Pizza Apocalypse

pretty neat

7/10 A TBS card battler in a funny post-apocalyptic setting Good: - free - if you like TBS and card battles, there is an interesting combat system here. Also, in each level you face new enemy types that challenge your previous strategies, and you have to adapt - funny short dialogs between missions, as you deliver pizza to different customers - a distinctive art style that I like quite a bit - it's also characteristic of other games of this dev - the game uses a system of "telegraphed attacks" which you may have seen in "Into the Breach". It feels fresh as it's not often used in TBS games - music is generally good and fits the theme So-so: - all abilities are given already at lvl 2 and don't change later. This is a bit overwhelming so early in the game, as you have to go through 12+ abilities and decide how to distribute them among the 3 characters in the party. On the other hand, once you complete several levels, there is a sense of progression lacking. Your characters don't get stronger, they just face increasingly more difficult enemies. I know that difficulty is relative (it's all the same if you make both your troops and the enemies twice stronger or not) but it's a psychological thing. As a player, I want to feel I've accomplished something. Especially if there is a "party" of characters like in an RPG game - similarly, there is no feeling of progression across the levels. It's not a bad thing (after all, there is still a level number, and you do read more dialogs) but it would be just better if there were some map for example where you clear regions from zombies, or at least a list of customers which get crossed out once you've delivered pizza to them. Or something else - the cards feel a bit cheap. Also some images of monsters on the cards seem too abstract, they don't even have a character on them, or it's so strange that it looks just like a piece of landscape. After all, you are fighting something, and expect that it's a creature with a clear shape - you start levels without seeing the enemy party, so you can't really decide on the loadout of abilities meaningfully. After you start losing the battle, you can give up and go back to loadout or just fight till the end to fail and then change loadout. It would be more logical (I think) if you could just see the enemies in a separate panel while on the loadout screen, and their abilities in tooltips Bad: - there is a noticeable (2 sec?) delay after you finish your turn and after the enemy finishes their turn. This artificially slows the battle down and gets annoying. In fact, I'd want the speed of animations to be configurable in options, with the ability to turn them off entirely. After all, there aren't really any animations here, it's just cards. So, nothing would be lost if the cards were just static and the attacks where instant to increase the tempo of the game. The player should spend time thinking on the next move, not waiting for animations to finish Overall, it's a nice free game. Though with some tweaking, playtesting, more options and some metagame to create a feeling of progression this would have more potential. E.g. I could imagine this game going premium at, say, $2-$5 only just if it had more psychological hooks for the player to keep on playing. Right now it feels more like a mid-development project, though a good one. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]