Playtime: 3,5 hours (three short runs completed) **Intro** LOKCOAD is a roguelike "strategy" game that combines a simplified version of Darkest Dungeon's positional turn-based attacks with node travel like in Monster Train or Slay The Spire. You pick an area to defend and an overlord, and that's it - everything else is pre-determined. After the starting battle you can pick between 1-3 nodes where you buy/sell stuff, get an event or fight another battle. Battles take place in pre-generated dungeons where you place two traps and two groups of monsters to fight incoming heroes. **Review** The main problem with the game is lack of input. The only permanent upgrades are the skills you pick on the very limited skill tree. You don't get to pick different factions or anything that really lets you strategise. Dungeons are random so few options there. You can't even pick which monster to attack in many cases. There's no changing positions either. When placing units you can only try to match resistances with enemy attacks, and hope they don't scramble your formation. Your units will die quickly, sometimes even before you get to use them. You do get to upgrade units a bit, but there are no choices there and you need money and the right node. There's all kinds of different artifacts, attacks and status effects that are somewhat interesting to interact with, but getting to do that is randomly determined. **Conclusion** LoK is a game that makes you feel useless. Your carefully placed units get moved randomly. Your carefully selected unit dies before it even gets to act. You end up with a ton of some resources and a lack of others because of random nodes. And after an hour or so you lose all progression except for some XP that you get to spend on exciting skills like "+x% bonus to y". This had a lot of potential. Dungeon Keeper has always been a fun concept and the various units and such are nice. It's just overly random and kind of feels like it plays itself.

Got it for free and I still feel robbed... Rogue likes are quickly becoming synonymous with talent-less amateur hour developers covering up the fact they cant make a game by "Just make it a rogue like" Rogue likes CAN be good, this is NOT one of them, half a game, tedious by unbalanced difficulty with heroes getting cheap game breaking abilities, and you losing because you've either been conned by the awful difficulty design or you've stopped paying attention because you've fallen asleep, due to the game being so god damned boring as its YET another boring half baked rogue like. IF you really want a Darkest Dungeon like where you're the bad guys get Iratus, that is actually made by competent developers

Fun game only problem the launch intro screen is black with only audio. I see the skip button on the lower left side of the screen but no video. Other than that the game ia fun. Hopefully that issue is fixed in another update.

Also somewhat buggy. In one event I rewarded a monster who found a relic, and it instead asked me to drop a relic of mine even though I didn't keep it.

It's simple and fun. Not terribly complex but enough strategy for me to feel like I'm doing something. I love the variety of monsters you can hire. Combat mechanics are simple (place troops, place traps, fight) but engaging. Overall, pretty simple fun. Not super strategic or customizable, but definitely enough for me