Circus Electrique

A nice aesthetic and good voice acting/art direction are not enough to let me overlook embarrassing writing, a messy jumble of hodgepodge mechanics that don't belong in the same game, an overly fussy UI, a stale and samey gameplay "loop", and weightless, mediocre combat. Shame, I really wanted to like it.

Не могу порекомендовать, т.к. не затянула вообще. Визуальный стиль, вроде, и привлекательный, но само исполнение не особо (видимо, очень уж на любителя). Да и не очень понятна атмосфера вообще. Это мрачный Лондон, погруженный в безумие? Да нет, не выглядит оно так, диалоги персонажей тоже не способствуют. Они вообще какие-то...неинтересные, примитивные. В общем, ни начало истории, ни атмосфера не удержали. Да и эта Элли, выползающая в конце каждого боя...всё какое-то детское, может, я не понял, что игра так и позиционировала себя как увлекательное приключение Элли с цирковыми ребятами. Но главное - это то, как тут устроено исследование города. Нет, серьезно, после каждого боя надо заниматься каким-то менеджментом? Смотреть газету? Пихать кого-то в лазарет? Подбирать стрелочки-совместимости для представления? Может, я был не особо внимателен, но на строке с персонажами даже сортировки не нашел. О какой-то динамике исследования говорить в таком случае не приходится, игра, вроде, ДД-подобная, а не попытка в менеджмент-симулятор (где менджмент города был в качестве передышки между заходами).

This game is mush better then the ratings say. Lots of content and value for the price. Well done indeed.

Listen to the negative reviews. There's a lot that's decent here, but the game wears thin in the fourth district and a *lot* of critical flaws start to show. Broadly, Circus Electrique is Darkest Dungeon, but in a linear narrative form. It's also got heavy worker placement elements, since you're running a circus. Now, Darkest Dungeon does a lot to cushion you from randomness. The deathblow system, clear communication about how mechanics work, no recruitment cost, no roster maintenance cost. You can softlock yourself, but it's hard. Here, though? You need a bunch of high level characters to do performances to generate resources, but you actually don't want that at all. Characters cost meat to keep around and scrap to upgrade, and both are unreliable to get. In fact, nearly all of it comes from random drops as far as I can tell. You might get it from circus acts! But the acts don't tell you if you do. And you get a universal currency, cash, that you can convert into meat or scrap, but it's expensive and you have to manually click for each conversion for some reason. But the early districts are super easy. So it's very likely you'll do what I did which is replay one of them to level up a bit more, get screwed on meat drops, and have to dismiss half your roster to try and get costs under control. But the game wants you to have a big roster stuffed full, so as soon as you dismiss units you don't have enough to do circus shows at your level, and you have to go for easier shows that yield less, and congratulations the tail spin has started. Also of note, a lot of the units in this game suck. As in, they don't have a plan. They don't have any self synergy. They don't function. And you can't swap their skills out. You're stuck with whatever random garbage they have by default. Fire Eaters are good, Clowns are good, Strongmen are good. That's three classes out of maybe ten that are useable. Everything else has crap like "50% chance to move a single target to a random spot, lose 10% sanity" for five out of six moves, and then "10 damage to any target, lose 3% sanity" for its sixth move. The circus acts want these other classes, and they want them levelled up, but again: you don't. I think 90% of my problems with this game would evaporate if units didn't have a constant meat upkeep, and easy mode cures that, but the gameplay is already a little tedious and making fights easier would just make that worse. Plus, fights are kind of flat. The most effective strategy is just Do Damage To Man, and buffing and synergizing is just wasting your actions. That all said, there's an okay game buried in amongst the jank. With some polish and reworks, it could be really good, and I think it's still fine if you play trying to aggressively conserve meat. I wouldn't recommend it at full price unless you're really thirsting for Darkest-Dungeon-likes, but it's a fine pickup on sale. Edit: The linearity of the game *really* hurts it. As does the inexplicable decision to put meat, which you need regularly to maintain your lineup, exclusively behind random loot drops from fights. This makes it *very* likely you'll play this thing like a normal dungeonlike and softlock yourself twelve hours in. Also, in a game where the most powerful skills are just dealing damage, damage scaling on enemies is a bit cracked. In DD, you can log a couple hundred hours before you lose a character for reasons outside of your control (back-to-back envenomating spider crits.) In Circus, that's just normal high level play. There's also no stunlock protection, and later enemies have AoE full party stuns, so you can just... spend a full round never getting to act and losing 2+ characters as a normal game experience. It's doody, is what I'm saying. I'm wiping my save and starting from a new file, and we'll see if the game is more possible when you've already played a bunch of it. 2nd Edit: Seven hours into save file #2 and I've caught up to my first save. By only raising the skills I know I'll use (at most 50% of a character's kit, usually 20%) and avoiding upgrading the sleeping facilities and keeping my roster limited to just the folks I need for combat or performances I'm... still only a couple rng rolls away from total starvation on normal difficulty. Also the class balance sucks waaaay worse than I thought. The ideal team comp is just four Strongmen. Two in the back to aoe, two in the front to burst down targets that taunt. You probably want to give them +precision gear, and you need to make sure they randomly generate with the boomerang skill, but otherwise they outperform every other class. They can handle the bonkers damage from late game attacks, they can eliminate an enemy team in two rounds, the only thing they don't work in is a gauntlet of fights and then you just take one fakir with points in only their healing skill. Some other classes can perform a bit better in very niche circumstances (like fireeaters at night), but even that's debatable. What a shame. 3rd Edit: Multiple choice events come with icons under each choice to help you figure out what they might give you. For example, an exp symbol and an item symbol mean the event does not give you exp or items but instead costs you half your meat and money. Another way to describe this is "pull from a hat, and one of the items in the hat is reloading your last save." 4th Edit: Redid the multiple choice, picked an option I'd picked before, got a pile of bonus meat instead. This is bad! If the multiple choice events are not just random in what the symbols mean, but random in what the individual choices output, and sometimes they can *cost* you meat, and meat is scarce and running out can brick your save, the game's just deciding on its own whether you're going to be able to complete the campaign. Nah. I like the aesthetic, and effort clearly went into the writing and worldbuilding, but we're in thumbs down country now boys. 5th Edit: Acrobats and cannoneers are useable! Not better than strongmen, but most of their skills are functional. Also you're apparently supposed to be using as many rare unique characters as possible, since they have lower food costs and scaling and their own unique passives, but you kind of have to gatcha for them, and only after you've unlocked them via random event, and once you do have them they can still get randomly deleted from full health by two enemies acting before they do. If you get very lucky, you can find the trinket that reduces food cost and stick it on characters in your back row, but it's also purely a random drop. Sensing a theme? Spin the wheel, win a disappointment. 6th Edit: Nah. Late game damage scaling (on normal) is bonkers. You start a battle, your acrobat takes one action, two enemies act, your acrobat is dead. And everything is spongey as hell. Even if the enemies spread out their attacks (they don't), you're still wailing on the same dude for a whole turn. And that dude drops a taunt + dodge up + regen on his turn, and his healer friend brings him back to full health on his turn, and you could theoretically bring a debuffer to try and counteract this but your debuffer acts once, two enemies act, your debuffer is dead. Twenty two hours is more than enough to say I gave this thing a fair shake. It's a nice aesthetic wrapped around a badly communicated tedious slog.

I feel like this game is overlooked. Maybe it's because of the steampunk circus concept? I wouldn't call this game "great" but i do think it's worth playing. It's a bit of a slow-burner though so it requires a bit of patience to get going. I'm only on the 3rd map, level 4 circus, and it feels like there's still a lot to unlock. I'd rather have a game that's slow to pick up instead of one that's quick to become bored with. The graphics are pleasant, using fully animated 3D models for the characters. Each character within a class has a set of randomized parts, skill set, and performance capabilities. So although all characters in a class will feel similar, they'll all be a little different in some way. The combat doesn't feel RNG-heavy at all. I feel like i can find a strategy the works and rely on it to keep working in the same conditions. While there is a diverse set of classes to make teams from, i do find myself having a usual lineup with a usual strategy. It's not good to do that though because some characters can't do anything in certain weather conditions and i got caught a couple times using the fire breather in the fog (she can't attack at all in foggy weather). One thing i don't like is planning the circus performances because it feels like i need to take notes to make sure i hire the right characters for them, and i really don't like taking notes for games. I still think it's a neat idea though. There's also a story to this game but i actually don't care much about the story as i'm more interested in the gameplay. For the record, i've never played Darkest Dungeon or Iratus so i had no expectations coming into this game.

Fun until you start snowballing down with no way to get back up. Also rage is a bad mechanic and allowing to stack, I love getting one shot'd by a attack with a high percent damage boost.

I hate leaving a negative review for this game because it has the skeleton of a decent game. But there are way too many elements that drag it down. 1) The game draws immense inspiration from Darkest Dungeon, but fails at the things that DD did well. Whereas the pacing of DD was quick sporadic fights with downtime to recover and plan the next excursion, in this game the loop goes: Figure out who to put in a show --> Stuff people into various buildings for bonuses --> Put together a random team with the remainder --> Fight one battle --> REPEAT It's extremely poorly paced and tedious, with none of the exciting team comp building elements that DD had. Worse, there's no way to save team comps so you're building that all from scratch, every single time. 2) This might seem petty, but the game is overall ugly. The cartoonish art direction was intentional and meant to match the circus motif but all you're looking at is amorphous, formless blobs for every character design. Compare this to Darkest Dungeon or Iratus where the designs had an element of coolness or badassery. Every class is an eyesore in this game. 3) There's no real strategy or team synergy. Unlike DD or Iratus there aren't a lot of abilities or item combos that create unique synergies that allow you to overcome harder fights. You really just have 4 independent chars that more or less just operate independently. Makes combats very dull by the midway point. A real shame for fans of the genre as there aren't too many yet.

“A steampunk circus with style, but not enough soul.” Time Played: ~5 hours Verdict: Stylish but repetitive What I Liked: The art direction and world-building are gorgeous the idea of a Victorian steampunk circus doubling as an RPG is fresh and full of charm. Early hours are engaging, mixing turn-based strategy with management sim mechanics. Unique class designs (like fire-breathers, strongmen, and clowns) are fun at first and bring some flair to combat. What Went Wrong: After the honeymoon phase (~5 hours or so), the grind sets in hard. Combat becomes repetitive fast same enemy types, same patterns, minimal variation in strategy. The game has a snowball effect: small failures compound until you’re stuck in a frustrating death-grind cycle. Circus management sounds cool but ends up feeling like a chore. You’re juggling too much busywork with too little payoff. Loot, upgrades, and progression never feel satisfying the gameplay loop just doesn’t evolve enough. Final Thoughts: Circus Electrique starts strong, but quickly loses its magic. If the gameplay loop had more variety or if the grind was better balanced, it could’ve been something special. Instead, it’s a lot of style trapped inside a slog of repetition. Score: 6/10 – Cool concept, but ultimately "meh."

Good, turn-based fun. This game is quite similar to Darkest Dungeon with a steampunk circus theme. The visuals are stunning, especially the light and shading effects, and the voice acting is excellent as well. I quite enjoyed my time with this game, beating the main story and am now going back to complete the six maps. I found the gameplay loop to be relaxing, but still strategic. The "sim" part of circus management is light, but it doesn't have to be anything more than that (heal, train for more XP, buff, craft, and put on a show by grouping a select numbers of performers together based on traits). The boss battles are challenging and I liked the need to keep rotating performers in and out based on battle conditions. Near the end of the game decisions on who's in the battle party, who stays, who performs instead, etc felt significant and impactful (sometimes taking a less-than-stellar team and pulling out a win anyway). If you like Darkest Dungeon and want something similar, but a little lighter, than give this a try.

I'm not sure if the negative reviews from September 2022 have any relevance anymore, the developer seems to have patched most flaws. I certainly never encountered any game-breaking bugs during my Hard playthrough. Maybe I was just lucky, or perhaps exploring each district 100% before moving to the next one helped. Yes, some random battles were surprisingly challenging and seemed unbalanced initially (like encounter #4 in the second club with that heavy hitter), but at the end it was always doable. On the other hand, the visuals, sound design, and atmosphere are excellent, and there's a ton of minigames, which I'm a sucker for. Although the circus setup initially seemed like it could become tedious, the later announcements being bigger and longer saved the day. There are a few shortcomings here and there, and perhaps five districts would have been more than enough. Still, I had a great time with this seemingly dead title, so my advice is to jump in at the next discount and see for yourself.