Fairly standard but fun and competent Deck Builder Roguelike of the Slay the Spire type. Rated Teen - Whimsical cartoonish art style, fairy tale backdrop, and light hearted writing but with not really child friendly - with ref about drinking, naughty nuns, and slavery. Nothing actually explicit and rarely serious. There's an overarching Campaign/Story mode with leveling and stats without premadeath that has the STS stages as nodes in a larger map. Plus a more standard roguelike run mode that uses a grid map instead of nodes. I didn't find it all that hard even without grinding after getting a handle of the cards and strategies. Overall enjoyable and very polished. Not sure if it's that replayable without future mods even with its "infinite mode". Various minor issues and notes- There's a number of balancing issues with the big one that it's not too hard to make infinite loops. One of the biggest sources of variety is held in consumable "relics" (called bling) that only last one stage but can be saved and stored. So you'll need to grind to get enough or just use strategy that doesn't depend on them. Some later bosses are kinda BS unless you have an OP loop/build which can trivialize them like everything else. Though I guess that's fairly inline with STS. No option to view upgraded forms of cards - which can sometimes differ greatly (ie. a one-time becoming reusable) Defense is kept between rounds by default. Luckily turtling isn't really recommended save a few builds/enemies. Mana economy is weird by default. Some heroes recharge only 1 per turn, some not at all. Mana cards are easy to come by and generally cheap. Food economy is mostly a nuisance. It only really matters if you spam commands (which can be powerful - one is to make all cards 0 cost for the turn).
You explore around a hex-grid map encountering loot, monsters, and the native. To fight or accomplish anything that doesn't use money, you'll need to roll special dice and use the symbols shown (ala elder sign). The gameplay is solid and addictive but takes a while to get used to, and even with the tutorial, they really are not holding your hand. Easy will likely take a couple tries and normal requires you to have a strategy laid out and prepped should any... accidents occur. It's like darkest dungeon but there's no way to hire higher lvled chars. The major bottleneck early and mid will be how to keep up your "sanity" (I feel that stamina or fatigue would have worked much better. This is NOT a horror game.) The easiest way is to master the combat system, kill all the wildlife and then bring a cook to eat it all. Plus the horns you gain from hunting are good trade items, can be carried over and don't take up space. The plot is very basic and fairly tongue in cheek of your rampant British Colonialism. The art and music are all fairly charming though can get repetitive. There are however, quite a few design choices that I do not like or feel they work out- They really should just have a glossary of all the possible combat combos. Turn on the auto combat helps but not enough. The "discovery" part of this is just a hindrance than insightful given how vital it is to most builds. Wound rate is way too high. Without a healer, you'll need ~2 medkits per battle. Resting should at least remove bleed. I really do not care for the initial trip cost. Sure, it makes trips more tactical and discourages inching forward. Still do not care for it. You should be able to peek at enemies to see how many/hp they have before attacking them.
It's what I'd call a "backpack" fighter where you place different items on a limited board to fight instead of select commands in a menu, or press a button to do x action. Except rather than squeezing in tetris shapes or merging, it combines it with a deckbuilder and has you pull dice to be used on a grid. Some are basic do X damage, gain X armor, but others react with the board - dices X steps away gain X power. Try out the demo on itch.io if you want to have a better idea of what's it like than my ramblings. It's (mostly) rather simple and intuitive to grasp but still makes you want to plan and optimize the grid each turn. So far it seems pretty good and polished for an early access (or even full release). Art, music, gameplay - all very nice and charming. I do have some suggestions/complaints, besides common issues like too little enemy variety, some artifacts being OP (and others mostly useless), minor bugs - The board can get a bit crowded with 2nd char. In general, spacing and readability can be improved. Max hand is confusing. I have no idea how it calculates it and why sometimes I can't use my draw ability. Needs more interesting ways to hinder/alter your board. Think traps or portals or enemy dice that attack yours. A bit too easy to find a killer combo and mostly just repeat that for most of the game save a few bosses (coughOrnstein and Smoughcough) that you need to be reactive to. I suppose this is true of many roguelikes and RPGs.
Rather than a typical turn-based RPG, this feels more like a tabletop RPG with tactical grid based combat, emphasis on positioning and low numbers aka Paper Mario (final boss has only ~40ish hp). That said, you mainly will want this for the gameplay. Though the graphics are colorful and detailed, the music, characters, plot, and general settings are all okay or rather standard. There's 25 missions with 5 being short puzzles, and a few being multi-part. On avg, prob took about 15-30 min each. In all, a fairly short game for RPGs esp at full price, but decent on sale. On normal, battles usually aren't too bad but completing with bonus objectives can be challenging. Most battles are either timed or have constant reinforcements that forces a mad scramble to complete the tasks. It encourages you to restart and try again knowing exactly where things will spawn and to minimize wasted movement. There's not a lot of damage synergy or weaknesses but it is still rather strategic in nature. For example, in the very first battle, you'll be surrounded by 4 enemies with only 3 heroes and no meaningful AOE/multi-target, and the bonus objective is to not take any damage. So how are you meant to get it? Well, the mission says to not take any DAMAGE rather than to not get hit. The melee has a guard ability that increases his armor. So just have him sit on one side and pick off the others with your range units. Some things that could be done to improve it - Show the enemies attack pattern and not just movement and range. Like "attack closest melee", "shoot weakest from as far as possible", "heal most damaged ally" Give longer warnings when more enemies will come and not just 1 turn ahead. Make the redo turn ability not one-time use. Or at least allow undo of combat and not just movement.
You control up to 4 hero units, exploring a dungeon and building towers in explored rooms to farm resources and fight enemies. Enemies don't spawn from a camp or base, but rather from "dark explored rooms" that you can kinda control by choosing which room to light up from a limited supply of dust. Quite a bit of this game is managing resources - deciding who to lvl, what to build, and how much to be saved for later. Not sure why so many people say it's a Tower Defense game. It is way more of a RTS with a dungeon exploration aspect (more of a Diablo like than a rogue like). They even copy the Starcraft enemy and unit sounds. (though they parody or reference lots of games throughout) The "enemy drops no dust bug" still seems to be present in the current version 1.1.5.1, and since they haven't updated it in over a year, prob to stay. That said, it is still beatable though harder on the higher floors where there's more rooms, less dust and you'll often need to fend of attacks from 2 or 3 directions. Overall, an enjoyable "one more try" high difficulty game brought down by some bugs like the one mentioned above. Took 10 attempts at easy before lowering it down to very easy, and still took 4 more attempts to beat. Various notes- Though it calls it easy, treat it as a hard new game+ difficulty - only to be challenged after you've completed a run or two on too easy. And even then, it's a meat grinder. Area Map appears if you zoom out. Often easier to play and control just using the map view, especially when you get more units and need to control multiple points on the map. The first hero on the list, Max, is VERY useful later on with his ability to gain more dust per room. Esp with the dust bug on GoG. Very recommended to have him at start and lvl to at least 10 and use him to open doors.
Simple resource collection mixed with basic turn-based RPG combat. Then using the resources from collecting and combat, create new monsters, tools, and complete collection quests. The base setup is very standard and simple in its execution. However, this is bogged down by various issues and annoyances - I experienced numerous crashes - it autosaves so usually not too bad, but when it happened in a boss dungeon, I had to redo it entirely. You configure controls by choosing from 3 sets of them, not configure each action. Actually only 2 as one seems to be a duplicate of the other. There is no fast travel (at least in the early game) but there are various times where you will need to go to other areas to collect the specific resource to pass a quest or checkpoint. Mob battles are numerous and quickly get tedious due to both the grinding required and also when you quickly outlevel the mobs before you finish the area. You can dodge them as they appear on the map and chase you to fight, but not enough to "fix" the annoyance. Resource gathering is simple, tedious, cannot really be improved (besides being able to gather different items) and you will need a LOT of them especially early game where you need to create your team. The story, music, art, from what I encountered, were okay, but not enough to keep me to keep playing what is at best a standard, kinda boring game.
You know those games where you summon units from the left and they slowly move to the right to fight the enemy's base who does the same thing? This is like a card and turn based version of that, though thankfully more compact and faster but otherwise having many of the same gameplay, strategy, pros and cons. Note that while there is a "real time" play option, I found the pause + next turn to be so much better for both strategy, and understanding how the units interacted. It took about 10 plays to get through the base game(s) with the first one taking maybe 15 minutes but last one clocking over an hour. Overall, an interesting game that is well worth the low cost. Some gripes about the game- It eases you in by starting off with very basic units, both for you and the enemy, but with each win, becomes progressively more varied and difficult. However, while the enemies automatically become more advanced, you need to grind mid bosses to unlock your full roster. Additionally, the game tries to scale with earlier battles having less units/waves, it doesn't scale very well for all of the enemy types. Some are way harder/easier depending on when you fight them. And unfortunately, the "rescue your units" mission is one of them. Which is salt on your wounds as this means you just lost beforehand. Despite you being a lich and fighting the humans, the story is pretty simple and not that interesting. The roles could be reversed with minimal changes.
Probably too old for some of those reading this, but this is very reminiscent of a certain age of flash games of Kongregate or Armored Games during ~2010 in both style, gameplay, and polish. The one I recall the closest would be Dungelot which upon checking wiki for its spelling actually references this game and vise versa. So not exactly original material even back then. It actually has a decent bit more strategy than some reviewers suggest (Dungelot was a lot simplier), but still meant to be very easy to pick up and play through. That said, most times you'll be just dual wielding max str (save to meet req. for valuable equips) with +hit equips and using skills whenever you can. Still a generally decent game but hasn't aged too well or badly. However, it also has some really odd decisions that set it back. Gold is kept exactly as is in the dungeon and exiting, making using gold unattractive as it'll slow down your meta progression. It has most of its tutorial... on random tiles as you progress through the dungeon. Some of which useful even at the beginning. Similar to hiding valuable info on loading screens but arguably worse. Right click isn't as universal as it should be, with many tiles not having it and some things are triggered by it. Full heal on lvl up is a staple but isn't too fitting for survival games and unlike desktop, you can't easily plan for it. Many things are really really expensive and while you get a lot more gold later on, these items and unlocks should probably hide themselves until you are comfortable seeing their prices.
Gameplay wise, it is basically the same as Slay the Spire besides the fact you control 3 toons that share a common deck (of 5 types) but have their own stats. The main difference is that the game structure around it is more... mobile rpg like? You unlock cards mainly by a gacha spin rather than just achievements using ingame currency you gain from playing. There's a daily bonus, and in the mobile version, you can purchase rare currency (that you can grind slowly) There's a story which I agree is fairly disgaea like in both the plot and style with rpgmaker-like maps. Characters gain stats with EXP from the dungeon (reset per run), and you can grind to gain boosts per deck to make things easier (you can turn these off in a special option but note this makes the game much harder) Balance wise, it is much easier once you unlock some of the more useful cards in each deck. Probably most will win most of their runs and only a couple end or post game bosses need any specific strategies. There's quite a few dungeons (12 base + 2 post, with 10 difficulty each), but most are pretty similar. You'll play around 30-40 in the story, each roughly taking 30-1hr. Very much designed to be played in spurts. Overall, it is a basic and fairly relaxed take on a Deck Builder Roguelike, that can be pretty fairly described as Disgaea rpgmaker Slay the Spire. 3* for the base and +.5 for being polished, competent with no major bugs besides one where it sometimes doesn't close properly and you need to force close it.
Plays about what you expect for a pinball zombie defense game. However, like the title hints - the Zombie part is before the pinball. It is fairly "light" in the pinball aspects with gutter balls not being the main penalty, pretty smallish "tables", and precision shots only really needed for some treasures and puzzles. The primary focus is to kill zombies before they reach the bottom with you juggling launching 4 skills and an ult for damage and crowd control, plus of course the ball itself. Overall I'd give it a 3.5 with an enjoyable enough gameplay and decent selection of skills and characters, with the story being barely there and the sound being okay at best. Each run lasts about 20 battles which is longer than I expected, and there isn't that much monster variety besides the bosses. Not something I care to replay to master rather than to just see and unlock all the skills and characters. Of which there is a LOT of (100+) which is both good to prevent you from being overwhelmed, but also kind of annoying knowing you won't see a lot of things until a dozen or so runs in. Each run unlocks like 10-20 so sometimes you won't even know what you unlocked.
