Arguably one of the best things about late DLC is that the experience isn’t limited to the content you buy. It’s a chance to reevaluate the original experience, get an idea of how things have progressed, and, in a lot of cases, see a wide variety of improvements. This wasn’t really needed for Moonlighter, it actually launched in a solid package, making the new dungeon, enemies, and weapons more exciting. However, given the original quality, is Moonlighter: Between Dimensions a needed expansion or a pointless mess?
Taking place after the events of the base game, Moonlighter: Between Dimensions starts with a weird portal appearing and you decide to explore it. The hope is you can figure out what the problem is, correct it and bring things back to normal, but to do so, you need to amass far more power than ever before.
At first, the expansion seems rather intimidating. Enemies feel absurdly powerful, a fact that is only furthered by how little damage you actually do. The logical assumption is, in addition to being a more challenging expansion, you’re out of practice and as a result, are playing poorly. However, a lot of it has to do with the insane stat increase that occurs in the new dungeon.
Initially, I started with the most powerful glove weapon, something I fully leveled, making it one of the most powerful weapons in the base game. This gives you just under 500 attacks, yet DLC weapons start at 620 attacks. While an increase of 120 attack is considerable, that is over 20 percent, it falls in line with how weapons progressed originally. The issue isn’t that your attack increases by 120, it’s that a maxed-out DLC weapon of the same type increases your attack by over 4,700. Not only are you nine times more powerful than the previous maximum, but all your stats also get a massive boost to the point where there is devastating power creep.
In terms of armor, you can go from a max of around 1,250 and negative 20 speed to an unfathomable amount that exceeds 8,000 and increases your shield stat by 30. Since Moonlighter: Between Dimensions is as much about running your shop as dungeon crawling, previous upgrades were balanced by having steep costs associated with them. Before the aforementioned glove started at 1,000 gold for the base model, with each level bringing it up considerably, ultimately ending with the last weapon, not even including upgrades is 512,000. For the initial DLC weapon, the one that beats the best of the base game, you’re looking at 456,000, though the fifth level one is only 656,000, despite giving roughly 3,000 more power.
Unfortunately, the same problems make their way into the shop. Based on guides written about version 1.6, the best items to sell, not including weapons/armor, came from the fourth dungeon’s boss or from the rarest chest in that dungeon. Each of those items sold for roughly 44,000, compared to the next highest being 17,000, making them considerably more valuable. While very few DLC items match or exceed that price, it’s fairly easy to do a general dungeon run and walk away with 2 or 3 million in resources. It trivializes the steep costs, makes doing lower dungeons pointless, and outside of rare drops like broken weapons, I could easily buy most of the resources needed for anything I could possibly want to do.
In a lot of ways, this is a real shame, as the expansion itself is rather interesting. There are a handful of new bosses, weapons with fun mechanics, it’s a shame that you can inadvertently become too powerful. With a maxed-out weapon and mid-tier DLC armor, it made much of the new expansion pointless.
No point in using the neat trick weapons if they’re weaker than your base weapon and require health to use the gimmick. Hard to fearsome of the bosses that are so weak you can actually kill them before they even move. And, even in the case of the final boss, I tanked most of its attacks and only had to use three HP Potion VIII before I defeated both of its forms.
Moonlighter: Between Dimensions Review – Verdict
For the most part, that is what Moonlighter: Between Dimensions ultimately feels like. There are new enemies, locations, bosses, and items, yet very little matters. Focusing on specific, relatively common, drops can yield millions in cash and the rest relies on how powerful you want to become. Given I achieved enough power to make most of the challenge non-existent in roughly five hours, it makes this expansion feel rather rough. You really need to decide how powerful you actually want to be, because you do need some of this power to make the expansion fun, there just isn’t much of a need for everything unless you case after it, which might be appealing for some but left a lot to be desired.
[Editor’s Note: Moonlighter: Between Dimensions was reviewed on PS4 platform. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]
