Recent reviews by Space Pope

Ehhhhhhhhh.

The game seems fun at first, it's another one of those "we've locked cool progression stuff predicated on RNG or doing well" which kind of defeats the purpose of progression stuff.

As it stands, you can purchase meta-upgrades with gold and rocks, and maybe you get enough of these each run to buy 1-2 of these upgrades for about 3% increase to whatever stat there is. Characters also have Talents that you can unlock, but you need skulls to do so. Skulls are randomly dropped by bosses, or a guaranteed drop from Nemesis (which spawn in your next run after something kills you) but they also take 10 minutes to kill.

The power curve is extremely anemic. I've played for almost two hours- thankfully still in the window to get a refund- and I have not won a run yet.

I've had a run where I've fully upgraded 3 weapons and they...don't seem to be really all that powerful as a result. Allegedly, there are Legendary Items that I think are supposed to be this game's version of Evolutions, but there is no in-game information on how to get there. Instead- you'll have to join their Discord and run searches or ask someone because no one has pinned any guides or info on them at all.

Abilities in general feel underwhelming- it's very common that abilities have 3+ second long cooldowns, especially in the opening minutes of the game, so killing anything is a slog. Opening enemies often take 2-3 hits to kill from abilities that take forever to fire off.

There's a dash feature but I'm unsure if it even offers I-frames as I seemingly take damage every time I dash through enemies, so I'm not sure why they included it in the first place.

There's Ultimate abilities, something every character gets on a long cooldown, but unless you constantly upgrade it, it won't be doing much damage to normal enemies later on in a run...which sorta of defeats the purpose of having an ultimate in the first place.

I'd pass for now. There's a lot of wonky ♥♥♥♥ going on that just doesn't feel right compared to other offerings.

Hitboxes are turbo-jank. Enemies wind up to hit you, you move out of the way, and you take damage despite there clearly being a big gap between you and them.

Also enemies hurt you when you touch them, and they have enemies that run extremely fast and can damage you 2-3 times before you get a swing off.

Overall, no sound game theory going on here.

We are so back

AoE spamming and stuff exploding off screen isn't fun. Oh well.

I like survivor games where you spend 30 minutes to get to the end and feel no more powerful than when starting off at the first stage.

Pretty solid game for 15 dollars. Cleared it in about 13 hours, though that was probably since I didn't take the time to level-grind multiple max level teams at the end. By the time I got my solid team together, that's all I used till the end.

It isn't a deckbuilder, and I think calling it a card-battler is questionable. The reason why you see cards is because it's less work/time intensive to draw than making full body animations for all the heroes/enemies.

It plays very similarly to Darkest Dungeon, you'll visit specific locations to clear them out of their bosses and make your way to the final area whilst upgrading your heroes and towns. Each hero is unique, there are no classes/duplicates.

A minor shortfall is that heroes are gated, so by the time you unlock the final ones they're pretty expensive when you're also spending materials to upgrade the heroes that you already have, so there's 4 heroes I never got to play.

The challenge is middling, I think there was only 1 expedition that outright failed or I had to quit, but the penalty was minor. It plays like DD, but isn't as punishing or long as DD.

Do you like survivor clones where they only have like 2 stages so they feel the need to keep you from winning a run for as long as possible?
Do you like survivor clones where your meta-progression is gaining 3% damage per run? Or sometimes even -6%-?
Do you like survivor clones where they give you a dash but not any i-frames so you're constantly questioning why you got hit by something when you dashed through it at the last moment?
Do you like survivor clones where you actually feel like you're getting weaker as the run drags on?
Do you like survivor clones where you don't want to play it again after getting killed during a run?
Do you like survivor clones that make you think "Why aren't I playing Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, Soulstone Survivors, or Vampire Survivors instead of this?

Then you should probably buy this game. Otherwise, don't.

Keep an eye on Steamcharts. This game, right now, is capping out at like 387 peak players all time.
There were 3 servers, now there are 4. This splits the player base 4 ways, for some reason.
This means that you are mostly going to be playing against bots.
The problem is, once you get into 2000+ ELO, the bots just RNG their way into Legendary skills, consistently, which has a very strange feeling to it.
Merge servers and nix the weighted pulls bots get.
Once, or if, this game gets a larger pool of players, it'll become irrelevant.
Other than those problems, pretty good take on the autobattler genre.

Nah

I got my 100 hours and dipped out before the PSN debacle.