Sculplings

I was not coerced into doing this. I'm writing this of my own volition. It was my decision to leave this review. This is a cool game with awe-inspiring art, evangelical music and top tier humor.

Sculplings feels to me like a game of two sides that are at odds with each other. Fortunately the far stronger one is the one you encounter first, and it's well worth the price of admission alone. The first 4-5 hours / surface-level game experience are a janky delight - incredibly charming, silly and funny. The crux of Pokemon as a bite-sized roguelike but with its own personality: goofy cute mons, tooltips that constantly break the 4th wall, pitch-perfect music. Once you start climbing the ranks, despite there not being much extra mechanical depth over a standard Pokemon game, you're asked to deal with trainers that are - in essence - increasingly overlevelled against you. The game never tells you the changes made at each rank up - the obvious ones are the opposing mons having orders of magnitude more HP than you, and asterisks denoting additional levels over the norm. In my experience: in addition to the explicit changes, expect to have tons of crits landed on you, and to miss your attacks a lot more than stats would suggest. I'm not especially good at this genre so take this with a grain of salt, but the game doesn't seem to offer you much to combat this besides 'build a solid team, try to find good passive effects, and pray for good RNG'. If you care about 'beating' the game, expect its charms to take a backseat to some head-meet-wall frustration. Fortunately you're not *forced* to climb, so I think where I'm at is leaving the game at around rank 3 or 4 and just playing for the fun of it - there's an apparent heap of stuff I still need to unlock, and quite frankly I already feel like I've got my money's worth.