Hex of the Lich is a game that deserves a bit more attention than it's gotten. It's a deckbuilder roguelike in the same vein as Slay the Spire and Inscryption, but instead of playing cards you're building up an arsenal of spells to use in hex grid tactics battles. While it doesn't exactly stack up to the titans, it's still good enough to be worth the asking price when it's on sale.
+ The spells and their effects are creative, interesting, and take full advantage of the board layout. You have spells that move you, swap positions of you and the targets, summon things, push and pull enemies, apply buffs and debuffs, do damage in an area or a line, and more. Each of these effects can show up as an individual upgrade hex that can be applied to any spell up to its upgrade limit; the more times you can upgrade a spell, the less charges you have to cast it in combat.
+ Deckbuilding choices are difficult to make, as they should be for this genre. You get one new spell and one spell upgrade per fight, while the shops give you a choice of 4 of each + the ability to reroll but at a price that (except for rerolling) increases every stage. Do you want the spell that summons an explosive at range and pulls surrounding enemies towards it, or do you want the spell that lets you cross the entire map as long as you move in a straight line? Do you want the hex that pushes surrounding units away, or the 2-pack that summons minions to soak up enemy aggro? Do you want the hex that becomes slightly more powerful based on how many turns you've taken, the one that becomes significantly more powerful if the spell hits a lot of enemies simultaneously, or the one that makes the rest of the spell twice as powerful but only if it [i]doesn't[/i] hit the enemies simultaneously?
+ Despite the added complexity the hex grid gives combat, turns still go by quickly. You won't spend too much time waiting for your next turn unless you and/or the enemies are spamming minions that get to take multiple turns in a row, and even then it still shouldn't take more than 15 seconds or so.
* Enemy theming is pretty good, with every kind of enemy having its own set of attacks that are always the same for its particular species. However, while you can tell what the enemy layout is on the node map, you can't look up what spells they have, and a lot of enemies look a bit too similar to each other. You might remember the difference between single-ghost and triple-ghost, but you probably won't remember the difference between green-thing-with-too-many-eyes and other-green-thing-with-too-many-eyes.
- Some mechanics are very poorly explained even by genre standards; I'm still not sure what Ultima and Duo actually do, even after experimenting.
- The variety isn't quite as strong as it first appears. There's no way to tank damage other than just not being in the enemy's range, which makes movement spells, ranged spells, and minion spam disproportionately stronger than melee spells. Charm is also brokenly powerful if you're able to cast it at range - many bosses just delete themselves and their adds when under its effects. Some artifacts are brokenly powerful like the one that gives all your minions a range bonus, while others like the one that makes explosives go off immediately are useless since all your explosives have push/pull effects baked in anyway.
- The only kinds of nodes on the map are regular fights and shops, with no more than one shop per stage regardless of your path, and of course the bosses at the end. I almost always went for the routes that had the shops as close to the boss as possible; the only times I did otherwise were when the shops all showed up way too early in stage 1, or when the latest shop in stage 3 sat behind a node with a truly cursed enemy combination while another much easier route had its shop only one node earlier.
- The starting RNG has a bit too much influence on your ability to win. Your starting spells are fully randomized with the only caveats being you always get Magic Missile, Blink, a 10-charge spell, and no spells with less than 4 charges. If you get Warp or Blob Lob as one of your starting spells you've got very good odds of surviving at least as far as the first shop, but if you get Grave Beam and a bunch of melee-only spells that don't summon minions then you've got very good odds of dying before you get there.
