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.
This is a tactical grid based game with STS roguelike elements that has decent gameplay, good music, nice but not that catchy art style, and some basic fluff/worldbuilding but not something you would get into for the story or world. There are however a number of mostly minor shortcomings - some with the game, some with the system itself. Game UI esp. picking direction is not the best. It would have been much worse without the undo last. Main "resource" is your cards/summons, so frequently games go longer than needed to hope and catch you at low resources, where you really need to be tactical. Though there is a lot of synergy, it is often fairly simple and/or not as important as the game often encourages you to be fairly aggressive and to simply buff up your individual units. It can get repetitive with the runs not varying that much and taking on the long side to complete. Still I would consider this a decent game and recommended to those that like tactical RPGs or turn based roguelikes.
The combat is somewhat dated and not as responsive as you want in an ARPG, but functional enough. The traversing and discovery is fairly original and works nicely as a card to video game adaption. However, the balance is not great and difficulty of the cards seems to be drawn at random. So you might encounter a double boss on the first floor before you get a chance to get better gear. And unlike some roguelikes that have out of level encounters, you often can't really escape or use limited resources to deal with them. There's some other annoyances like how the initial card shuffling cannot be skipped The final boss is also bs even on easy difficulty. There's a reason why boss rushes tend to be their own separate path. Overall, still decent ideas and worthwhile to play, but might not want to finish to continue playing.
It's a neat take on the roguelike FTL/STS. However, there are a number of balance and feature issues that keep it from being great. Map/fuel is confusing to navigate/understand. NOTE YOU DO NOT USE FUEL TO GO DOWN BLUE PATHS. However, the fact that you can backtrack from side paths isn't really told. I'd suggest to allow full teleport to already visited nodes and make the blue paths bolder and clearer. The fuel icon when you hover over a side node is also very missable. Cooldown pile needs to be made more clear. This is a crucial difference in how it's played compared to other deckbuilders but it barely got any attention in the tutorial. Keep clicking on the deck piles while you play a few turns and some cards like Autoshield become way less random. The way different factions/reputation works is interesting but very limited chances to change it. Mostly dumb ways to make people hate you for very little gain. You shouldn't discover/reveal node info for nodes you can't get to anymore. FTL made it so quests always appeared after the node you found it and it allows full backtracking. Very limited deckbuilding. Mostly HAVE to skip and limited replacement possibilities. I know it's due to the cooldown mechanics, but means you likely built your deck by the end of the first map and unlikely change it until you get a new module or keep skipping cards til you get that one card you need. I know high level/difficulty deckbuilders also have this issue, but this is enforced on all play styles. Unbalanced weapons/ships. Some I beat the 2nd boss first try, some not even close to winning. Swapping reactor power (ALL POWER TO SHIELDS) should probably have more things to do. It may seem very critical but actually very situational and I've forgot to use it on more than one occasion. Might allow res to be swapped before you play any cards? Or make capacity expansion cheaper/allow overloading it?
Pretty much everything I've said for the first applies to the sequel. Both pro and cons. The main difference is that there's a lot more things now. More unlockables/progression, generally longer runs, more variation, etc. I'd suggest you first try the first one if you haven't played either - its cheaper and easier to pickup. And afterwards, if your main complaint was the lack of things, or you just want more of it - go ahead with the sequel. Some smaller changes - Extra Gear slots are behind a building rather than from random upgrades. Get this first. Most of the unlocks are small bonuses but this is almost required. Many bosses/mid-bosses constantly summon units. Being too slow or defensive can easily get you swarmed or trapped. Being too glass cannon is also risky as summons can appear and attack the same turn. I've had some devices STILL experience the bug where you can't progress or end turn even after the patch. It's tougher than the first in the beginning and at the end but still easy for roguelikes. It does NOT need to be maxed out to win (I won on my 2nd or 3rd run). Might still feel grindy to go through all the ranks though.
