[EDIT TO THE REVIEW, CHANGING FROM THUMBS UP TO THUMBS DOWN]
Everything I said in the original review is still valid, but I am changing my review and warning any potential buyers to stay away - after barely a week in early access the developers are pulling the plug.
Apparently the game that just arrived on early access, without any marketing or any updates or effort isn't making enough money.
Seems like a scam.
This is a crying shame as this game is fantastic.
[end edit]
This is one of the easiest recommendations for me to make in ages.
This game does exactly what it sets out to do, does it perfectly and for a bargain price.
Its a mashup of tower defence, city builder, vampire survivors, they are billions and RPG with persistent upgrades and increasing difficulty that I didn't know I needed.
The game is split up into two stages, battle phase and construction phase.
Battle phase is exactly as it sounds, hordes of monsters attack from every direction with the intention of destroying your city center. These high intensity combat segments are quite quick, barely taking a couple of minutes.
To win the battle you have static defences such as mines and turrets, your three heroes who have abilities and soldiers that you have recruited.
Soldiers range from heavily armoured flamethrower wielders, to swordsmen, medics or assault rifles and many others besides.
When hired, they are attached to one of your heroes and form a squad, whereby moving your hero somewhat controls the whole squad, but each soldier also acts independently.
There are bonuses for having certain combinations of soldier types in the same squad.
In addition to the chaos of combat, there are mutant birds named pigeons flying around that if you kill, give you an award.
And occasionally crates of supplies are airdropped in, tempting the player to risk pulling away one of their heroes to go and grab these bonus rewards and hope the remaining defenders can hold the line.
I'd also like to point out that there is an impressive number of different enemy types, and of fairly interesting and unique design.
There are even more enemy creatures that I haven't seen yet lurking in the higher difficulties.
If all of this action sounds overwhelming, then fret not because you can use tactical pause at any time to freeze time, look over the battlefield, que up orders and the use of abilities and then unpause and watch your masterful plans carried out.
If you survive the battle/day, then you go to the construction phase where you can level up your commanders (heroes), purchase new soldiers and construct new buildings to expand your city.
You gain a resource that I'm just going to call research points that you use to level up your characters in match.
It takes 1 resource per level, and I seem to be earning between 1-3 per mission.
Leveling up a hero gives you a list of 3 randomised skills to pick from, which can do anything from enhancing an active ability, reducing the cost of soldiers in the shop, giving them status effects like bleed or poison on their attacks any number of effects.
Purchasing new structures and recruiting soldiers is done by spending a purple resource called lava that you earn during the battle phase by killing enemies, looting supply crates and murdering pigeons.
The shop has a random assortment of soldier types and structures, but you can pay increasingly expensive costs to reroll the shop.
I'm not sure if there is a squad size limit to how many soldiers you can have, but in my limited experience you can build up quite an army, limited only by your money and available supply/population.
Building types are as varied as one might expect. There are defensive structures like tesla towers and turrets, single use and recharging mines.
But there are also a wide range of economic structures, ranging from housing to increase your population and allow the hiring of more soldiers, mines to harvest resources, production buildings to give you consumables or free defences after a battle phase, labs to increase the money gained from killing enemies, power structures to expand the radius of your city ect.
There are also support structures, like the barracks that after each day, boost the stats of your soldiers by 5%.
There is a pretty significant variety of structures, just like everything else. You have a lot of options.
Once you are happy with your purchases, city defence and chosen hero skills, you hop back into the next battle!
At the end of a run, you are awarded with persistent experience points for the three heroes you brought with you, meaning they can get stronger and unlock more abilities from game to game.
You also gain a resource that can be spent unlocking permanent upgrades, and you have an impressively large breadth of unlockables to choose from.
These range from stat increases to your heroes or soldiers, to starting new runs with bonus equipment, increasing the chance of supply drops, boosting the chances of finding rarer soldiers or structures in the shop or even simply expanding the vision range of your town center.
As of writing this review, there are 6 commanders in total. Three start unlocked, and three can be acquired by making your way through the difficulties.
There is clearly an intention for more heroes to be added.
The translation to English is serviceable, but not great.
There are some skills that I don't quite understand exactly what they are doing, but there has been no real hindrance for me to play the game, though I do hope deeper into early access the developers touch up the translation.
Thus far I have only come across two buttons that haven't been translated, and they are inconsequential – at the scorescreen post match they flick through the different screens.
As for the roadmap, the developers have ambitious plans which is exciting (but bear in mind the game as is, is a lot of fun and very playable!). They are hoping to add more characters, units, enemies, unlockables, and even multiplayer and mod support.
So in conclusion, I highly recommend this game, and would go as far as saying that if the steam page, trailer, this or any other review sounded interesting, then you would be doing yourself a disservice by not giving this title a try.
It's aggressively priced at the cost of a coffee, has been made with a lot of love, and I can say with confidence that within two hours aka the refund window, you will know if this is a game for you or not, so there is really no risk.
