Guards of the Gate

A genuinly charming indie game with good combat, that has its flaws and drags a little too long. After having been burned by early access games in general pretty hard i waited for the full release and voila, this is a good game. The baseline is just that you choose three out of six heroes and attempt a roguelite dungeon run with them. There is barely any story, just go and kill stuff on each level until you kill the last boss. There are generally three types of encounters on the way, monsters, which you fight in good hexagonal combat, traps, which feature a simple and rather stupid minigame, which however fulfill their job to make the game less monotonous, and stuff that powers you up (treasure, merchants, statues). It is roguelite because you keep the statue bonuses for your next run, which makes you incredibly overpowered after playing a few runs (30% base crit chance kek) The heroes only level up 5 times each, but at each level you can choose one of two perks. Also each starts with 3 attacks and 4 attack slots, while having about 8 attacks in total. You can unlock those through shrines for your current run. All choices are redoable, making character building flexible and decently challenging. Hero balance is mediocre, the wizard and the shaman are way stronger than all other heroes. Overall combat is this games strong suite and it relies heavily on it. The cons of the game are a rather bad UI, only very few levels before the heroes reach max level and a very stale late game . I had my heroes maxed out 3 (out of 8?) stages before the final boss and i had very potent combos which made short work out of all foes. Those last stages were mind numbingly boring. Also you can not choose which skill to unlock at shrines, so you get odd results like not being able to utilise and item because you do not have the skill it enhances. Overall i give this game a solid buy recommendation as a good indie game. Good job Dev!

Played a few hours and really liking it. Nice take on the RPG game. Wide variety of skills, talents and items has made each run different. Your party retains small boosts from Shrines across the life of the game. So even if I am not doing so well now, I expect to do better later. Good idea. Feel like I am getting my moneysworth already, and look forward to the later additions to the game.

This is a pretty fun, though difficult game. It may seem easy at first as you coast through the first 8-10 fights, but then you will suddenly run into a group of enemies that just overwhelm you. And though it frustrates me, I just keep trying. The game is pretty addictive so far. The dev is actively working on the game, which is great. A new character and new skills for other characters have been added since I started playing. The turn-based aspect of the game along with limited movement of each character forces you to really think about your party make-up and how you approach each fight. Some enemies you can simply charge and attack with a tank character (and always have a tank, either the mutant or knight), while others require ranged attacks to soften them up before moving your tank forward. The character models are really quite nice, though I am not a fan of the map graphics. They look a lot simpler and seem to not fit with the models, in my opinion. But this is a minor gripe. Another small problem I have is not being able to go back to a merchant. Several times I have found the merchant but had no gold, then I found a chest on the next hex, but the merchant wouldn't sell to me when I went back. I find that rather frustrating. Levels and enemies are repetitive but not so much that I don't want to play. This is an interesting hex / roguelite (there are permanent bonuses for consecutive games after you die) mix that I haven't seen before. As it is, it is a fun game, but I am interested to see where the dev goes with it and what is added.

Huge potential but currently so many bugs and problems. Not worth 8,19€, maybe in the future

Guards of the Gate is a turn-based tactical RPG with a hexagonal map setup, choose a team, do battle, gain gold, xp and other things you need to make your team even better guards! https://youtu.be/9FdAuQUnI-U

The game looks really promising. I already lost a few times, but I like it that way. I'm going to put a thumb up hoping that the developer will add many things to do!

I am definitely having fun with this game, so I can recommend it. I didn't really like it at first, but as I experimented with the different team combinations and learned more about the game play, I really started to get into it. This isn't a fancy game. You create a team of three characters. Mutant, Knight, Ninja, Ranger, Wizard, and Shaman. You navigate a world map by moving from spot to spot. Each spot is either empty, has a battle grid with monsters, has a reward statute, has a merchant, has a new skill, etc. The maps aren't that big. My only real complaints are that you can't heal outside of battle, very few classes have healing, and you can't make separate saves. You can have up to 6 different parties with different combinations and there is supposedly benefits across games. This game is all about casual, tactical battling. And the skills that each class learns and the treasure you find or can buy is random. So some teams will get better stuff than others. Experimenting with different team configurations is pretty fun and the learning curve isn't that bad. This isn't a game you get for story, plot, puzzles, character customization, open world exploration, etc. But overall, I am still enjoying taking multiple teams though each map level. And the maps are random too. Haven't experienced any real bugs and no crashes. I did see a bug where your HP doesn't always show right at the start of a battle, but once the battle gets going, it has always fixed itself. If you are looking for a simple distraction with lots of grid/turn based battles, then you should probably enjoy this.

the game concept is good, but it is easy to get boring cause what you can do is limited

I don't really mind the simple aesthetic and low production values as the actual art-style is fine and the straightforward game-play mechanics are interesting and intriguing to me. Unfortunately it is the only game I have ever played where the English translation is so bad that it completely put me off from actually enjoying the game.

To summarize, it is a really nice turn based game with hexagonal style combat and simple exploring elements with rogue lite gameplay. Combat is rather simple but not boring. Only donwside is you can do pretty much everything in the game after couple of hours. It needs a reward mechanism to promote replayability like new stuff/modifiers after completeing the story or arena, with different characters or team combinations or something like that. Then it surely will be my one of the favourite roge lites. Definetly worth to buy in my opinion.