I wasn't expecting much depth since it's "a casual, hack and slash game", but it seems like it's designed for replay value that it fails to deliver.
There are 20 classes to unlock, each has only an attack, an active skill, and a passive skill. I've only unlocked 2 characters so I'm not sure if there's any difference in speed, health, offense and defense between them (those are the 4 stats).
The levels as Garret said are static. The replayability is supposed to come from maximizing your score, finding all the secret areas, and just trying an area again with a different character. They are short by design ("Fits easily into your schedule, designed to be played in 15 to 30 minute chunks"), and thorough RPG players can find all the secrets with no trouble (SPOILER WARNING: FIND THE WHITE ROCKS CUZ THEY'RE ILLUSIONARY THE END). The levels don't seem to get harder when you replay them, and since you are upgrading your characters (all of them at once), it just gets easier as you progress, giving little incentive to go back and try the old levels.
Progression is not so good. It's oversimplified and not well done. Stat upgrades apply to all characters, so it's not very satisfying and dilutes the differences between all the classes, in which they have put much of their work. You get a number of stat points depending on how well you cleared the level and can apply them to the 4 stats or the 2 skills. This would have been more satisfying if they have just let you slightly upgrade a single character in entirety with the point instead of bumping up every character's stat.
And yes, there is no inventory. You can hold only 3 powerups at a time, encouraging you to use them constantly which makes it a little more exciting. There are health and mana pickups, creatively called Health Pickup and Mana Pickup respectively. Upgrading your offense makes your weapon change, all Knights of the Round style. A couple of levels where kind of a bitch since I found almost no health pickups or regen powerups and every damn chest had a trap in it. For the most part, I breezed through it on my son's laptop's touchpad.
On the plus, the animations are better than DoP, as are the environments (there's contrast!) and hacking and slashing are a little more visceral. I can appreciate what it's trying to do, kind of an ARPG Weird Worlds where you play a couple of 20 minute levels then put it down.
Since this is the beta, I would humbly suggest:
Fix progression Either make it apply to a single character or use some scheme that doesn't make the game easier for all characters as you go.
Give some additional incentive to come back to the old levels Something better than "find the white rocks" (warning, spoiler preceded). Increase the difficulty on each replay if you find more secrets. Add some secrets that can only be found by certain classes or class types or by using a certain class's special attack. I assume it's too late to put in randomized levels and make this a casual graphical roguelike.
Misc bugs and unfinished business The characters and enemies skate into their attacks. The font is terrible. The frontpage UI isn't too pretty. If they're streamlining and "casualizing" the gameplay, they should clean up the interface to go along with that. Right now the in-game UI looks like a crippled DoP interface. Fix some of the conventional language if this is for the casual crowd; i.e. change primary/secondary skill, offense, defense, health, pickups to something gooey and shiny like attack, dodge, life, potions.
