It's funny, at first, when I was looking at whether to buy this game, it looked like a Rogue-like and I've been having a ton of fun with those. Many of the ones I've played have had a more whimsical tone (except for FTL), so I thought it'd be fun to play one with a darker, Lovecraftian tone. But then I finally played the game and it turns out to be a lot more like XCOM - although one could certainly ascribe certain Rogue-like elements to the newer XCOM games - the perma-death, the randomness of your soldiers. Like XCOM you also have the ability to slowly level up your base, which allows you to better finesse your unit population. The difference from XCOM is that instead of a 3D masterpiece, it's a vector-animation sidescroller. It's also, of course, heavily influenced by fantasy and D&D. This brings me to the one thing that I found difficult, but not enough to remove a star - there's a LOT of stat acronyms that don't mean anything to me and make it harder to understand what I should expect from any given attack. Part of the reason that I didn't remove any stars for that is because there's a glossary included. Overall, I really love the creativity they're bringing to this space - we don't need yet another Spelunky or FTL clone. We need new and creative games out there! I don't expect I'll ever beat this game - it looks like a lot of the negative reviews have to do with that. But why should everyone get to see an ending to a game? Maybe these reviews are by younger guys who never played Nintendo-Hard games? I never beat any of the Nintendo Era games (while I beat everything from the N64 onward). If you're on the fence, wait until it's on sale. It seems that Steam, GOG, and Humble Bundle are now having year-round sales. At $5 who cares if y ou only play the game for an hour - that's still a better deal than going to the movies.
