Primarch

[h1] Astronarch fans come here [/h1] Astronarch (this dev's first game) is one of my favorite games of all time. I have almost 1000 hours into it, have made up my own unique challenges to try to accomplish, have bullied several of my friends into buying it, etc. For others like me coming from Astronarch, I need to be super clear that [b] this is a very different game. [/b] Don't buy this game expecting Astronarch 2.0 or Astronarch expanded. I will try to keep this short, especially since this is super early access. Do I recommend this game in its current state? Yes. [h2] Gameplay [/h2] The spirit of Astronarch is here, but GONE is equipment entirely. The heart and soul (more or less) of an Astronarch run is gone. Instead, you have a much deeper (and more complex) system of upgrading your hero (singular) with sequences of abilities, permanent boons similar to Slay the Spire's relic system that give permanent upgrades, as well as class-based boons that are limited but more powerful. There are also "tribe" based boons, as each ability (attack/action) you pick up has a tribe association that gives you boons if you get to 3+ of each (common in autobattlers like teamfight tactics). You can choose attacks, shields, summoning, etc., style moves, and choose the order that they activate. [b] Combat happens on a hexagon grid in this game, with characters that have movement stats, abilities that use movement, which plants proximity based actions and abilities as a main focus in this game. [/b] You can get abilities that pull people in, push people away, transport yourself around, dive in at enemies, and more. Every ability that you draft to your sequence of actions has a second option that's related but passive, allowing you to augment another one of your abilities. You can choose to add it to your sequence for its 'primary' ability, or elect to augment another one of your abilities with its 'passive. This can happen twice per ability in your sequence. So your decision = add this ability to your sequence for its primary action, or augment/fuse an existing ability with this one's passive. This creates a really high number of different interactions between abilities that let you tailor your action/ability sequence in unique ways. For example, if i have an ability that creates a fire shield that does AoE damage, i can augment it with other abilities that maybe expand the AoE range, and/or gains additional energy (a resource that allows you to use abilities), when used. This adds an incredible amount of depth to the game, with an incredible amount of interactions. I can see some folks coming from Astronarch being a bit overwhelmed here. [h2] Art and UI stuff [/h2] Astronarch had a delightful precision and clarity to its pixel art style. The scope of this game is MUCH broader and with much more detail / information in general, yet retains the pixel art style. For that reason, sometimes it is a bit hard to quickly comprehend things at a glance, as the same amount of pixels are trying to accomplish a lot more work in terms of informing the user as to what's going on. Another area this is impacted is the ability sequence itself, your character will be activating 1-8+ abilities in a row, each ability potentially having 2 modifiers -- and there is not much in the way of visual guides to let you know what is going on outside of 1) the pixel art combat itself which is sometimes fast and hard to follow, 2) watching the sequence timeline itself and know what ability is activating. I found it sort of hard to figure out how to optimize my sequence by strictly watching the combat / health bars like in some other autobattlers to try to hone my strategy. For now this feels a bit more like reading a spreadsheet in terms of trying to determine the order by simply reading all of the abilities in a row. [h2] Final Thoughts [/h2] I'm trying to approach this uniquely from a perspective of -- what to expect if solely coming over from Astronarch. That said, on its own, this is a deep, complex, carefully constructed autobattler roguelike that has the potential to rank quite highly in this category, and even now is quite unique in its premise. Don't expect Astronarch 2. I think that this actually has broader appeal for folks who are fans of the rougelike, hero-based, autobattler genre, but have never played Astronarch. For those Astronarch fans coming over, I encourage you to do a few runs here and you'll start to see the crossover appeal, just don't expect the somewhat zen experience of Astronarch. This is more of a puzzle that requires deeper thought and more experimentation. Thank you Dale for your games and I look forward to many more hours in this one.

Currently the game is super unbalanced, plus it's a pain to try and read every ability with its thousand keywords and status effects. It's messy, the UI is really bad, and most of the time you don't even understand what's happening. I can see promise, since the dev released a great game prior to this one, but I think currently this isn't worth your time. I hope dev can prove me wrong with future patches.

I like the idea but the game itself is so incredibly inaccessible. Every ability has like two paragraphs of text and keywords associated with it and I have no idea if my build is actually any good until I end up fighting a boss or elite that just kills me instantly.

So far, this has all the makings of an excellent game! From the solo dev of Astronarch, the way this game plays has his signature game math on full display here. I spent about 20 hours playing the demo before EA launch. This game is only going to get better, as it is new to EA as of this review. One note... be prepared to do a lot of reading. The systems in this game can be a little daunting at first playthrough, but stick with it and you'll be rewarded with a game that has both depth and class. Well done!

I think the concept of this game is very cool, become a super weapon and stack synergies. For an auto battler it is woefully lacking. You become too strong too quickly, and the order of your skills hardly matters, once you stack 16 skills and have 1 tribe maxed (the auto execute one) the game plays itself, not in a good way. The items you can grab in addition to the skills are ok, they don't have exciting effects. I think worst of all is the battle space is massive but you're just one guy, and don't influence anything during battle, so its just watching this guy either merk everything or die for a minute every battle. The dev's last game, astronarch, was infinitely replayable because there were like 18 classes with different passive and active effects that could receive upgrades. I don't see myself playing through all the acensions or replaying to figure out better synergies/skill orders. This game lacks impactful, interesting decisions to make your character uniquely powerful. hopefully the dev refines the gameplay to make it meaningfully difficult, and maybe add more characters to fight alongside you.

Solid foundation, really interesting and fun autobattler. I look forward to seeing the features fill in.

I am a HUGE fan of Astronarch, so I had high hopes for this game. I have to say, so far, it has surpassed my expectations. I'm still learning, but so far I am blown away by all the different combinations of skills available, and I absolutely love the fusion mechanic. My only complaint is that there's a few things that don't seem to have tooltips, such as "fury," and I can't see what sort of skills or abilities the enemies have, so I have to kind of guess based on their name and appearance. I hope those things get added later.

Played the developers other roguelike Astronarch and found it fun. Both are easy recommends and worth the modest prices. Believe it's a solo developer and both have been impressive releases that lean into very specific identities. Primarch takes longer to get in the groove and be able to play quickly compared to most roguelikes, but it's really good once it starts clicking and you're spending less time reading tooltips and more time intuitively making choices around the different synergies / what you want in your build / what you don't want. A lot of tooltip text to read, but some roguelikes are poor about providing detailed information about your skills/items/etc, so it's appreciated. Reading some other reviews this is a common point of criticism, I talk about the UI later. More characters, spells being tied to each character so they actually feel unique, and more items as well as talents would go a long way in solidifying this as a must buy roguelike that you can get an endless amount of hours out of. I hope there will be continued support, I don't think the developers other game received a significant amount after the 1.0 release, but you still got plenty of hours out of it when considering the cost. At the time of my review the game released into EA 18 days ago. Considering the early state of the game, the build variety is large, there can be talents or relics that really benefit from thinking on how to select synergistic spells. Energy is also this tug of war that you have to manage, generating and then spending similar to a rogue's combo points. Some builds can even focus on amassing energy and not spending at all. I think the current selection of events is good, but sometimes it feels like the path I'm choosing is entirely dependent on the special events available and I don't want to strategically play around the type of tribe encounters or spell elements because the special events can be so strong. Balance feels kind of weird, low level corruptions (modifiers that increase difficulty each time you clear a run) feel hard to fail even if you don't make the best decisions as long as you have enough of an understanding to grasp the basic systems at play. High level corruptions require very good synergy across your relics / talents / spells (if you don't cheese) but sometimes it's hard to tell if your build is strong or not. You'll be doing fine then just start hard losing very quickly. The sweet spot I've found if you're not abusing the strategy of having an extremely low number of spells (believe this will be nerfed) is having 10 spells. Around the time the run is over (3 areas + a final boss) is when you'll have 2 fusions into each of your spells, with a healthy amount of aether spent at the shop to ensure good synergy or a ton of talents. UI definitely needs some work. There's many different statuses / effects / etc. going on with your character but then enemies as well. Yes you can slow combat down and spend more active time monitoring the flow of combat, but I feel energy/hp/shield and buffs/debuffs applied to both yourself and enemies could be displayed better somehow so it's less working against the UI and more passively observing. I feel like most information comes from directly hovering/clicking tooltips, which doesn't feel great when some stages are over with very quickly. It contributes to it being tough to tell what's going on. It would also be nice if you can somehow make it clearer how specific effects would be enhanced by your relics / talents / spells when you're making selections, so identifying synergies is more intuitive.

I don't know man, huge fan of Astronarch and auto battlers - I'm also giving this a positive as there's definitely something here and I want to encourage the dev. First, the presentation is polished and things are cohesive overall from the color palette to the UI, fonts, icons --- leagues above Astronarch. I love synergizing, upgrading between each battle, and onto the next. This game has all that. But it comes with massively bloated flavor text and descriptions. Tribes and the ability to fuse your skills will certainly make possibilities endless, plus the order in which your character uses those skills is set by the player. This is amazing to be honest. The downside is that you are so overwhelmed with what the skills do, multiple paragraphs of descriptors, elements, tribes PLUS the ability to fuse --- almost every run after a few stages, I start to very much start picking random skills and slotting them in order because reading through it all is actually a chore. And yes, on paper this design seems amazing. Lots of skills that do a lot of things, and now you can choose to fuse them with other skills but also place the skill where you want in your chain of skills. I'm going to keep at it for sure, but I think this needs some sort of de-bloating, a touch of minimalism would go a long way. The presentation is great, the mechanics, fusing, tribes and choosing your skill order is great. But the skills themselves are just too much. You are also referencing previous skills you have slotted (all the time), because you are adding new ones and want to find which order to slot the skill, so you end up having to constantly re-read the paragraphs of descriptor text multiple times, every single time you want to add or fuse a new skill. Not sure what else to say though, I'm going to play the game quite a bit more at least until I finish it or get close, but so far it has been a slog.

For the price its worth it, although it does lack the satisfactory aspect of their previous game (Astronarch , which I HIGHLY reccomend). I think its just a little overwhelming with the text and too detached , I don't feel like i'm making meaningful adjustments to the character like the buffs aren't as interesting and they run off so quick/ aren't as noticable. I also don't find the graphics as charming as Astronarch, which I actually loved I will leave it for now after completing the final boss once , Will come back for futher development patches