Recent reviews by The PolterGhost

Pretty much garbage. Gameplay is almost non-existent and is primarily grinding stats, watching those stats drop, grinding more stats, and then watching your dude roll dice to win a fight, except the dice rolls are mostly all obscured, so you don't even get real feedback to work with to optimize your options. I've seen attacks with high accuracy, high damage, and low energy cost end up hitting less often, less powerful, and consume more energy than "worse" attacks. Status effects give no real feedback on how effective they are, and they last only one or two attacks. Your only real fight interaction is sometimes swapping out skills to adapt to your energy costs, and that's about it.

Writing is bad, ending is nonsensical, and there's so much forced dialogue and cutscenes that eat up a ton of your time. Game is glitchy, consuming your resources at random and making certain events break in various ways. The "free DLC" is forced and makes you spend resources just to look at poorly written cutscenes where two people stand in a room while text bubbles pop up, with no real warning that the game is about to steal your bus fare and two minutes of your time yet again.

The various game and film references are fun, but it's literally as intelligent as putting up Bloodsport posters and having guys named Ryu and Ken show up in karate gi, so it's not like it makes up for the writing. The rest of the decision-making in the game, which amounts to choosing fights, choosing story routes, and choosing builds, is sadly one-dimensional and effectively amounts to picking one of three builds, picking good or "evil?", and just keeping up with matches to keep your resources up.

On the upside, this was $2. I got to grab every achievement while binge streaming. I was drunk one night and this was super easy to play and not worry about ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. But this is definitely barely scraping the definition of "game" and is not worth any more than the $2 I paid. I can't imagine the sequel will be much of an improvement over this.

Bottomline: 6/10, would only really play again in specific circumstances like randomizer, achievements, etc. Basic Metroidvania with incredibly linear content, weak storytelling, and underwhelming difficulty curve.

Pros and Cons:
+ When the soundtrack is good, it’s very reminiscent of PS1 games.
+ Character sprites are reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre. A lot of fluid movement and action in spritework.
+ Fairly strong game flow from one area to the next.
+ Area artwork is vibrant and reminiscent of Symphony of the Night, with a lot of views of landscapes and cities in the background.
- Music is mostly ambient or forgettable outside of the couple areas where it’s great.
- Character portraits feel uncanny and do not mesh well with the Tactics Ogre aesthetic.
Important mechanics crucial to both the story and Metroidvanias in general are put on the backburner, leaving exploration feeling underwhelming.
- Areas are bland, containing rooms that have maybe one enemy at most, while also containing expansive hallways filled with literally eight of the same enemy multiple times in every area.
- Story drops the ball almost immediately, forgetting the basic principles of time travel that the game presents us in five minutes of prologue and throws them on the ground. The story becomes supernatural gobbledygook in the last 20 minutes, and effectively reduces any aspects of choice, destiny, and personal emotions that were presented across the game to “good guy good, bad guys bad, gotta kill bad guys because virtually everybody is irredeemable, except for the one that did it out of love, but not the other ones that did it out of love, because they're just really evil horny.”



Yes, there’s LGBT stuff. Yes, some of it is plot relevant. No, it doesn’t really matter to the plot as much as it does to having characters who have relationships with each other. Yes, it gets super awkward at the end of a particular questline. But, the good parts are really good and natural and basically are either gleaned or come across as "oh, huh, that explains a few things." Except for the part where your character cheats on her girlfriend because she thinks her girlfriend is dead or something. Polyamory doesn't mean you get to cheat on people!

The rest of the story falls flat as the rules of time travel don't make sense (they're presented as creating new timelines, but in-game it's treated as a singular timeline) and they have to invent TIME GOD to explain some of it. Time travel is so bad that the game mechanically uses them to solve one optional puzzle, and the time freeze ability is used maybe three times to make jumps, one of them requiring you to manipulate really bad moth AI.

Game difficulty is non-existent outside of early bosses and a couple POISON enemies that gobble your HP with a broken status effect. Puzzle solving is non-existent outside of minor upgrades via frozen enemy jumps. Sequence breaking? Ha, you don't even get your first movement tool until halfway in the game, and the rest are end-game or post-game. Equipment barely exists, most weapons are bad, accessories and spells are cool. Main character is unlikable murder hobo who is a murder hobo before the game begins and only mellows out during the "bad" endings. Almost every sidequest is a fetch quest to get five chicken legs and twenty bear asses for virtually no reward. Every area is filled with long hallways or towers with no features other than six of the same enemy. MAX SAND is a meme in my friend group due to how useless the time mechanics are. Genocide is forgivable, screwing your mom isn't. The list goes on and on.

Out of three Chucklefish-published games I've played, this is the third one I didn't like. Might mean something. The game took 10 years to make, 5 after the Kickstarter. Might also mean something. Please go play Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, or Strider instead of this. There's so many good metroidvanias that you don't need to play the bad or mediocre ones.

My full review is in this hyperlink, because word limits suck.[docs.google.com]

14 hours to finish is probably a good start to this.

Is your goal to play a competitive card battler? Is your goal to play something akin to Slay the Spire? Go ahead, grab this.

Is your goal to play something cerebral, beyond just card strategy? Do you want to come out of this feeling like, even when it's all over, that there's so much more to explore? Yes, please buy this.

I'd advise seeing if the demo grabs your interest. The demo will cheat a bit and force you to learn some new mechanics before you can beat it fully, but it otherwise will introduce you to what the majority of the gameplay is going to feel like.

Please play this game blind. You don't need to do a post-game 100% blind, but at least do it all on your own the first time.

Gave this a few plays before I made a judgement.

tl;dr, this game feels like an early beta and not as advertised as "the first mission," and it needs significant improvements before I can recommend it.

As a player of deckbuilders both irl and on the computer, and especially one of roguelikes like Slay the Spire, Monster Hunters, and Monster Train, there's a lot of promise involved with the premise of this game, but ultimately I believe it falls flat in a lot of areas.

This is a game that emphasizes a lot of movement and flow, pushing enemies and allies into positions, shoving foes into walls and out of boundaries, and debilitating foes and forcing them to attack one another in the confusion. Unfortunately, the game doesn't allow much movement, in that most actions cost equal amounts, and each of those actions only allows one form of movement in most cases (move 2 spaces in a single direction, shove an opponent one space, etc.) The fun movement options, like grappling, throws, sliding under opponent's legs, and evading shots are all rarer cards that, for the most part, aren't in your starter deck. Additionally, using low-cost options that utilize your Combo meter becomes more difficult when you do have movement options, since every space moved costs 1 from your meter. With the randomized hands each round, this forces you to have rounds where you just can't do anything worthwhile because you have all movement, or you have all attacks, or you have a certain combination of movement and attacks that counteracts each other because of the Combo mechanic, or you have just a bunch of bad movement actions since a Move 2 card only allows you to move in orthogonal directions, so you need to spend multiple to get into a position where things can actually happen.

Additionally, actual in-game options feel weirdly balanced. The "upgrade card" action at the gym costs different amounts for different cards, but the actual value of the upgrade feels completely disconnected from the cost (and I believe the costs increase for each card you upgrade?) Event spaces seem to exist to make you flip coins on whether you get a benefit or a penalty, unlike Spire's events that primarily just grant you bonuses or an explicit trade-off. You also can't view your upcoming route, apart from basic decisions like "do I want to go to the Gym or another fight," so you can't plan for fights with better rewards or easier enemies.

Graphically, the game looks similar to something like Superhot, but for whatever reason it feels really unoptimized. I have a midrange computer, but the very simplistic presentation of the game felt very sluggish, especially when loading into levels. Clicking on Graphics in the options menu actually froze the game for ten seconds, until the menu finally loaded in. The sound design is nothing to comment on.

There's also just a lot of poor presentation in terms of how the game interacts with the player. Poor grammar and formatting in events and dialogue scenes makes the game look messy. It's never outlined to the player that enemies will always try to attack you if you enter their range during your turn, making for surprises when you walk into a punch or a bullet that wasn't happening beforehand. I also believe that it's never detailed that getting pushed into an obstacle deals an additional 4 damage, which is problematic. There's no tooltips on what keywords mean, and nebulous descriptions like "move around" and "move past" have to be experimented with to understand when and where they're applicable. An ability that throws your opponents on counterattack goes completely unexplained for what ranges it's applicable at or what happens to a thrown opponent.

Unless this game significantly improves in the future, I can't see myself specifically seeking it out on release. It feels less like this is "the first mission" and more like an early beta.

Note: BattleCON Online is a Free to Play game that I have acted as a playtester for over the past many months. I received a Steam copy early to help playtest the Steam release.

The Short of It
+ Engaging gameplay
+ Replicates the feel of a 2D fighting game without worrying about the intricacies or the dexterity requirement
+ Chess-like perfect information
+ Already a bunch of characters and more to come
+ Vs. AI mode for practice
+ Very high skill ceiling

- Doesn't have my favorite characters yet
- Still has bugs that have to get ironed out, with more seeming to creep up with every character release
- Some daily quests just really suck and take hours to do
- No ranked mode yet
- AI is kind of complete garbage
- Very steep learning curve



For the past two years, I have played Level 99's BattleCON board game. It first came onto my radar around 2012, when I originally came across Level 99's Pixel Tactics card game (also likely to end up on Steam at some point.) At first, I questioned how good a card game fighting game could be, and I avoided playing the game for a while due to my preconcieved notions of what it would be.

So, fast forward to 2016, when I came across BattleCON on Tabletop Simulator and learned to play it with a friend. Since that point, I joined what was then the official Discord server for Level 99 and began playing in Organized Play events and tournaments, and eventually became one of the top players of the game. I've been playtesting for Level 99 since then, and I've enjoyed most of it.

As far as BattleCON is concerned, it's a board game. Let's get that out of the way now. It's a board game that replicates 2D fighting games like Street Fighter, though the inspiration behind it was Guilty Gear mixed with crossover games. What this means is that, instead of inputting Shoryukens, you'll be doing a lot of reading and figuring out what cards to put together so that your attack comes out at the right time to counter your opponent's attack.

If you can get past the fact that this isn't an action game, BattleCON becomes a very rewarding experience where it's entirely about your mental dexterity and reasoning, rather than your physical dexterity and reaction time (and reasoning, there's a surprisingly huge amount of logic and strategy in standard fighting games.) Knowing when to play a Strike or a Drive, knowing how to avoid jumping in when it would leave you open to counter-attack, knowing the correct times to block or dodge and counterattack, that's all the game is about. It's not quite Magic: The Gathering, it's not quite Tekken, but it's a nice amalgamation of everything that makes those games fun.

At the moment, not a whole lot of the universal lore is in the game, but all of the characters come from Level 99's Indines universe, a fantasy world where the majority of the major characters are fantastic creatures, and where technology is absurdly advanced. I'm not sure if/when story modes will be added in, but it's a wonderful universe to explore across BattleCON, Pixel Tactics, Argent: The Consortium, and Empyreal: Spells and Steam.

At the moment, there's about 20 characters in the game, whereas the physical board game currently has about 80 tournament-legal characters, with over a dozen more planned. Two of the characters in BCO were made specifically for the game, so it's not as if we're ever going to run out of material for new characters. Unfortunately, the more interesting ones will likely have to wait until the development team figures out how to bend the game engine to make them work. The existing ones have been reworked for both better functionality within the game engine and better game balance, with the character tier lists seemingly shifting with the meta.

In all, it's an enjoyable game, hopefully the F2P situation doesn't automatically mean that new players are stuck with just the free rotation characters, hopefully Ranked gets added at some point in the near future, and hopefully more people will put up guides to help beginners learn how to play BattleCON better. Also probably hopefully, the playerbase expands beyond how it has been over the past few months. It's pretty bad when the lead designer of BCO is thrilled when 30 people are simulataneously online out of the 1200+ people who have had access to the game for the past couple months.