This is a really neat game here. It has such a neat combination of army recruitment, upgrade, and combat that makes for a really pleasant experience. The general way this game works is you play the game in a series of rounds, where each round is a time to prep and upgrade, followed by a fight. In the prep phase, you recruit units, put them in fights, recruit and imprison more units, then start to melt down the units you don't want. The melting of units gives you talents you can then put into the units you keep. On top of that, every unit comes with its own rarity, where more rare units can slot more talents. They also drop better talents when melted. This pattern essentially repeats with interesting new rewards at the end of each fight. You're goal is to match up units of the same race and class as having more units of the same race and class give buffs to all your units.
The gameplay feels satisfying - upgrading units really makes a difference, and the abilities units can do are pretty awesome to watch. You can start to get a group of units you enhance into essentially demigods and watch them utterly annihilate the battlefield. My favorite moment was getting an absolutely bonkers Terrifying Pumpkinman. Usually, units are going to deal anywhere between 500 - 1000 damage per round in the mid to late game. When I buffed him up, this walking jackolantern was dealing about 40,000 damage! So yeah, elite units feel pretty special.
The art and music design is great, scratching that great retro dungeon crawling mix. I personally love how the audio for returning to your "hub" of sorts changes every time because they keep remixing the pitch it playbacks at.
Currently though, there's a fair amount of bugs and balance inconsistencies. One faction, the Undead, is centered on having units regenerate quickly with low HP. The idea behind regeneration is that when not in combat or hit with a healing spell, units get health. The problem is that units are never out of combat to regenerate and abilities that give health to yourself and allies are very hard to come by. It ends up making the healing stat almost obsolete because there just aren't as many talent drops to heal as deal damage. [strike] Additionally, when you upgrade units, many times the upgrading mechanic bugs out and prevents you from upgrading or choosing a skill to go with your upgrade. [/strike]
There are two glaring concerns that I think need attention. The first is the translation. There are a number of functions that are inconsistently named, mechanics not telling you what they do, or incorrect damage multipliers. While overall the game makes enough sense with the current translation, it is still an issue, particularly when you don't know if something counts as a buff or debuff. The UI also is a bit inconsistently sized, making this even more challenging. [strike] Additionally, and this is a huge issue, when you choose a game mode that goes beyond 15 rounds, you are unable to save your game. This means, if you want to do an endless game mode (60 rounds), you have to do it in one sitting. This is hugely concerning because some games can go for a few hours, and many folks don't have the time to invest several hours to finish one game. I hope they remove this feature, or at least change it to another option - you really should be able to continue at any point.[/strike] As a side comment, I would like their endless mode to actually be endless and not 60 - have two options!
On a personal tweaks level, I hope they give more customization options to the types of games you can pick - right now when you choose more rounds, they actually make your starts harder - more customization on rewards, units, and events would be great. Additionally, there are several items in the game that need some balancing. For example, there are items called keys that increase the chances of getting better loot from chests. The thing is, a chest is a reward only if you choose a combat encounter that has a chest as a reward. So if the chest just doesn't show up as an option, the key is worthless. I hope they change some of the encounter reward rates to make some things more viable. Also, I really like the idea of melting units and giving abilities to your units. What I do wish is there were more ways to flatly upgrade your unit stats. There are a few starts in the game where you can get an initial unit, and because it is your first unit, it gets a stat buff. However, by the end game, that unit might be obsolete by other units, and there isn't a way to really make it do as well as more elite units. That is clearly a design idea, but while I love stacking abilities on units, it would be nice to have other ways to just improve base level stats of a unit, particularly if you are given an unit that has a stat buff. One of the ways they do this is through a class called reaper. If you collect enough reapers, all your units have a percentage chance when damaging units to permanently increase a random stat. Sounds awesome, but you need reapers to drop, and some units are super slow to attack it may not get to them. It's just another way I'd like to see personal choice in the game. Finally, more unit and ability types will be great. They have a good start, though most of them are reskins of the same unit or ability.
All in all though, I'm having a lot of fun with this and I think it's a steal for the price.
EDIT: They have for the most part fixed the menu bugging out as well as implemented a proper save system.
