Recent reviews by DragonTech

Great game! Not underrated, but not very well known.

A quick list of things I liked:
- The right amount of complexity for light hearted but engaging play. As someone who likes very fun, punchy RPG builds but doesn't like balancing dozens of stats and hundreds of pieces of gear (as is often the case in party based RPGs), this game has a combination of clear archetypes and mechanics that feel fun and engaging to play with while not being too overwhelming. Although I definitely had balances I leaned a bit more towards, I did multiple full team shifts over the course of the game as I unlocked new stuff, and I didn't really feel like I'd ever "solved" it. I only approached that point near the end game, and even then the final boss was a challenge.
- Unique, inventive mechanics. I don't think music bar RPGs are going to be a new genre or anything, but I think pivoting your game around a small, unique mechanic that you've clearly thought about a lot and polished, and then building more traditional design on top of that makes for a memorable experience and a sense of freshness for your players, as they try to apply their genre knowledge to a new situation. Very fun idea, very cool to make builds around.
- Great, unique art. I think with the current standard of what "good" game art looks like, it might be easy to say that this game's art is very simple/loose, but in my opinion it is a very refined, well tested style built on years of the dev finding his voice with webcomics. I think it's a general style group a lot of us have seen on Instagram, Twitter, or more dedicated webcomic sources if you're into them, and I think seeing that kind of art transferred to a game has worked very well for Dealthbulge. Great slapstick, great visual gags, characters that are easy to grok and fun to look at.
- Pretty solid playtime for an indie RPG. I don't personally like valuing a game just based on a dollar to hour ratio, different games can affect you in different ways in different frames of time, but a type of good game experience I like to have is being able to say "Oh, I spent the weekend playing X, I can't wait to get back in and finish it". It was a good, satisfying journey that I was able to invest almost 30 hours into, and spent that whole time feeling things out about the game. Wasn't gone too soon but didn't overstay it's welcome. For $20 I thought that was great.
- Funny writing. This goes back to the webcomic thing, but this is very clearly a game made by someone who has found a fair amount of success doing comedic writing. The humor is not necessarily for everyone, but I really enjoyed it.

I'll say real quick that the one thing I didn't like, but is also relatively genre standard, is the amount of backtracking and wall hugging I had to do to find all of the game's secrets. I'm largely a completionist, maybe not to the point where I need every achievement, but especially with functional collectibles or upgrades I'm usually trying to get everything. There's a pretty regular cadence of hidden stuff in this game, but sometimes I reaaaaaally had to grind, checking every nook and cranny of every big labyrinthine place I'd been before to get this one little thing I missed. That was a bit of a slog. But again, pretty common in lots of games.

Oh, uh, and I work in games but the title "Deathbulge" always makes it weird to bring up in conversation or try to post about on the company slack. However I still recommended it to a lot of people 1 on 1. 😅

Very fun game! Challenging at times, and you have to get used to being able to do multiple things at a time, but really rewarding when you get into a rhythm. Feeds my action brain goblins AND my farming optimization brain goblins.

This game's really fun! There are a lot of fun, unique abilities, the story, sidequests, and flavor texts are all great, and really humorous. I think more people should play it, it's definitely a diamond in the rough. Sometimes the long treks from place to place can be a pain, and it's grindy at times, but I still recommend it strongly.

Great game, awesomely balanced, some really strong emergent strategies. Feels great to have a good deck with matching relics.