Imagine Slay the Spire but you can't remove strikes or defends from your deck, and theres a timer counting down, that's pretty much what this is.

Art direction is nice and all but gameplay wise they don't have much going on creatively.

Gets repetitive quickly, you'll have your "deck" set up by the end of the first floor so then you just skip by everything till the end.

If you liked Slay the Spire, you'll probably like Crush the Industry. Crush keeps a lot of the core elements from Spire, like a deck of upgradable cards and a bar of artifacts providing useful effects. You have attack and block and status effects and all that sort of stuff you'd expect.

This, however, is not the best part. The best part is the things that are different.

There are plenty of interesting innovations, but for the sake of brevity I'm going to focus on the one that I found the most impactful. In Spire, when you take lethal damage, the game is over. In Crush, enemies work the same way -- all damage is applied at once. Your, on the other hand, are special. Whenever you take damage, your health gradually decreases from its starting value until all the damage has been applied OR all enemies have been defeated. This results in some of the most fun and hilarious gameplay I've had in a deckbuilder in years.

Sometimes, this results in strategic gameplay. Sure, the enemy is going to hit me for 10 x 7 damage, but I have 15 points of thorns so they're going to die before they complete the attack and I'm only going to lose two or three hp. That's good, but what's even more fun is the desperate last ditch effort where you know your only chance to win is to spam your way through your turns as quickly as possible and just YOLO all your damage so you can win before you lose.

For my first few games I didn't really like the mechanic of gradually losing life, but above ascension (or whatever Crush calls the difficulty levels) 5 or 6, it becomes a super important resource to manage and a new potential path to victory.

Anyway, great job to the dev team on this one. The music and art and characters are also great by the way, but that's not why I keep playing.