Abalon: Roguelike Tactics CCG

I've never reviewed this beauty? Seems like an oversight. What we've got here is a lovely little top down turn based strategy game. The rules are pretty straightforward but the overall gameplay is very satisfying. It does a good job of balancing short term and long term rewards as well as having a fair variety of builds that'll work. There's a good effort to add in some weirder powers over the standard ones and a lot of enemies have difference-in-kind type effects that stop you approaching every encounter in the same way. There's also some neat variety in abiliteis you can obtain, all of the standard "I have big armour" or "I do fire spells and they're cheaper and more damaging" that you'd expect are there but space is made for some more out there effects too. Things like a card to change your main character to someone else on the battlefield so you can lose them or a follower that can shapeshift into anything it can see and get that statline. Each campaign takes a couple of hours to play, there are 20 heroes and it'll wind up taking 4-5ish campaigns to hit max level (including xp bonus items you'll get for winning stuff) so that works out to quite a lot of gameplay. There's also a descent mode which ups the difficulty and eventually has an optional boss that I've not even started on yet. I've not got many negative points to go alongside the array of positive ones, but if I've got a gripe with the game it's that starting off each hero feels pretty darn slow. A lot of things that make them distinctive or permit distinctive builds are gated behind xp so spending. It takes 40 hours to do one adventure with each hero, assuming you never lose, so getting them all above first level is a chore. There's a mechanic where you level faster the more heroes you've completed the game with which is nice, but doesn't do much to take the edge of that process. It'd be wildly improved if heroes autolevelled to the level of your 5th best hero or something like that. Yet I've had the game for years and I keep coming back to it and dipping in again from time to time. It's easy to play and fun to do. It's presently on offer for a tenner which I reckon is a steal.

This is a good game that feels really close to being a great game, but it has some odd design and UI choices that hold it back. The root of the problem to me is the equipment system which feels tacked on. I think the root of the equipment system's problems lie with the mobile-first UI. It's impossible to deterministically know what unit abilities come from their starting gear and which ones are innate. The only way to tell is with tedious trial and error, and sometimes that's not possible without wasting money on something at the store. When you get an artifact like from collecting all of the lore on a level, you can't compare the gear you currently have equipped with what you're getting. I think a lot of the information that's missing would typically be handled in tool tips, but being mobile-first means not having on-hover actions. The equipment system also breaks summoner balance. Several of the summoners' entire kits are equivalent to a weapon you can start the game with once you level them up a bit. A good example is Sylvia vs. D'Orc. There is zero reason to pick Sylvia. Both of the characters give you Nature + Chaos magic. D'Orc gives you 5 bonus life (25% more!) and his goblin summoning ability is innate and not tied to his weapon. Sylvia's squirrel weapon is just Oak's End, a 725gp artifact. If you wanted to focus on an animal build it would always make sense to start with D'orc instead and pick Oak's End as a starting artifact. This all screams to me that the equipment system was added late in development. The supporting UI elements were not fully fleshed out and the balance would make a lot more sense without equipment being in the game. Overall, I had a good time with the game obviously as you can tell by my hours played. It's frustrating, because I think that this could have been an all-time great for me with a little more care.

I enjoy playing turn-based tactics and this game is definitely one of the good ones in the market. Despite being years old, the dev is still continuously updating the game, which shows his dedication to make the game better and closer to being perfect. Awesome game and I hope all best for the dev and his future plans. <3

I finished 1 run across PC and Steam Deck and think that's enough to judge the game as I have no desire to revisit it. Minor issues kept adding up and the more I played the less I enjoyed it. A game like this absolutely needs a written tutorial/guidebook that's viewable at all times, but besides the very basic tutorial, there's nothing. There's no explanation of how half the mechanics work. The menus kept getting stuck open, or the UI resizing on its own. If I tapped the "skip turn" button on Deck there's an "end turn" prompt stuck on the screen. RNG seems heavily weighted against the player even on novice difficulty. Lack of card variety. The game boasts having hundreds of cards but they're just reskins. Every boss plays the same - endless summon/heal spam. No real variety or mechanics to differentiate them. Enemies can riposte on death which is absolute BS. If they're on 0 health they're dead, they shouldn't be getting a free hit in. The "custom" adventures have very little customisation - basically a choice between how cards are drawn and that's it. No difficulty options, HP regen, damage boost etc. Graphically it's awful. It looks like one of those AI generated mobile ads. The larger characters cover multiple squares which makes it hard to see their 1 square hitbox. I also think £25 for this is ridiculous and is at least 3x more expensive than it should be. There are other (much better) games on the genre that aren't nearly as expensive.

I just don't like the art style.

I am several hours into this game and I am enjoying it very much. Challenging without being over the top. Good progression and strategy. Turn-based combat meets Slay the Spire card collection. Worth it at full price but a must-buy when on sale.

have not left a review on a game in a while fire up the coffee pot cause this game will have you up till the wee hours of the morning great game, super fun, building your team and loading them up with gear for some very strategic battles the crazy number of cards, heroes and gear is nuts I REALLY hope the dev keeps working on this 2 big thumbs up

Very good game that is quite unique in what it does. When I first tried it years ago, I didn't like it as much, but since then a new game mode has been added that, at least to me, makes it feel more like a deck building battler. The highlight of the game for me is to use equipment on creatures. Not only can you actually see the equipment, there can be some very interesting synergies. Without spoiling too much, but I had a unit that was fairly ok in melee and could poison. Giving it a bow turns it into a high-damage ranged unit, still with poison. Quite a big upgrade. One thing of note is that the difficulty curve is inverted, at least as far as I have been playing. What I mean is that you can discover cards, and when you do, you may choose them as starting equipment. There are limits, but they get loosened with higher upgraded characters. For example, my necromancer starts out with a staff that can summon up to two skeletons, and my starting hand has a card that summons a unit that buffs all my skeletons +1/+1. Such a setup makes getting started in a new run a lot easier of course and the game gets easier, rather than harder. So yes, finding these exploits is fun, but also means that there is a bit of a legacy element to the game. At the end of the day it depends on the player whether they like it, or whether they find it too spoiled to be a true rogue-like. I am firmly in the former camp.

Super gierka! Mega wciągająca, niby nic nowego, niby proste mechaniki, ale odkrywanie plansz i kart daje mnóstwo frajdy. Kart jest okropnie dużo, więc jest z czego wybierać, a losowych eventów wystarcza na tyle, żeby nie nudzić się przez wieeele godzin. Super gierka "z doskoku", na krótką przerwę (tylko że niestety najczęściej krótka przerwa zamienia się w długą...)

ターン制ストラテジー、アニメーションだけで何が起こっているのか把握できるのが良い。 ゲームによっては大量のログが英語で流れて読み切れない場合が多いので、ユーザーフレンドリーなゲームだと思います。