Break the Empire

Full disclosure: My best mate made this game! Honest opinion: It's really great! Cheap rouge-like with tons of funny characters, and it's surprisingly hard. Definitely worth the €5 for the hours that it kills!

This is a hidden game gem, way more than enough content and updates for the low cost. I would recommend it

Fun little roguelike that did a good job of actually making me feel like a necromancer, and then there were more characters! It feels like something you'd play on Kongregate back in the 00's, and I mean that in a good way. fun to mess with in hour bursts while catching up on youtube or balancing with other things. Was definitely done with it by the time I got a winning run with all characters, but got my $5 out of it.

This game is great every Character is unique and fun to play. This dev always does a great job I would recommend all of their other games as well.

All I can say about this game is that it's cheap and that at this price point, you'll likely play it enough to get "your moneys worth" out of it. But it's not satisfying time. It looks like it might be good. It's like one of those 90's shareware games you'd try out and you'd be like, oh, this is cool, and you'd send some guy $10 in the mail or something and he'd give you a code. That's a compliment - those games were fun. I enjoyed digging through game download sites to uncover little gems. But this game is completely unbalanced and hits you with gotchas and those games were not like that. There's like 8 different characters you can play as. The guy you play as in the demo is the best of them by far that I've seen. He's limited, but he's alright. If the other guys were like that, this would be a tentative thumbs up. But the other characters are awful. I was going to get into the specifics of those characters, but those are symptoms. The real problems of this game come from this: 1. Every skill costs too much mana and every single skill uses mana. So when you build your character, you're pretty much forced to specialize in the active skills which preserve or regen mana which takes up nearly all of your 'active skill points'. None of the other stuff except increasing spell damage (which again is about getting more mileage out of your mana) makes any difference. If you run out of mana, you're dead. This is even true at level 1, where your spells are not only pitiful, but you quickly run out of mana even fighting low quantities of the most common mobs and have to run around, trying to regen it. 2. Gaining levels isn't good, really. Because then your spells just cost more mana. You don't get a sense of "I gained a level. That's good.", in this game. It's "How do I reduce the harm caused by the new drain on my mana?" 3. Many player skills are often so weak as to be useless, drain your mana dry for too little payback, or directly work against your other skills. As an example of the last, there's a cult leader character whose main skill is charming enemies to fight for him. Well, he's got that skill as well as other skills which damage enemies. Most skills in this game are automatically fired, so you're simultaneously getting someone on your side with charm while beating the crap out of them with your damage spells. If you charm him, he's now on your side with 5 hit points. As often as not you kill him before you can do so. 4. The levels are designed in such a way.... so there are I think 5 levels in the game. You've got one character whose best skills require him to be on or around water. You've got others whose best skills require dirt, or flammable materials. One of the 5 levels is in a mine, which is almost entirely rock and has no water at all. The final boss level is in a castle which again, is all rock. What do those characters do? Their best skills become useless at the time of the game where they most need them. Through 40% of the game they can't use their core competency at all, or at least without a great deal of hassle. So nominally there's a lot of skills but there's really just one optimal way to play with each class. I can't see anyone going anywhere in this game unless they go nuts with mana regen and reducing spell mana cost and being entirely about mana management. I probably shouldn't mention this but the names are weird. Stuff like (and I'm paraphrasing)... "Buttfart Village" and so on. I feel like this could have been good. All the work was done to make it good. It's just that the decisions about balancing weren't well thought out. The names of everything kind of hint that the dev didn't take this too seriously, which fair enough but he did all the hard work... why not figure out balance and change some variables here and there and make this game three times better for minimal effort? I don't really get it. Meh... I'm investing too much time in this review. I mean, it's cheap. You'll play it enough that you're not cheated. I'll probably toy with it a bit more because the game has that 1990's fun game vibe and I want that vibe, even though logically I know this game can't give it to me. But you're best off avoiding it.

Really fun and surprisingly deep little game. It is also quite difficult. Lot's of characters to play as that all vary quite a bit. Highly recommended especially on sale, though it is certainly also worth its full price.

I gotta say this has really scratched an itch that I didn't know I had except for necromancers in games. I can turn off my mind, relax after a long day of teaching and just enjoy the intricate sprites of gunning down villagers as a villain. Excellent game and I'd highly recommend it for some bite sized fun, especially at this price.

Pretty good, the characters play really different from one another, and it feels great when you level up enough and start to tear stuff up like it's nothing, though you always need to be careful doesn't matter how strong you get, feels nicely balanced that way The procedural generation is also very good, maps feel different each time It has Vampire Survivors vibes but it's completely different in how it plays Anyway, solid game, cheap too.

Fun fantasy maniac sim.

Vampire Survivors, but better. Game has a lot of retro charm, like in the actually charming janky kinda way old retro games had on windows 3.1 when you know some guy in a basement somewhere decided to throw a game together but it was surprisingly addicting even if the music, sound effects, and graphics were a little corny. UPDATE : after grinding through the game a few times, completing it with a few of the characters, the balance is REALLY off in terms of upgrades, in a fairly unfun way imho. i still think the game is charming as heck and worth the money, more rewarding than a game like vampire survivors. really have to think up a good build vs. mindless grinding. just go into it realizing it's not gonna be what you normally expect from a rogue-a-like game in terms of what you'd expect from upgrade trees making the game easier and easier