Short and sweet of it is this game is awesome with some minor gripes. Everything on the artistic side of things is perfect to me; I got sucked into the world instantly. The lore, the setting, even the colloquialisms of the characters all pull you in to the world. The game plays like a pretty classic JRPG but with more tactics-forward battles (deciding frontline vs backline for example). My one issue is the implementation of the tactical side of the game. Despite this issue, Entropy gets a real easy Recommend from me.
You are the main character and you find/recruit other characters. Classic. The world of Entropy is presented as an awful bleak place that stops just short of grimdark; I got the distinct impression of The Age of Strife from 40K. Story-wise it would seem you are tasked with stopping the world from going grimdark. All of that is worth mentioning because tactical, high-stakes gameplay makes perfect sense for the world of Entropy.
Progress is fairly grindy so losing a whole character sucks. That, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a problem but per the JRPG nature of the game most of the battles you fight are fought approximately the same. The game kinda seems to draw vague inspiration from Battle Brothers with its notion of mercenaries and a brutal world with persistent injuries and perma-death. JRPG Battle Brothers I suppose. When you lose someone in Battle Brothers you are losing 1/12th of your force. In this game, you are losing 1/6th of your force so it is much more punishing. Or in my case, 1/5th after I lost to the hyper-difficulty-spike boss of Act 1 because I figured I'd meet another neat character to add to my party just from playing out the story but that didn't happen.
Another odd gameplay element is the world is persistent even when you fail, so similar to Dark Souls. You respawn and maybe your party pulls through or maybe they don't. The Act 1 final boss has two stages to the fight and if you make it through the first stage but fail on the second the boss stays in the stage you died on. I suppose that is forgiving but it was just bizarre to me, because that was my one failure and the only two-stage boss thus far so I got two more people to make up for the one I lost and ended up smoking the boss.
You could say unlucky or even skill-issue at this point, but...
Speaking of the characters, everyone you meet is jam-packed with personality: party-members, npcs, vendors, all of them. Each one really only gets a few lines but they sold me on everyone I met. Which aggravates the perma-death situation because the characters you meet through the story are so lovable, to me, relative to the randomized mercenaries you can recruit to flesh out your party. The excellent character writing is bitter-sweet in that regard.
Back to the Battle Brothers comparison, that community typically recommends save-scumming until you get a good idea of what the game can throw at you. I agree with that assessment. Entropy, though, does not let you do that. I go the entire First Act without difficulty whatsoever only for the boss to give me trouble. And a difficulty spike isn't necessarily a problem but it reallyyyy didn't feel good. Like it felt cheap. And don't get me wrong, Battle Brothers is chalk ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ full of cheap stuff but you are given an enormous toolset and essentially total freedom on what fights you take. This fight was unavoidable and unprecedented. Part of the problem I experienced relates to the games economy which literally taxes you for each party member you have. So, I figured, I'll get one merc for now and another story character is bound to show up! A five-person party was lovely for everything else in the game except that final, bastard boss.
The final aspect of the tactical side of the game I'll mention is that the game affords you SIXTEEN possible reserve spots for characters/mercs and that number is insane based on Act 1. In Battle Brothers, injuries are sustained from normal fights typically BEFORE a unit dies. The play pattern is to then sub in a different unit while the injured one heals. The natural flow of the game almost necessitates some number of reserves. In Entropy, however, dipping into ones reserves means you failed. There is the aspect of "builds" and some characters might be better suited for certain fights based on perk choice...but, again, you can't know what might be better without losing. Furthermore, the current tactical depth simply does not demand a wide variety of builds, hell it can't even really sustain it because the character customization is so shallow. The are no unique gameplay aspects to any characters at all from what I could tell.
If it were up to me I'd bump up the number of active party members to seven or eight, change perks from every three levels to every two, increase the sheer variety of perks, and I'd consider a trait system similar to what you'd see in Battle Brothers or Our Adventurer Guild; variety is the spice of life and all that.
If the game didn't concern itself with having some semblance of "hardcore" gameplay this review would have stayed short and sweet. The marriage of JRPG and mercenary-sim might need a divorce to commit harder to the JRPG or the mercenary-sim part. Like, fielding a bunch of desperate people to fight encroaching demons in this bleak world sounds awesome: you've got people missing limbs, they're traumatized, losing units left and right with a core group of characters that carry the playthrough! The gameplay systems--AT THIS TIME--don't support that fantasy though. The devs clearly care about the combat system but, man, their strength is the WORLD they built is just so sick.
The game is a 10/10 that drops to maybe an 8 from some gameplay choices. I have never before bought an Early Access title without some sort of discount so perhaps that is what I feel warrants such a nitpicky review. Anyways, I hope they do a little tinkering with the core systems. Again, SUPER AWESOME WORLD!
This is a review of Act 1 of the Early Access version of the game as of September 3rd, 2026.
