The Wrath of the Goose King

Pros: - cute red pandas - funny geese (Gaintrud is an icon) - combat is easy to get in (Pro tip: reading the abilities help a lot) - a LOT of different spells/abilities/equipment Cons: - can be difficult in the beginning

Don't let the cutsy look of the game fool you, this is a SERIOUS game. You need to pay attention what's happening durning combat, learn what works well together and what synergies to pick. You can also unlock permanent gear as you progress to make your life easier. The enemy and boss variety is decent, around as much as in Slay the Spire. I would say the biggest highlight of the game for me was character and enemy designs: I kept going because I wanted to see more of them. The humor of the game is clever, but can be a bit cringy sometimes. It also doesn't only rely on the pandas being cute and geese being silly. The story might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I had a fun time with it. There is some jankiness when it comes to the UI, but other then that I didn't encounter any bugs or issues.

Wrath of the Goose King is a charming and fun rogue like that has a lot of love put into it. It's very nice to look at for an RPG Maker game and unless you're very familiar with the engine you probably wouldn't even realize it is one. The combat is easy understand, but difficult to master. With such a charming art style you may think you're in for a very easy time but you'd be wrong, you'll die in this game, probably a lot. But that isn't a bad thing due to how the runs are setup. You'll fight different bosses and get different companions while slowly getting more powerful with some permanent upgrades. The game also has a lot of dialogue, it seems to mostly be for the first run to give you a reason why you're doing what you're doing. But if it's boring you it's find to skip and just jump into the game-play. Overall, a solid fun indie game at a fair asking price, I'd give this one a try if anything in this review on the steam description interests you.

Game plays like traditional turn based RPGs. It can be tough at first, but you can unlock permanent items and discover new heroes each run. Renew is absolutely a game saver though. Story is silly and have some funny moments. I would recommend if you like turn based strategy games like old FF titles. Also good replayability so worth the price.

Wrath of the Goose King is overall a very solid roguelike, I'd say it's worth at least a couple playthroughs. Definitely worthy of more attention than it's gotten at the time of this review, "profile features limited" is sad to see on a game with fundamentals this solid. Is it the art style? I know it's a bit 2000's flash game, but it still sort of works with the tone of the story, and it's far from the most important thing to get right in this genre. The animations/text speed can be a bit slow on the default settings, but these are very customizable and the fastest options are virtually instant. Cutscenes auto-skip after the first time you see them, with an option to reset your story progress to replay them all. The writing is pretty decent, vaguely humorous but nothing that will really stick with you. That's perfectly fine for a roguelike though. The main gameplay loop is balanced around a risk/reward system, where you pick one of 3 encounters per node with the enemy layout and type of reward displayed in advance, and if you win you can either move on or stick around to fight the rest, but each successive fight gives the remaining enemies higher stat bonuses. It's an interesting approach and I think this game makes it work pretty well. The only real flaw is that there's (currently) no reroll feature to help offset poor RNG in either the reward offerings or the reward you're actually given, but it's quite rare for this to break a run - usually when I lose it's because I just got too greedy, and my first successful run also had the most mediocre RNG I've seen so far in this game. Characters. spells, and relics are varied and interesting, as they should be. A lot of weapons/armor give minor boring stat boosts at lower rarities but higher rarity variants can actually be quite powerful. Jewelry is a bit mixed, some of it is pretty good but most of it has too steep of drawbacks to really be worth using despite the benefits. Money is less impactful than you might think, it's mostly for shoring up particularly poor RNG since shops have limited stock, only stock 2 of any type of gear at a time, and only sell the lowest rarity of gear. The spell store has a wider selection but also uses a much rarer currency for everything but its potions. The game is definitely balanced around this system though and I never felt screwed over by shop RNG. There's a little bit of roguelite in the game in that you can buy boosters that carry over between runs. Each character can only equip two of them though, and you can only buy each booster once, so you'll still have to make choices and have a fairly strict cap on how much power you can get in this way. Once you've beaten the game the first time you unlock several challenge modes for bonus endings, plus another alternate challenge mode that turns one of your starting character's booster slots into dead weight, locks both of their booster slots for the whole run, and replaces the boss fights with entirely new high difficulty ones. So there's plenty of replay value to be had here. The dev continues to update this game despite the tragically low attention it's gotten, and has confirmed that a jewelry rework and a reroll feature are both planned for future updates. I hope that they can receive the success and attention they deserve, if not with this game then with future projects.

It's a chill game, with lots of different gear and spell. The enemy and the teammate is randomised so it's different each time, every playthrough is unique.

If you're unsure, pick up the demo. It's short and sweet and gives just enough of a taste to see if you'd like it! This is coming from a steam deck perspective, which at the time of writing. Isn't supported and a little tricky to get running. But we got there. Game is super charming. The characters, meta jokes don't overstay their welcome, it's a small little game packed with a lot of fun and unique interactions. Lots of replayability with the roster of pandas, magics and equipment, as well as challenge modes. Overall it's an obvious purchase if you have even a passing interest in the genre, especially for the asking price. Some small critics, again it's not supported on steam deck. So optimization isn't ideal. My best solution was to play the game through desktop mode. Some things I'm hoping they can change is adding more ambiguous pronouns for the main panda. We can name them whatever. But all text assumes a man. Slight nitpick but would love to see at least theythem singular in the case of a blank slate main character. Tldr, get the demo. if you like that. Get the game. Don't regret for a second and that's on top of the steam deck tinkering I had to do.

A fun pandarific rouge-lite!

Cute pandas fighting against evil geese? Sign me up! :) It's a fun, but hard game. Takes some time to figure things out, but you have a lot of options to try so it keeps it interesting.

I see goose, I upvote. The game is really cute! I loooved the characters sounds