Recent reviews by C²

I really enjoyed the time I spent with this, but I also did encounter a hard crash to desktop that prevented me from finishing my first run. Fun cross of your typical roguelike deckbuilders with something a little more Tactics Ogre.

I'm obsessed with Fire Emblem and very much love roguelikes, so this was an easy sell for me. That said, the experience ended up being a lot more joy than just haplessly mashing the two together. A lot of things below may not make sense to a buyer just looking for an easy-to-digest breakdown of the game's good and bad points, and it will probably read more like my notes to the devs. If so, that's fine! My first sentence largely encapsulates the whole experience.

Things I liked:
• The Heroes have very different game feel both from each other and from the militia units that come along with them or get recruited along the way. I liked this a lot because I didn't want every run to feel like it was playing out exactly the same way even if I switched up my two starting fellas.
• The skill system and the general *feeling* of leveling up is very charming. You gain experience from fighting guys, normal, but that experience gets allocated deterministically across your stats rather than relying on Fire Emblem's (traditional) random stat growth. Each stat wants its own amount of EXP to increase by 1, and once 7 stats increase you get a level up and get to pick one of three random skills, weighted by class, weapon availability, leader, etc. I like it quite a bit, though this comes with some caveats I'll address in the middle of the road bits below.
• The runs are long, but not *super* long. Games like Fire Emblem have a way of being a little bit slow to clear maps, even when you're doing everything in a relatively low turn count. There are a lot of fellas to move and a lot of combats to check the forecasts for, but I think my average run clocks in around 4-5 hours if I'm playing well. If you take a break after every act, you could probably do 60-90 minute segments.
• It's familiar but different. Obviously the inspiration is Fire Emblem, but it's not just a 1:1 recreation of those systems, and the differences shine through in the weird progression and the randomness that will crop up during your runs. With a bunch of weapon classes and a bunch of weapons in each class, it becomes fun to try to gun for your favorites to make certain builds you're going for really shine, and the randomness of skill acquisition and which militia you'll recruit helps things from feeling stagnant.

Things I felt less good about:
• It's very much a shame when your unit levels up and you get three abilities that feel like they're not going to do anything. A big contributor to this is the "+2 [stat] when you're standing within 3 tiles of allied [class] or [hero class]" type of skill, of which there are several and they're very common. Other times, you get no-brainers like +1 move. A few of the skills that aren't Simple (read: they take up a *slot* of which each unit has a limited amount) feel downright painful to try to employ, like Aegis. Maybe when I become a little more positioning-reliant on higher difficulties, I'll care for it more.
• The enemy range indicator just doesn't stand out enough from the tiles underneath it. The transparency needs to be reduced by a fair bit so that it's actually easy to see rather than me straining to find the edge and hitting R a few times to toggle it just to play "spot the difference."
• Class balance seems spotty, just because high speed seems to dominate lower difficulties. Until enemy Hit gets higher enough, high Avoid units are just monstrous. Again, this might be mitigated based on difficulty, but I found that Bridget (a Scout) on my first two runs was an absolute *creature* with near-base growth rates and no excessive favoritism, but my Knights were all rather mediocre; enemies were hurting them for quite a bit even with their *relatively* high defenses.
• That the ending fight of Act 1, 2, and 3 all have the same map every time might get to feeling a bit stale after a bit, even if the exact non-boss enemies filling those maps differ run to run. Relocating the chests or remixing where the boss is relative to where the player deploys might alleviate this feeling.
• Picking up another hero at the end of Acts felt just a bit odd, since you get to roll all of their skills on level up whereas you don't get that opportunity for militia recruits. It made me feel like I was always going to immediately bench someone to start using a hero, because the heroes are just... a teensy weensy bit better. Maybe that's fine, but it has a weird game feel to me.
• Going off of the above, because you don't get to pick the random skills assigned to militia units you recruit and because they join at a level lower than most of your army ends up at if you're full-clearing maps, it often feels like there's not a ton of reason to use recruits you pick up after Act 1 unless they luck into a really amazing skill or two. This may also be a difficulty thing, where playing on higher difficulties will allow them to spawn at a higher level.

All that said, I see myself probably racking up 50-60 more hours in this at a minimum. There's nothing quite like executing the perfect turn in a SRPG.

I'm forty-something floors deep in Palace of the Dead and I'm not bored yet. Denam keeps getting stronger and stronger and I'm worried my enemies keep throwing themselves upon his sword.