Little Dungeon Stories
Starts off with a good concept but far too short and the events are random so sometimes useless events show up. There is also not much variability in the types of events. Character stats are random and unable to be customised except a one-off buff choice at the start. Boss rewards are not unique, just giving you a refill of resources.The game ends at floor 150 (if you get there that far with rng. I’ve played 7 hours and got there 4 or 5 times) and replayability is limited. I feel a bit disappointed as this is basically completed on release and not in early access where much of the content could be improved. Would need a moderate amount of improvement for me to recommend it.
– Real player with 8.4 hrs in game
The Little Dungeon Stories game process is entirely built on cards that entail a certain outcome. In fact, the game about the dungeon works - you get various situations, which are presented in the format of cards with inscriptions, and you can react to them with one of four options. Your actions have certain consequences that naturally affect the gaming process. If you are wrong and make the wrong decisions, the dungeon will sooner or later destroy you, after which you will have to start the game again. This is the whole essence of the game process - you have to pretend where a decision will lead you to, after which you will take it and move on. Sometimes questions are really complex and even logical thinking does not help, and sometimes developers provide quite a simple choice. That ’s the whole point of the game.
– Real player with 7.3 hrs in game
Card Quest
This game is like if FTL and a modern digital card game had a baby with most of the fun parts of both and none of the flaws.
You build your run from the start out of pieces of equipment, each of these pieces of equipment come with cards that make up your deck. For example, a sword comes with 3 sword hacks and 1 sword stab. This is how you build your deck. Unlike any other roguelike i’ve played, there are very little upgrades you can get within the middle of a run. In fact, there isn’t really any. Every single stage comes with a piece of equipment or upgrade to a piece of equipment, but these carry over run to run and mostly serve to give you more options. You don’t slowly build up a run as you play it, you build your run from the start and see how far you can get.
– Real player with 126.2 hrs in game
This is a tentative recommendation. I enjoyed the game, but not quite for the reasons I expected.
When I bought this game, I expected it to be something of a ‘deck-building’ game, when it’s really more of a resource-management game. That is to say I expected to theorycraft some overpowered decks by finding hidden synergies between card packs, but the way the game is designed causes most card packs to only work with a few others, and it’s fairly obvious which ones go together and which ones don’t.
– Real player with 106.3 hrs in game
Alina of the Arena
ABOUT
‘Alina of the Arena’ is a roguelite deckbuilding tactics game that combines elements from ‘Slay the Spire’ and ‘Into the Breach’.
Play as a gladiator that must fight for a bloodthirsty crowd to survive. With roguelite deckbuilding and hex-based tactics, players are no longer bound by simple attack and defense. Make use of dodges and knockbacks to stay alive!
#### FEATURES
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Dynamic Deckbuilding
Pick up dozens of cards, keep the ones you need, and craft a unique deck as you fight your way through randomized levels that present a different challenge each run!
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Hex-based Tactics
Unlike traditional deckbuilders that focus on attack and defense, the tactics element adds a dimension of positioning. Dupe your enemies into attacking each other, or use the terrain to gain an upper hand.
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Dual Equipment System
Carry equipment in both hands to enhance your cards! You can dual wield daggers for extra damage, go with a sword & shield combo for rounded performance, or wreak havoc with a two-handed weapon. Figure out the best combination for each fight!
Read More: Best Roguelike Deckbuilder Hex Grid Games.
For The Warp
As others have pointed out, this game has a lot of great features and has some compelling gameplay. However, there are three things that kill it for me because they lead too far down the path of heavy RNG.
- The shuffler makes no sense. The fact that you don’t discard cards and that every time you draw a hand that you are pulling from your entire deck is against the foundation of what a deck builder game is supposed to be. It has all of the other facets of how to build and manipulate your deck but the player should be drawing from a shuffled stack and continue to do such until the discard pile needs to be shuffled back in. I might have been less opposed to this if you could freely discard cards from your deck without needing to pay for it or have NPC’s want to buy them during events. But as it stands, it is far to easy to get a 18-20 card deck and that is far too much RNG when doing pool draws.
– Real player with 12.2 hrs in game
As others have stated, FTL meets slay the spire.
HUGE potential here. I think a few things need reworked.
1. Balance: jmzero’s review goes in depth.
2. No discard pile: this i feel is an odd design choice, since there’s no discard pile, all cards used immediately go back to the deck, so attaining any new card is a constant lower percentile of getting any card in your deck on every turn. So you may never see your new card in play…ever. Since the deck is shuffled every turn. This is poor design, you cant structure synergy here, as you are constantly threatened to draw the same cards over and over. This just feeds into the balance problem, of “just grab the most OP cards and scrap the rest”
– Real player with 9.3 hrs in game
Luck be a Landlord
The negative comments on this game talk about how the balance is very unfavorable to the player and in order to win, you have to be very lucky. These complaints are valid. But they leave out an important piece of context: This game is being very actively worked on!
The developer is constantly tweaking with the game balance. If you look over patch notes, you’ll see tons of changes to how individual items behave, new items being added, and entire new game systems being included. Over the months, these changes have been very favorable to the player. It used to be that you’d have to play many rounds before you had one where winning was even a possibility, but now most games are winnable as long as you have a decent strategy in mind.
– Real player with 225.0 hrs in game
I LOVE the concept and the game is good but it could be better. Which is about right for an early access game.
The biggest issue is replayability. For a ‘rougelike’ that is a big deal and this game has limited replayability. Every run begins to feel pretty samey after you’ve pulled off a handful of different synergies. So far the only efforts made to address this have been adding more symbols and a handful of items. While this adds replayability it is a limited option. Every new symbol and item added makes it harder to find things that go together which lowers the fun and viability of the game. Having 100 new synergies doesn’t make the game more replayable if you can never actually get the pieces together to do any of them.
– Real player with 126.9 hrs in game
Tower Tactics: Liberation
It’s a mix of a Tower Defense and a Deckbuilder Roguelike.
Whats’s there not to like?
Especially because the Dev is very responsive and listens to feedback
After finishing the first Deck in Ascension 20 just now. I can say a bit more about the game.
There are 9 starting decks you unlock over time with your level, each with other starting cards and bonuses.
At first the game felt really hard, after getting used to the mechanics it became a bit better, but still was on the harder side.
Dev said he will adjust the difficulty to make it a bit easier.
– Real player with 50.5 hrs in game
Edit: Game is still good 20 hours in.
I would highly recommend getting this game before it releases. This game is functionally complete. Obviously there is room for improvement (more variety of content) but you can complete a run (3 maps + Boss), there is meta progression, including 8 slots you unlock over time which you slot passive abilities you find or create. Which are a little bit basic like increased attack speed or range or increased currency gain. Also there are many starter packages that change how your run starts which are tied to level progression to keep things fresh.
– Real player with 24.8 hrs in game
Crown Uncrown: 1D Tactics
Win a run and your party gets Crowned, becoming the BOSSFIGHT for your next run while keeping all its items!
Crown Uncrown is an approachable turn-based tactics roguelike with minimal complexity and lots of unique items which interact in interesting ways.
Defeat enemies in a series of highly tactical and positional combat to seize the Crowns.
Each run is short and unique—perfect for sneaking in a run or two even when you’re busy!
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Adapt on the fly by tossing an item to an ally!
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(Sometimes it’s also useful to just lob a bomb toward your enemies.)
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Enemies are equipped randomly from the same item pool as you, and their loot is a great source for equipping your party.
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Beware though, enemies grow stronger too as you unlock more powerful items!
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Because the enemy AI adapts dynamically to its random items, it often makes surprising moves!
Features
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1-dimensional battlefields
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Cute 1-bit pixel art
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100+ unique items
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Unlimited undos if you’ve made a mistake
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No character classes or stats (Everything is item-based!)
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Alternate color palettes
Dark Edges
Get ready to roll in this dice-packed rogue-lite single-player strategy game! Collect a unique set of dice and discover powerful artifacts to protect your village from ghastly monsters!
Another Way to Die:
You’ll come across hundreds of faces that can be inserted into your dice. Select the faces that go well together to gain an edge against your foes!
Against the Odds:
Every wave will feature different kinds of enemies, dice faces, companions, and even bosses! You’ll also come across a slab of artifacts, traps, and spells - everything you’ll need to weaken your enemies before the battle arises.
Take Me Down to a Pair Of Dice City:
All sorts of travelers will visit the village throughout the game and settle in, later helping in your tireless defense.
In Dark Edges you’ll find:
Various characters with unique abilities and die faces to choose from;
200+ dice faces
100+ artifacts
50+ unique enemies
50+ secret events
20+ companions
30+ magic spells
40+ kinds of traps
The game will also feature an endless wave mode, in which monsters will attack your village without taking a breather.
Corpoct
The advertisement videos shows gameplay that isn’t consistent with the actual choices/options/theme of the game. Buyer beware. Other than that, it’s a simplistic wanna-be “FTL”, but its not. It could be good for small children who just barely know how to read. In fact, it should come with an expected player age of 7 years old. This isn’t insult or malice, I just think that the target audience should be an upfront aspect shown to the buyer.
– Real player with 18.5 hrs in game
This is a neat game. It combines some travel elements of FTL with combat similar to a pared-down Gratuitous Space Battles. There’s some resource management, cardplay to influence battles, and satisfying meta-progression. It’s worth checking out
– Real player with 9.3 hrs in game
Staff Only
I really begin to love this game. In the beginning I thought “Well, game mechanics somewhat like ‘night cities’, fun, but not too hard to win” but man what a difference it makes, if you add rules which add/remove boni and mali to certain cells. For 10 bucks a must have in my opinion.
– Real player with 10.0 hrs in game
Great game so far, cant wait to see what it develops into
– Real player with 8.7 hrs in game