Recent reviews by ```skunk3```

FIrst of all, the game is extremely p2w. Unless you dump a bunch of money to get materials for making better cards, you are at a massive disadvantage against all of the people who are spending money.

Second, the balance of the game is super weird. From the heroes to the towers to the sends... it's all out of wack. The hero abilities are very imbalanced. The towers don't do enough damage and/or the sends have too much HP. There's no good way of dealing with a lot of stuff that is thrown at you.

It's almost not even worth using high cost cards because people can just spam 0 cost cards, or stuff that costs 1 gold and rush from the very start.

The defense option of some towers is completely pointless. Yeah, they do like an extra 10 damage when defending but it barely makes a difference.

The reload time of towers is absurd. I can understand maybe 1 round, but 3 rounds to reload is ridiculous.

Progression / rewards for playing PVP is incredibly slow.

Even though the game has been out a short time, there's already turbo nerd virgins exploiting the current meta.

The voice acting is generic and cheesy as it gets.

The audiovisual aesthetics of the game are about as exciting as watching paint dry.

I wanted to like this game but the balance of everything seems so completely off and confusing. For now this game should be avoided.

The game isn't terrible.

The issue with the game is the amount of grinding it takes to get the full experience.

It's only $5 so you can get your money's worth for sure, but I am reviewing this based upon whether or not I think it's a good game - not if it is worth $5.

Basically, what you do is go on runs with various characters and get semi-random power-ups as you gain enough XP. Your job is to survive the full 30 minutes that each run takes. It's kinda fun at first to experiment with different characters and play styles, but it quickly becomes apparent that the game is tedious and grindy.

If you like arena survival type games, you'll probably enjoy this. If you have the patience and capacity to grind the same thing over and over again just to unlock incremental upgrades to your 'power level,' you'll probably enjoy this.

Personally, I have to look at it like this: Is it worth me sinking a ton of hours into a game like this? A game in which all you really do is just walk around and collect XP? You can control your attacks manually but it's far better to put it on auto and just use the left thumb stick to walk around. My answer is no, it is not worth me sinking much time into a game like this because there's no skill or strategy involved... there's nothing to the game really. It's fun to play for a day or two AT MOST and then you'll forget you ever bought it.

This game is either going to be interesting to you, or not at all, depending upon your preferences.

I'd say the game is a mix of titles such as:

Hades (gods bestowing random powers and having beef with each other, general art style in many ways)
Vampire Survivors (pixel art, extremely simple mechanics, massive hordes of enemies)
Soulstone Survivors (manual aim, lots and lots of XP gems, different rarities / tiers of abilities and being able to upgrade them, adding difficulty modifiers to increase loot quality)

...as well as a more Diablo-esque gear system that has mostly randomly generated stats, so you're always looking through your loot and at the shop to see if you can find something just a little bit better than what you currently have.

There's also a skill point system where you can purchase passive upgrades for your character. The only thing that sucks is that you're limited to 36 points, which is enough to get one of the capstone abilities if you plan carefully, but it's not nearly enough to get everything.

At the time of this writing, the game is EA and that is very obvious. There's only two stages that I've seen thus far, which is very disappointing because the only thing you can do is just experiment with the different characters and try to play on harder and harder settings. That's not really for me. I like finding a character or two that I like and working on them until they are godly, but not in an obsessed grind sort of way... more natural. Unfortunately, grinding is a part of the nature of games like this and it's why I tend to lose interest after a while.

Overall I think the game shows promise but right now there's not much depth to it.

I'd say wait for the proper release, or get it heavily discounted ONLY if you like this sort of game. It gets old fast.

The gameplay feels good and there's enough items to make you feel as though there's plenty of variety for all playstyles. The graphics kinda have this old school Neo Geo feel to them in a good way. My only complaints are:

1. Being a roguelike game, sometimes you get really screwed when it comes to RNG and just don't get anything good during a run, or can't possibly afford the good stuff.

2. It's not made clear that you HAVE TO talk to the NPC bad guy and fill his chalice with souls before being able to actually beat the game. If you plan on playing through, you cannot skip him and complete his quests, which is a bit annoying because it doesn't tell you (that I am aware of) how many kills you need, how many you have, etc. Also, if you are trying to hit a quota of kills that means selecting path options that involves fighting rather than goodies, which sucks.

Overall I'd say the game is totally worth it if you're a fan of this style of gameplay.

I am giving this a reluctant thumbs down. Most of what I bring up has to do with PVP and not single player.

First of all, forget your notion of typical tower defense because this is not it. It's technically tower defense but plays drastically different than 95% of other TD games. For the first couple of days I enjoyed the game. It was fun going through the tutorial, doing some solo stuff, and then jumping onto multiplayer. It was neat to try out the different factions and see what all of the towers are about.

What quickly became clear is that what towers you have/select is mostly irrelevant. This game's balance is weird as heck. Offense seems so much important than defense. Sending enemy units to your opponents not only puts pressure on them, but also increases your income, so it's pretty much necessary. The problem is, after a while you memorize what comes on certain waves and what to send on that wave. It becomes very formulaic and meta. In short, the game becomes very repetitive, fast. Rarely do people do anything that falls outside of the meta norm. As long as you have the minimum defense necessary to deal with the waves, all you do is build eco so you can send at certain waves and hope to win. Some units are clearly better than others as well and for most units there's only 1 upgrade path and 1 upgrade total outside of randomly bestowed buffs.

Another thing to mention that I am sure probably has been mentioned before is the fact that the player base is very pushy and toxic. You have people who want you to do exactly what they tell you to do (which is fine if youre a newbie, I guess) but if you don't give in to their demands, they start screaming at you and calling you every name you can think of.

I played long enough to experiment with all of the units and learn the waves and my conclusion is that although the game SEEMS like it has a lot of depth, it really doesn't. Maybe it's more nuanced and tactical at the highest levels of play but I certainly didn't experience anything like that, and I hit Expert rank (or whatever is just above DIamond) in PVP in a relatively short time of casually playing.

2vs2 is more challenging than 4vs4 because there's less people to depend on to catch leaks, and also because you can run into clan mates or friends playing together and they are going to be way more cohesive than you and some random you get paired up with.

The graphics are decent, sound is okay, and the game generally runs smooth. Really it just comes down to whether or not you enjoy this type of gameplay. I really thought I'd like it, which is why I bought it. Unfortunately, at the end of the day the game is way too repetitive and shallow for me. There's really no tactics involved aside from basic unit/tower placement, but even that isn't THAT deep. Ultimately, I feel as though most matches resolved in an extremely similar way, on the same 2 or 3 waves, no matter what... ESPECIALLY if you are playing 4 vs 4. Virtually every game ends in a big wave 22 push and whoever wins is basically a flip of the coin.

It's not a bad game. I just wanted and expected more dynamic gameplay and tactics. I don't feel any urge to boot it up and play because I know that it's just going be the same ol' thing every match.

I don't know why people are saying this game is easy. I am no stranger to roguelikes or strategy games in general. Maybe I've had the worst RNG ever, but in every run I find myself underpowered by far and unable to defeat what should be run-of-the-mill encounters.

This game offers a blink (teleport) mechanic but the blinks are limited, and oftentimes you MUST use them or take otherwise unavoidable damage, or even get stunned. You can get more blink charges by breaking enemies' armor, but that often puts you directly in harm's way, which zaps your HP. Ranged weapons are barely worth it since enemies can always close in on you and melee weapons don't feel powerful enough.

I only spent like 5 hours playing the game but I was frustrated and bored by the time I called it quits. Maybe this game is right up your alley. For me, it's a definite thumbs down.

Another thing that really sucks about the game are random curses you get, some of which are straight-up heinous, like not getting gold for many encounters, or not being able to change your weapon. It's punishing just for the sake of being punishing and adding some sort of artificial 'difficulty' to the game.

In short, everything bad that happens to you is really bad and everything good that happens to you (items, etc) is mediocre, situational, or useless.

This game is a perfect example of why Steam needs to allow neutral ratings. I am 'not recommending' this game but I don't think it's terrible. I just don't think it's worthy of an 'overwhelmingly positive' rating here on Steam.

First, the good:

4 playable characters, each with unique pools of cards to make gameplay varied.

Various runes that give buffs (or debuffs) that can be collected

Somewhat addictive if this style of game is for you

And now, the bad or not to my liking:

This is very much a roguelike game and random luck can and does screw you over all of the time

Healing is relatively rare in the game, and pretty weak in most cases. This means that you'll want to avoid taking damage as much as possible, which is pretty much impossible depending on how far you go and what deck/strat you're running.

Random events that force you to lose HP, or take a curse, or take some relic/rune that sucks and doesn't help you

Upgrading cards is super important and at rest sites you are forced to pick between healing HP or upgrading a card

Most themed decks that require a handful of cards to pull off are very hard to put together due to random card rewards and shop choices, typically forcing you to play a more generalized deck rather than focused

Many gameplay mechanics (like statuses of various types) are completely unexplained AFAIK and the only way to know what something means is to just pay attention and see how you're affected, which means doing run after run after run just to understand what's going on.

The graphics are a total joke. The game looks dull and old and character/enemy design is extremely bland and generic

The music and sound fx are also as bland as it gets. Generic and barebones.



With all of that being said, if you like the idea of a deck builder roguelike, you'll probably like the game. Personally, I'm on the fence about it. I enjoy it in certain ways (trying to find great combos) but the RNG is really a punch to the gut sometimes. You could have a great run going and end up dying due to horrible random luck.

It's really not that different than most of the other Kingdom Rush games but it's still worth the money if you like mindless tower defense. Not stellar but far from bad. Good time killer.

I bought the game over the holidays with a heavy discount and I still feel unsatisfied.

The gameplay seems smooth and everything but there's some mechanics that don't feel right and/or don't make sense if you're new coming into this. Sometimes it feels like you're playing rock, paper, scissors. What I mean by that is that you can throw an attack at somebody and then one millisecond before it connects they will throw some other attack that for some reason will take priority over your attack. Yeah, I know that light punches and kicks are fast and have relatively few frames but still... I've been playing this game for about a week now and so much of it just doesn't make any sense to me AT ALL.

Another example is throws. I can be right up in hugging distance and try to throw someone and it will completely whiff yet my opponent can throw me. Am I off by a freaking millimeter or what? I also don't understand how some people can launch me into throws after a jump the nanosecond I touch the ground, yet when I try to do that to other people it NEVER WORKS.

I swear to god, playing this game sometimes feels like playing a cheating system. I know that people will just say 'git gud' or trash talk me for saying this but there's something about it that just doesn't feel right to me. I'm not a newcomer to the Street Fighter series and played all of them pretty extensively except for SFIV.

Once you get hit by *any* attack you can't do anything until your opponent ends their combo. You can't block, parry, nothing. You just have to sit there until their 15 combo is done and 40% of your life is gone. Supers (called "critical arts" in this game) are extremely fast to perform and link into as well, so you can easily go from dominating a round to dead in seconds without being able to do anything about it, because like I said, once you get hit once by any attack, you're just a sitting duck until your opponent finishes or drops their combo. It's very, very frustrating.

You can parry attacks in this game but it's awkward compared to SFIII. Why on earth do I have to press medium P + K to parry when I can just use the joystick like before? I also feel like V-gauge builds up way too fast which allows people to spam way too many EX moves in a match, and the V-trigger stuff seems cool in theory but it's really a convoluted mess which requires people to spend a ton of time studying what how it works for each character because if you play against someone using a character that barely gets used online you will have no idea what you're coming up against... and since the character roster is enormous, that's a lot of info to know.

I've been playing almost nothing but ranked matches and I am completely stuck in rank. I'll go from bronze to super bronze and back down to bronze... or Ill get to ultra bronze and get knocked down. I've been trying my hardest to hit silver rank and it feels pretty much impossible.

On top of that I am pretty sure that there's people with smurf accounts because I will bump into people with rookie rank who utterly destroy me... like I can barely even land a single attack on them and they know every special move, every combo, etc. No rookies are playing like that so yeah, it's obvious that some people get off on trolling / smurfing. Pretty lame if you ask me.

I will aslo say that another thing that sucks about the game is that in SFV there's hardly ANY story at all. When you beat the game with any character you basically get one screen of the lightest epilogue imaginable. That's it. The story might as well not even exist in this game because it doesn't really add to the lore of the series at all.

On top of that I think the music is really, really mediocre in this one. Pretty much forgettable, really.

Should you buy it? Depends. Are you okay with knowing that the next game comes out this summer and that this one might go dead? Are you okay with getting obliterated constantly and feeling ripped off by game mechanics that make no discernible sense? I'm partially joking. The game itself as a multiplayer experience is a pretty decent one but this game you have to study hard and learn all the nerdy boring info like frame data and matchups and s*hit like that if you want to have a chance at succeeding.

Oh and also, there's a stupid advertisement that plays before every match. You can turn it off but it's a pain trying to figure out where that option is at first. It's stupid that it's on by default anyway. I also hate getting bombarded with system messages every time I log in, trying to get me to do crap so I can unlock extra costumes or whatever. Hey Crapcom - instead of making people engage in dumb grinds for this content, why not just give it to us from the start?

Super fun yet simple. Great for 2 player action but its dead online unfortunately. It's worth it if you like old school shmups and Neo Geo in general.