. Some of the help text makes no sense (are we sure the fault spells hit allies? They do not seem like something I would want to cast on my allies. I never bought any to try though). The fact that the system doesn't prevent repetition of bosses and similar floors seems to be more of an oversight than a gameplay element, but either way it really hinders the fun to encounter the same (easy) boss twice in a row.

Overall Score: 2/5
My overall judgment would be that this game has potential, but is currently very messy. Craze has too many things going on at once in this project, and they don't mesh as well as they did in some previous projects (see, for example, Demon Tower, Arian Wild or In Praise of Peace for better execution of some of Craze's ideas). The whole thing feels cheap in a random rather than difficult way, and lacks polish.

I do feel for Craze given the nature of the release (for those of you not following this game, he is leaving for a substantial period of time soon and wanted to release the game before he left) but I just don't feel like I could recommend it to anyone in its current except as a "Check this out. When he fixes the problems, it'll probably be pretty good." Some great ideas, but has execution problems. Try at your own risk; by the very nature of the game, your mileage may vary.