The Dark Horde

At first the game draws you in with the cute colorful graphics, varied fantasy themes and a comforting fantasy music that reminds you of countless carefree hours spent on the 90s classics. then right before the grind sets in you get catapulted in the exctitement of those combos and synergies so powerful you think you broke the game just to die on the next turn. this game is a love letter to strategy, fantasy and cannot wait to play all the content to come

TL;DR: It looks bad, but it feels good. Like a greasy shawarma. Or sleeping in one bed with your sister when you're both in your 20s. "Another Early Access Pixel Art Roguelite Deckbuilder" (S.L.O.P. for short (don't ask how that acronym works, just trust me that it does)) may not be the best first impression when you gaze upon the store page, and may indeed be a tough sell in the current market, especially when it does not yet have even things like the ingame card library (a horrific sin), and the cards look suspiciously AI-gened, and... Man, it really doesn't inspire much confidence at all, does it? Yet, strangely enough, I'm nonetheless quite eager to earnestly recommend it. I have had (and will exceptionally likely continue to have) genuine fun with this one, and even despite my penny pinching miser nature I felt like it's quite worth the handful of shekels it asks for in its current (admittedly somewhat basic) state. It offers satisfying synergies even in early game stages, deck themes that range from classic to peculiar (Sure, you could have a zombie or a skelly themed death deck, or you could have a deck where your janitors throw out several graveyards worth of corpses from your tower's dungeons and then a single corpse maggot unit eats them all to multiply by a magnitude of a dozen or two), and appears to have good potential for various little tricks and strategies that draw upon varying degrees of conniving arseholery. It does what I want a card game to do and I appreciate it for that. You scrolled down to the reviews and read this far, so you might as well give it a try. Demo's right there.

Insanely fun game with so much content. I really don’t understand how this is only early access. I can’t wait to play more of this. There are barely any reviews for this year but every review is upwards of 40 hours playtime. Honestly that’s way more of a recommendation that tons of 30 minute playtime reviews. New to Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 this is definitely the most engaging game I’ve played so far this year. Need to play more but I just wanted to do my part to help boost the positivity for this great game. Buy this. Stupidly good with so much content for like $6

This game has a whole lot of really cool ideas and gameplay mechanics. On paper. I love how many ressources there are to manage. Apart from just damage and cards there are gold and souls. enrage meter, sacrifice and devotion and of course the time units used by each action. On top of that the miracle cards that have to be played in a specific time limit, and come with a detrimental effect or a specific limitation, each give the player a lot to juggle, which is a really fun concept. The multitude of ways the gathered ressources can be spent(*) invokes the feeling of many different possible play styles and there are a lot of cool cards and card synergies to be found. Sadly the actual gameplay kinda falls flat though with my biggest complaint being the balance. There are decks where you can do the whole 4 skull deckrun without ever drawing a single card or being in danger of taking a single point of damage, while other decks are absolutely frustrating. The worst part: playing the game the way it feels like it was intented does not really work out well. You are most probably gonna lose, sooner rather than later. At the same time winning couldn't be easier: just get one or two broken cards and you can sit back and gather ressources. Resources you don't even need, because you've already won and are only going through the motions at this point. Instead of finding a way to deal with the challenging mechanics of the game Not even playing those mechanics at all is the way to go. Part of this is that these mechanics are TOO punishing and many upgrades too expensive or unreliable. The other Part is broken cards that trivialise the game. The shop and upgrade System are another place that need work. As stated before many of the upgrades are too expensive to be worth it. One example: Drawing random cards is very costly. Upgrading the quality of the random draw even more. Then there is a chance that you don't neef any of the 5 cards. All 5 cards even might be detrimental for you as they clutter your deck. In this case rerolling is another rare ressource spent. And if you can't reroll or draw ♥♥♥♥ again getting rid of that card will only happen a long way down the road for a steep cost. Another thing I didnt like was that Gold and souls are really limited in what you can do with it. Draw a random card (as described above), or heal the tower, which is way too expensive and almost never really worth it (apart from that 1 hp to max maybe). That's it, two options, and both are paid with an equal combination of both ressources. There is no real difference in their use. Nothing that costs more or only gold or souls respectively. The third option is exchanging Gold and Souls for the super resource (hero souls) that buys everyhing you need to win. This also means there is absolutely no reason to try and risk to kill heros as it's a lot safer and easier to just gather normal souls en masse and exchange those. (and if you don't have a card that produces rage, triggering the heros reliably, at a point in time where you even have a chance to kill them before the round is over, is impossible anyway.) TL;DR There is a ton of potenial in this game which I really hope to see realized. But i'ts still a long way off and at this point in time I sadly can not say I enjoyed playing it.

There is dopamine for sale here. Gameplay is kinda Hectic/chaotic (in a good way) you try to win just the right amount, in order to maximize your rewards. Its not just about playing the right card, but the right card at the right time. That's a recipe for fun no matter what the graphics are. The decks feel unique and interesting. Each one focuses on a different angle to win: The Ratagagedon deck overwhelms with swarms of rats spawned from enemy corpses, so you wait for those to "accumulate" and then try to unleash the plague quickly. There's also typical red deck: hit your opponent hard and fast. Or play cultists and sacrifice all your minions to summon death itself to your side, just be careful not to lose since all your minions are dead. I wanted to retry decks and learn them better before moving on to the others - there's that much depth here. In short, This game has unique, interesting and well designed mechanics... and its fun. You can trust my opinion, I'm a pretty big nerd. Jump on in boys.

It's hard to give this game a recommendation. There's a lot of creativity put into this. The idea of cards costing units of time is kinda genius, the "miracles" are an interesting way to deter small decks (but they feel a bit too oppressive later), the basic actions are a nice touch, and all of these classes (really just initial starting cards) offers some interesting variety. I love theorycrafting my deck, but i do not enjoy how this game makes you theorycraft currency. There's a chance that peasants will drop gold on the ground or souls in the air, but you only get the gold if you send a goblin to go collect it, and vacuum the souls in time before they reach the top of the screen. If the goblin doesn't make it back in time, or if you just leave gold on the ground by the time the round is over, you don't get the gold (regardless if you defeated the enemy). This forces you to incorporate collection methods into your deck, and play slower (not just demolish the enemy). So now you're almost required to lean on specific overpowered cards and combinations because you need fewer cards (allowing for collection cards) to build a successful deck. The collection meta this game incentivizes kinda detracts from the fun of making a crazy build. I don't want to criticize this game without giving some kind of suggestion. Maybe they're bad ideas, but this is what I've come up with so far: - This is a cool game, but all the run upgrades being locked into 4 different currencies, 3 of which need to be manually collected just doesn't feel good. I would significantly decrease the cost of the collection actions or simply reduce this to 1 or 2 currencies. The mechanics don't need to leave. Cards that function based on souls, corpses, and gold would still be fantastic. Cards that cost souls or gold would continue to offer variety. - There are permanent upgrades you get from simply playing the game and getting experience based on the current wave, but they are predetermined and very slow. Maybe getting skillpoints from the profile levels and allowing people to pick and choose what upgrades they can get would improve the feel. This also gives players a window into how the game could feel if more time was invested, whereas right now you simply get whatever reward you're given. - I love the idea of spending time to pull additional cards, but not getting any cards over time feels awful. I spend almost as much time drawing cards as I do playing cards, and spending 4-8 time units to pull a 2 time unit card or a miracle seems kinda dumb. I would add a feature that pulls a non-miracle card every 20-30 TU's (non-miracle - just to keep the choice of potentially drawing a miracle in the hands of the player) and make the card draw action pull an additional non-miracle card if it pulled a miracle. - The hero (rage) parties seem a little overtuned. The vast majority of minion builds simply don't hold a candle to them, and a hero party makes short work of even a freshly summoned demon next to a fully upgraded tower. A bit ridiculous. I think the party should consist mostly of basic soldiers, with an increasing number of heroes based on the number of skulls.

pretty fun roguelike deckbuilding game. I'll list some of the pro's and cons I've had below. pros pretty fun game, and each playthorugh can take from 10-45 minutes roughly, depending on how slow you go and how far you make it into the run. good complexity and synergy. it feels a bit like MTG in how you combine a lot of cards to make synergy and break the game. I made an orc deck that just rushed everything while giving draw and summoning more orcsto the point it held up with a spawn rate of 1 enemy per TU (base is 1 at 8TU) being able to level up and gain new features and initial resources. lots of freedom in how you play. rush the base to get a bonus and not deal with hero's, take things slow and aggro hero's for valuable loot, sacrifice units to maintain the pace and farm on the map longer. lots of depth to how you want to handle each round or run. pricing. the game is pretty cheap and I got it for a bit over 5 bucks and already have over a dozen hours in it. realistically I can see putting in 20-30 hours with the current content unless you really love the game and just want to keep playing after unlocking most things. CONS there are a number of bugs, but most are very minor and don't really affect a normal run and will likely be addressed soon as the developer is very active on the forum and is aware of them. (removed level cap comment as I am maxed out at lvl 18, I mis-wrote originally.) this seems like it will remain the max level for the foreseeable future and the benefits fall a bit short for this level, however with future updates we may be able to gain more starting benefits to open up runs a bit more. hopefully this helps give some details for those on the fence or interested in it.

The Dark Horde is a finely crafted gem even in its current early access state. The progression systems in place offer a fair amount of replayability, even 10 hours in I have yet to discover all the mechanics. Looking forward to seeing how this game evolves over time.

Overall: * Insanely fun with huge potential (for multiplayer PvP as well) Positives: * Tons of different playstyles, you can go aggro, you can go economy, you can go full defense and upgrade your tower cannon instead, you can go straight up spell face dmg, each of these having several more variations * Visuals/fx can be surprisingly juicy at times * Decent music and sound Negatives: * Some factions/synergies are a WIP and are insanely weak rn, being unable to pass the even the 1st lvl with their starting deck, but there's already a huge variety of working things to play with * There are some overly complicated cards with little to no payoff (like, you have to meet 2 or 3 different hard to reach conditions to barely scratch the weakest enemy unit), they should either activate way easier or do way more than they do. For example there is a skeleton that costs a lot, has weak stats, moves slowly, but has a really weak stun/dmg effect ONLY in the middle of the map (that isn't even well defined where exactly it is) Not to mention some frost cards, oh god * AI art is a bit all over the place and pixel art sprites are mismatched scale-wise, but the gameplay makes up for it

The pixel art is cute and charming, watching those lil guys bouncing around is a joy. The gameplay loop and the colors do well in satiating my ADHD tendencies, im locked in when im playing this. This game has so much to offer at a great price point. I enjoy the time-unit mechanic, theres always something happening to keep you engaged and if you wanna slow down you can take your time. The synergy possibilities is fun to interact with in the deck-building making the decision making enjoyable for me. The replay value is high, im always end up lying to myself when I say just one more run.