Recent reviews by Lowallyn

pretty good

game is good

this is like vampire survivors but fun

I have no idea why winter and real time is a function of this game. I just sat there for 5 minutes on the fastest speed waiting for winter to be over so i could harvest wheat again to progress further. The game doesn't reward you for managing correctly for winter or even punishes you beyond just wasting your time. The overall design of the game lacks the polish for a worker placement board game that has been a staple of board games and also lacks the immediacy of any real time elements despite the clock.

I hope this game gets better in the future since at the current state it is a mess with the worst parts of two different mediums.

it's a more fun arpg than grim dawn or diablo

However, it's a long tasteless grind to level 50 with some of the least intuitive menus and questionable designs.
My biggest gripes are with the presentation and how incredibly meaningless the quest grind is. MMOs and ARPGs already suffer from having pretty awful quests but this one takes the cake.

I will definitely still play this game when my other games are down or out of content for the day but, it's not worth the time.

If you want a really tasteful, fun, and deep top down action game then I'd recommend hades. Even as f2p this game isn't worth it unless you want a time sink.

It's fine for a cheap game.

If you like rouge-like games go for it.

Suffers from same issues as other games in the same genre: reach minimum dps check and you stop playing the game plays itself, which i find boring.

My biggest issue is that aspect which might not be fixable but further addition and other mechanics added to the game might be a nice way to extend the life of the game.

At around 5 hours I beat one of the two maps and could've stopped their and uninstalled. At 16 hours I got everything I could and now there's no reason to play other than for enjoyment. Your mileage may vary but I got decent value from this little game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRLNUGmFC8


Back4blood should advance on the left4dead genre/game but in many cases it fails to improve on the detail or passion on what made the game interesting. In a lot of areas it feels sloppy.

Modern games are marked by half-assed content and bugs like the original no man's sky and cyberpunk 2077. the former became reformed and apparently a very good game that pleases a large audience. While the latter was a abysmal failure that still does not work and forgot all of the thematic ties to the TTRPG roots such as concerns of yellow peril, technocracy, and capitalism.

Back4blood is somewhere in between those two games in terms of polish and fun.

wait4sale.

it's fun for a few minutes until you realize that you can just run out the clock with the same two combos.

My biggest gripe with the game isn't the mechanics but the fact that it doesn't have much heart or imagination in the writing. Compared to other satire games like millennium blades all the cards are really bland and uninteresting both thematically and mechanically.

BO3 setup for matches is also undesirable. If I've solved the puzzle of that match and can very easily repeat it why make me do it another time?

not recommended for card or board game veterans.

at its present state I can't recommend despot's game but it's still pretty fun (if you don't take it very seriously and play it infrequently).

My main gripes are with the gameplay flow where I'm either incredibly strong and snowball out of control.
Or it's a negative death spiral where losing 1-2 units or not playing perfectly becomes a slow death.

I would rather die quickly than play out a dead run but I have to play out dead runs for a lot of the unlocks or the rare hope a mutagen saves me.

Compared to other autobattlers like tft, dota, and even the sad underlords there's less variety for units. It's also extra problematic as no unit seems to be individually different. all tanks tank. they don't have unique abilties and you're forced to keep them on for the set bonus upgrades.

This is feature or lack of features makes the death spiral more prevalent since you're forced to keep lv1 shielders or boxing glove man in the back or they will die. When they die you will search for them via reroll for 1-2 tokens eating more at the tokens that will be used for more units or food costs.

At this point, I should mention food, it's a fairly miserable mechanic to balance players from purchasing large armies to end the game quickly with capital. In practice, it just stops players from exploring more area and pushes them to seek lower/new levels faster since the rewards are greater.

Because of the food mechanic players will look for mutagen rooms, food, and boss rooms. every other room is a skip or a minor bonus to make your party slightly better. You often don't need or even want to buy more units because of food or because you're already strong with the units you have. The tokens go to global tech tree improvements which often is the better investment.

The event rooms which are a break from the heavy heavy combat play are often just a net loss of resources. 30 tokens or an incredibly niche mutagen. If the tokens scaled at all to which room i was in that might be nice. the 2nd floor event gives 30 and the 3rd or fourth floor event also gives 30? My fights per room nearly give that amount.

The food mechanic actively hurts investigating these events.

I'm frankly very disappointed that almost all the battles are just stat checks and positioning does not matter. If i'm strong enough i can position all my healers in the front and just let them spam heals since the ai is so terrible anyways it's sometimes been more effective especially with fighter teams.

In conclusion, it's okay for what it is (flawed and fun) and it's in development but i still have several questions: Have the developers played other autobattler games? And if they did why did they take out the most interesting parts such as multiple item combinations, unique unit types, and even terrain based positioning for sets like tft's second season.

In some cases I can see arguments for going wide means having less impactful and quality units but not every item in those other tft games were damage but they might have been for utility such as blink daggers etc that greatly improve the strategy. This game desperately needs more tactical choices for positioning and better AI or behaviors we can set.


Edit: i played for another 8 hours and beat it. It has some of the worst balancing for a single player game (not that single player balance matters much) because of how incredibly weak the tanks and healers are. They're often a huge token sink and negatively impact the experience. The tanks and many of the other melee units become an economic sink and using them makes the run go impossible.
In the base game mode there's far too few mutagens to make the game feel interesting or give it much replay. The scarce mutagens one does get must be used to improve ranged units like shooters, cultists, and mages + eggheads.
Late game self bodyblocking is miserable experience and further reinforces my previous statement about how there's no tactical positioning. The board is half full and not stacking them all in the back and praying is wrong. there's no reason to position any other way. Secondly, not being able to see the enemies means there's no point in trying to position other than metagaming the popups on the 4th? 5th floors.

Horribly unpolished and needs immediate fixing.