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Break the Empire is an action-RPG with the player taking on a role of a villain in order to play through a few villages and towns in order to slay the emperor. The game has some roguelike properties and each run shows some random spawns. There is permadeath and very little forward progression as of this point in Early Access.

There are four playable characters and they have unique feels for the players. You can use the fire imp, the cult leader, the necromancer, or the ice mage in order to accomplish your goal. Runs will not allow the player to max out all skills/traits for the character, so you will have a good amount of trial and error in trying to figure out the best builds for your gameplay style.

In each location, the player's goal is to gain exp by killing the people of the empire or destroying their buildings. With the exp, your character can level up and you will obtain 3 skill points each time, one each in the universal, active and passive skills categories. All of the characters share the same 12 universal skills, though each character has their own unique set of active and passive skills. You can also earn a few points throughout your run by picking up drops from killing named enemies.

Each run ends either by the character dying or you make it into the castle and slay the emperor. The maps progressively increase in difficulty, so it's definitely worthwhile to stay behind and max out the available exp before moving on. The gameplay becomes easier as you become more familiar with the game, though the final two maps of each run always feels rather challenging to stay alive and finish out the run with a victory.

Controls are by keyboard and mouse. The game has a lot of different choices for spell/active skill aiming either by mouse pointer or auto-attack modes. There may be ways to convert this to be intuitive on the controller in the future, but that's not available right now.

Pixel art, pretty well done, though nothing outstanding.

The music is pretty nice, but does seem redundant after a while. Especially when I find myself spending longer trying to maximize exp by taking down buildings around the area. The sound effects feel just right.

It's a pixelated RPG that involves a lot of leveling up and killing everyone within sight. The player will often get swarmed by enemies in the later levels in each run and so you are constantly circling around as best as you can or running away. If that doesn't appeal to you, then you might want to skip this one.

It's a cheap game, valued at $4.99 USD currently. Definitely game with enough content to worth the asking price. The price may be slightly higher when it develops further, but likely not much more.

1. It does feel a bit repetitive at times, especially if you plan to maximize your stats by taking down all of the buildings, even after killing all of the enemies. It may be nice to have the game auto-destroy all buildings after the entire map is cleared of enemies. (This will not always work as some villagers may be holing up in random buildings. But it would be helpful.)
2. Also when starting up a new run, you gain 1 universal skill point automatically for every 5 achievements, so it's possible to get a head start in subsequent runs. This along with some legacy items that carry through from previous runs are the only forward progression. This seems very minimal and it would be nice to be able to have a bit more meta gameplay.
3. Sometimes runs can last a while. It would be ideal to have an option to save & quit. I understand that most games with some randomization in world generation, permadeath, as in the roguelike label do not have in-run saves. (I did discuss this with the developer already, and there are plans to implement this.)

Break the Empire is a fun little action game with quite decent build up in each run. There are some roguelike properties and given the 4 unique characters, there's quite a bit of replay value. The game is still in early access and there's plans to add more content and to improve quality of life by the developer. That coupled with the cheap asking price, I would definitely recommend it.

I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.