Combolands: Roguelike Citybuilder

A tight tile-placement puzzler. More content and depth than a lot of similarly-priced roguelikes. A good amount of unlocks. It is a bit easy, even at higher tiers.

something about combolands scratches a very specific itch that was designed specifically for me, and it goes beyond how excited i get to use railroads to connect everything and get more numbers

Excellent core loop, I bought this and within a week I had victories with all 21 combinations of factions. It's a bit like Monster Train in that sense - you pick two factions that have different sets of buildings, but since the game plays in turns and you get a new "hand" of buildings from your chosen factions (+ neutral) each turns, it's even more similiar in that they're basically different decks of cards that get combined. The game looks and feels great, scoring points has that ca-ching impact that reminisces Balatro or any kind of dopamine-inducing combo-based scoring accumulator. Some points for improvement: - Steamdeck support is not great. It's a cursor based game and at the time of review it didn't have a gamepad-native way of selecting things on the map. How hard that is to add depends on the technical underpinnings of the game which I can't assess from here, but it would fundamentally make it much more enjoyable on deck than it is currently. - Once you are cranking 10k+ point turns, the point accumulation can take a while to complete and it feels like a lot of your playtime is just spent watching points go up. I would ask for some control here, to be able to speed things up even faster if we opt in to it. - Cross-faction synergies are by design rarer than in-faction synergies, so often what ends up happening is that you have one half of your map devoted to faction A and another devoted to faction B. Interfaction synergies absolutely do exist and pop up, but they feel quite rare and unreliable and honestly just not as effective as most of the single faction synergies. There are lots of examples, and its a testament to how cool some of the design is, but the industrial faction is particularly ridiculously good since it can both generate and consume resources which trigger all of its synergies, it basically has no need for other factions! - Probably too easy for a lot of people, you can kind of do whatever and win. I think that's good for accessibility, but there's definitely untapped potential. - Music could use variety. Very minor though, ultimately most will just mute the music and play their own with this kind of game.

Extremely solid game. Fits nicely in the random-draft strategy genre with Lootplot and Luck Be A Landlord. Nicely balanced and has some pretty crazy synergies that aren't immediately apparent and make you laugh when you discover them. The only mild criticisms I have are that the two secret unlocks are a pain as they require a specific build tailored to get them as well as a ton of luck getting all the specific bits you need to trigger them. Making them unlockable once you've finished the run and move to Endless would solve this easily.

Very solid game. Wish there was a bit more variation in the environments.

Can't stop thinking about those numbers