Posted on: January 20, 2023
FrogOfLegend
Verified ownerGames: 287 Reviews: 30
A roguelike pretending to be a TRPG
I was really looking forward to a tactical RPG experience, but what I got is a roguelike that is more interested in having the player grind over and over again while it kills you repeatedly. It's not a terrible game, but it's rather shallow. The story is basically 2 lines of dialogue. A tyrant took over and you need to kill them. There's some fun dialogues between characters, but they're far and few between. The visuals are pretty good, though. The pixel art is beautiful and flowing, but the stage maps are lacking any personality. They're all flat, square grids with some trees or rocks. Nothing really unique or interesting to look at. The mechanics is where the devs chose to focus their efforts. Enemies will all move and telegraph attacks at the start of the turn and you take all your actions to interupt, move or defeat the enemies before they attack. If your'e targeted and move you leave behind a 'shade', a shadow of your character that can still take damage. In the early stages your mostly evenly matched with the enemies, so performing well enough to take no damage a turn is really satisfying, but the game very quickly scales up the battles where you're outnumbered and enemies have area effects so avoiding the damage becomes nearly impossible. Also you can damage yourself by striking your own shades. On paper, this is a great idea. In execution, it proves frustrating. The devs seemed to have realized this because the game provides a 'guardians', buffs that prevent your characters from dying, but these are limited PER RUN and you can run out very quickly. And once you lose one charcter, the run is essentially a loss. See the trick is each enemy on the field will revive after each turn a set number of times. If you're facing 5 opponenents and they have 7 respawns, You're facing 5 enemies until you exhaust the 7 respawns. Once you die, you start all over. No restarting battles. If you're looking for something engaging, you won't find it here.
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