Sublimation is a top-down, twin-stick shooter in which you defend a precious crystal against waves of aggressive monsters. Sublimation boasts extremely diverse and intuitive, emergent combat systems. The game play has multiple layers of complexity, and you may upgrade your preferred methods of combat as you progress to increasingly challenging waves. With 5 difficulty settings, randomly generated enemy types, multiple enemy ranks, 4 core magic types, 6 additional emergent types, area-of-effect spells, a counter-attack system with over 20 unique counter-attack spells, mid-air projectile manipulation, and many methods of combining the magics available to you... I hope that you are engaged long enough to discover them all.
- Along the top you can see that we are currently using element 4 (Air Magic), out of 4 available magical elements. Each of these elements can mutate when they touch a different element into the other 6 elements (e.g. water + air = frost magic), or with itself to enhance it's power (e.g. water + water = powerful water).
- Each distinctly different enemy here has a massively different approach to combat, to keep you on your toes.
- Here you can also see the crystal is partially damaged, and it's tint has changed to yellow, as well as that of the environment and foliage, to rapidly portray it's health state.
- Enemy colours represent their element "type", and their detail colours represent their "rank", e.g. here there are fire and earth enemies (red and brown main colour), and all are of rank 2 (yellow detail colour).
- Dealing killing blows with any of the combat types, for example projectiles, allows you to upgrade your proficiency with that type via the upgrades menu to unlock advanced magic techniques, as highlighted at the bottom.
- You can see fire and water spells overlapping to create an area of smoke in the bottom right, another emergent element type.
- Finally, this screenshot also shows three enemies that have been "frozen" by one of the two available frost counter attacks (one offensive, and one defensive).