Recent reviews by Yoshi, M.D.

I am over 30 hours in and I have not gotten to the talent tree system advertised on the store page. This game is much grindier than I even thought from previous reviews. I am already committed to the game, so i will update if i ever get to the talent system.

EDIT: I got access to the talent system after 5 more hours, turns out more grind is needed to farm enough materials to level up the skill trees. Every tree has the same basic skeleton for dodge invulnerability extension, which kind of limits the build diversity of the tree, since going down the middle requires the same investment across all the different characters.

This game truly is the epitome of making you wait to have fun. Other survivor games have far more player agency right off the bat, and don't require vast amounts of hours for meaningful progression. Crafty Survivors is demanding 60+ hours of gameplay for town progression completion, JUST ON EASY MODE (because it is faster to get through the campaign maps with faster and lesser spawns.)

Come back when this game is near complete in about 6 months and 9 months when it's on sale.
Ranged and Magic combat leveling is not out, meaning you can only have a full melee-party if you want to play co-op with friends. Teamfights are just composed of spamming your auto-attacks as the chain stagger on mobs don't ever allow them to get a single swing in to even block/parry the attack.
There are plenty of complete survival games with more interesting combat and in-depth crafting system at a cheaper price tag. It is embarrassing that Jagex released the game in this state. No amount of pretty graphics can make up for agonizing gameplay and slow progression.

Great synergies and well defined build concepts specifically within the Thief Archetype. Would like to see more design for Warrior and Hunter.

Introducing a Hardcore element to a rogue-survivor-like game really requires more rewards for keeping your characters alive and having a long "career". Every 1000 kills in a round you get a completely random mutation that could be negative or positive. I have completed some long rounds where i am rewarded with 4 negative mutations, which i have to spend 500 gold each to delete them, meaning the reward for completing that round was -2000 gold and ZERO power level increases. If my character had died, i would have gotten the same power level increase (because it was a fresh character) and I would have saved 2000 gold. These kind of outcomes shouldn't be possible when the balance of the game relies so heavily on keeping characters alive for long grindy runs. This kind of progression heavily direct rounds towards fast raids to quickly cycle through mutations, rather than risky raids that mainly give you base resources instead of meaningful and tangible character upgrades.

Game is very much unfinished as it is, progression is too slow for incomplete goals, as if your time is being wasted so by the time you reach the end you realize there's not much there.
Dev spent too much time spent on aesthetics and not nailing gameplay.
Some other reviewers have mentioned Greedland as an alternative and I agree, for the same money and time spent, you are better off getting that game instead.

Until YAZS is completed, it doesn't deserve a purchase price past $5

game power scaling is too slow in the beginning, absent of any post-game progression, which is ALSO too slow. The first upgrade requires 100 post-game currency, I got 9 for my first run that went fairly well, and was unable to get any currency past 0 because my initial picks were too unlucky. The game should feel like it is moving every time you get through a 5-10 minute run, not feel like progressing backwards.

Holocure - Save the Fans is the gold standard for survivor games, because not only is it an engaging and viable 20-30 minute rounds, IT IS FREE. At the very least a game that costs more than $0 should be able to hold a light against Holocure.

good game

good game so far, got hundred hours in just on the prologue/demo version of the game.

Fun for awhile, but has no replayability, outside of failing your first few games and picking up recipes to accomplish your final run. there are no alternate routes to the win condition. When the board gets too massive and cluttered, there is a lot of glitching out, which makes it especially hard to coordinate battles when the fight is moving all over the place, preventing you from pulling units in and out of the fight.

Like Slay the Spire, but going down instead of up. And Hybrid classes