This is another game that I recently rage-uninstalled for the same reason as always, once again it really feels like the devs don't play their own game.
I don't know where to begin with this one. It starts out pretty fun, simple, and straight forward, but it doesn't really expand much beyond that. You unlock the pieces of a few more builds as you go, but the limits to what you can build and the dependency on RNG prevents you from ever fully realizing the intended combos that were put in place.
An example of this would be a poison build where you might have some unit options with various poison-related effects such as: poison application, heal from poison, poison buffs, damage to poison enemies, activatable poison effects, ally buffs based on poison, etc. The problem is that you only really get 4 units to work with in a 2x3 grid. This means that you could get: poison application + efficient healing from poison, OR poison application + buffs from poisoned enemies, not all of the fun poison things at once, not even close. So instead of feeling like having multiple viable poison builds to choose from, you perpetually feel like you only get access to a partial build at any given time and you're just trying to make that work while constantly feeling like you're missing core pieces of your build no matter what since the game is so limiting. This feels like you should have twice as many units to work with and twice as much space, at least by the endgame, but it unfortunately never changes. To summarize, in any other game this would feel like having an armor set bonus for equipping 6 pieces of gear in the same set, but you can only equip 4 pieces..... and that's IF your RNG is perfect.
There's a lot of difficulty spikes and crazy difficulty scaling through multiple layers of New Game +. The New Game + modes are similar to the typical roguelike "Ascension" modes where you take on basic penalties on new runs like; "enemies have +1 health" and "your units have -1 health". The problem is that this is a game where most of your units and enemy units start out with stats around 2/2 (2 attack and 2 health). So even with just a few of these modifies on (NG++), your 2/1 units now get wrecked by enemy 2/3 units. It goes up to "NG+++++" difficulty and by "NG++" Your units take twice as long to kill anything and get one-shotted by everything. It genuinely feels like the devs don't realize how impactful the math is here. It feels like they just said "oh we'll add a +1 bonus for the enemy, how bad could that be?", well if it's going from 2 to 3, then 50%.... That's a blatant 50% spike in difficulty from just one modifier and again it feels like the devs didn't recognize this at all. Even before NG+ your runs had narrow victory margins that relied heavily on RNG. All NG+ does is slim those margins further and make you somehow even more reliant on RNG to win. It simply isn't fun, specially when each boss just hard counters certain builds, lowering the strategic diversity even further in any given run. Across 3 acts there's a total of 39 floors and in the later difficulties you'll be frequently losing on like the 4th floor.....over an over again.... until you roll the dice just right and the RNG gods smile upon you..... in which case you then get steam rolled on floor 9 and consider yourself lucky to have made it that far. It's just not a fun process. Oh, and there's also blatant anti-fun mechanics like the boss's attack that targets your highest hp unit and sets it's hp to 1, effectively deleting your tank and removing max health builds from the game. It's just riddled with lazy, questionable, completely unbalanced game mechanics like this that just make you auto-lose the run.
In short, I wouldn't recommend unless you can get it on sale for like 5$ AND want to play for <10 hours before the difficulty spikes too much. Because after that you're forced to pay close attention to the game's systems and you'll start realizing that they are not well balanced and not too well thought out... Almost like the devs don't really play their own game ;)
