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
Read More: Best Roguelike Deckbuilder Procedural Generation Games.
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
Vivid Knight
This is a cute roguelite and auto-chess crossover. It’s very strategy-focused, and the difficulty makes it quite addictive, but some balance issues begin to detract from enjoyment once you’re deep in the game.
The Good
The core game play is roguelike, with your character exploring a maze and fighting monsters in turn-based auto-chess-esque combat. Each step consumes mana, a limited resource that refreshes on each floor, and your team begins taking damage when you run out of mana, forcing you to be efficient in your exploration.
– Real player with 62.5 hrs in game
Welcome to Auto Chess Darkest Dungeon, But Cute.
Jokes aside, this little game so far is one of the biggest surprises of the year for me. I do quite like the auto chess formula, but this game takes a quite unique spin on it which makes it really enjoyable for me.
I’ve seen a lot of reviews making comparisons to TFT and they’re not entirely wrong by drawing the said comparison.
That said, if you’re familiar with games like Auto Chess and TFT, there’s a few things this game does a little different.
– Real player with 32.4 hrs in game
Death: The Ascension
Certainly not for everyone, confusing at first, but has plenty of unique mechanics after you get past the learning curve
– Real player with 285.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Roguelike Deckbuilder Tabletop Games.
Update:
After a few ascensions, I have a better idea now how the mechanics and concepts fit into this creative new game developed by a very friendly and responsive indie-developer who has updated the game in quick response to suggestions on the discussion forum.
What is it?
I would describe Death: The Ascension as a card/puzzle life-choice simulator in which you aim to optimize your chances of a successful ascension by manipulating event probabilities. It has a deck-building type of mechanic in which you add cards to your deck, but the deck is not a draw-deck. Cards in your “deck” influence the chances of drawing cards into the player’s five card hand from an infinite pool. In other words, if you have only one card in your “deck”, you have a 100% chance of drawing five cards of that type. You are playing cards against Death as your opponent. Death has their own deck that has similar draw mechanics, but only draws one card per turn. Each turn one card from each deck is played with four possible events dictated by the player’s card with varying probabilities for each event known ahead of time.
– Real player with 83.4 hrs in game
Ratropolis
Call me a dues-paying member of ‘The Cult of the New’ when it comes to genre mash-ups like this. I can’t get enough of them. When Slay the Spire came out and combined roguelites and deck-builders I was hooked for 100+ hours and even back in my pre-COVID table-top gathering days, deckbuilders (Dominion/Thunderstone) were my favorite. The combination of control and RNG is so delicious and it’s exciting to see all of the ways developers are using this in either quality design or just experimenting with a gimmick.
– Real player with 90.9 hrs in game
A very tentative recommendation. In terms of my play-time, I’ve completed most content (including wave 120), so I feel I’ve enough experience with the game to give a moderately informed review.
In a nutshell, this game is a very polished game that reminds me of my days playing free games in the heyday of flash. Take a Newgrounds defense game and add a massive layer of professionalism and that’s this game. You play a defense game where your units, economy, and development are linked to a deck built throughout a session. It is hard. You will lose a lot. But there will be an “ah-hah!” moment where you understand what the game wants from you and suddenly it will be rare to lose.
– Real player with 87.3 hrs in game