Shapebreaker - Prologue

Fun blend of deckbuilding and tower defense.

It's a fun combination of tower defence and deckbuilding. Defenitely worth at least a try.

A superior tower defense offering. Not perfect by any stretch, but I will certainly buy the full game at some point. The main downside, from my perspective, is the lack of fluff, no story to give the players something to get involved in. Not a huge deal, but given the minimal effort required and the significant value it gives a game, it seems a shame not to have done so. There is pathing, which is always interesting, though so far (I have finished the first two acts of this demo) the maps are pretty cramped, which limits how much fun that is. Early on I feared a heavy preponderance of flying units, making the pathing meaningless, but luckily this seems not to be the case. There was one level where a starting point only had fliers, yet I was still required to keep a ground path open for units that did not exist, which was a little bit irritating, but no big deal. The look is minimalist, but by design, and the music very much in the background. There are tactical options, which I like, you are limited to three (so far) and they are one use only, which makes you think about when to use them, a good thing. All in all, quite pleased. In a genre that I don't feel gets the love it deserves, this is a real gem. Two thumbs up.

I enjoyed the game For feedback: I think the game could be improved by adding resource collection for each shape broken. In classic tower defense games, you gather resources from defeated enemies to make decisions about upgrades in real-time. Integrating this kind of resource collection could enhance the gameplay and add a satisfying element of progression as you see numbers increase with each enemy defeated.

"Shapebreaker - Prologue" isn't a game at all, it's just an ad for [i]Shapebreaker[/i]. Talk about store pollution... Misleading marketing like this is an abuse of the Steam storefront and the "free" category. The product this is advertising, [i]Shapebreaker[/i] is an incredibly lazy attempt to make a ripoff of Slay the Spire but with the laziest, crappiest TD tech demo ever made bolted onto it... like... no attempt was made to create actual computer graphics properly. Amazingly, and this might be the greatest display of delusion I've ever seen, the developer expects people to pay him money for that much laziness.... but that's not really relevant, because "Shapebreaker - Prologue" isn't Shapebreaker, it's just an advert for it! Incorrectly published adverts are harmful.. they take up visibility that should instead be afforded to ethical developers who do the right thing. And it makes it harder for us to find those ethically made games. The goal here is to get you to spend [b]$5 USD[/b] on [i]Shapebreaker[/i]. I don't recommend you get suckered, or reward these kinds of shady, deliberately misleading marketing practices. They're harmful to everyone. Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. As an advertisement, this is only free in the same way that adverts on Youtube and banner ads in your browser are. This is a game demo that's been dumped on Steam to advertise another Steam store page in the hopes of raking in some cash. Just because advertisements are free, doesn't mean they're worth your time. It's important to understand there's a formal process to create a demo/page for a game which hasn't been followed here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/application/demos While it might seem like an innocuous mistake, publishing demos and advertisements as if they are full games is misleading and in some ways harmful. This advertisement is taking up marketing space and visibility that would be better made available to a developer that's done the right thing and created a full game. Instead, that visibility is given over to a demo/advert that's been published incorrectly and is polluting the marketplace. It's unclear if this mistake was made through incompetence or a deliberate intent to mislead gamers. Often developers may choose to incorrectly publish demo/advertisements as separate games as a cheap way to bypass paying Valve for marketing presence on the Steam front page, which may seem clever to them, but it's harmful behaviour and it's not good for gamers. A peak of [b]4 concurrent players[/b] (according to SteamDB) for a "free" game is a disastrous public reception. Out of 130 million potential players here on Steam, almost nobody was interested. Even though this is "free". That level of rejection speaks a lot for the quality of the game. Advertisements and incorrectly published demos don't add +1 to your game collector count, they aren't full games. It's impossible for me to recommend this incorrectly published advertising spam to gamers, you deserve better than adverts.

A delightful mix of deckbuilding and tower defense