Recent reviews by Dispenser (Garacian)

Incredible free horror game reminiscent of Little Nightmares. Took me 40 minutes but that's mainly because I died in dumb ways a lot LOL. Has a neat little story told through snippets and the main character is charming and unique. I would LOVE to see a much longer game with expanded needle and thread mechanics in this same universe. Very cool!

Extremely fun game! Great art, wonderful game play mechanics that are both simple and unique, and 2+ builds for each character! You can play at your own pace too: you can replay a level for loot and exp if you feel behind, you can swap weapons and decks and try different builds and party comps, or even buy a bunch of overpowered healing potions (which you will need for the final boss, good luck lol). Highly recommend.

Decent amount of content.

Name cute animals after your friends, watch them attempt to leave as discontentment rises, sacrifice them to your elder god for power! What more could you want?

Best puzzle game of the century

Legend of Keepers: Return of the Goddess is an excellent expansion to Legend of Keepers. The new master, Toeris the Hippo, is a goddess of fertility and childbirth, but plays more like the goddess of kicking ass and tanking anything the heroes can throw at her.

Gameplay:

Toeris brings with her a new minion type - the mummies. While they don’t feel drastically different from most of the other monsters that already exist, they do bring with them a new mechanic. The wraps buff imposes morale damage on any hero that slays a monster with wraps stacks, which can be given to your monsters through traps, spells, and monster abilities. This seems lackluster at first but with some strategizing and upgrades it is easily possible to have a monster impose over 20% of a hero’s morale on death.

The Hippopotamus Goddess herself is an absolute tank of a master with some fantastic morale attacks. Heroes that make it to her sanctum will often become afflicted with damage debuffs and tire themselves out on her incredible health pool before fleeing in terror.

Graphics:

A new Egyptian style temple has been added as a dungeon location for heroes to invade. It is a fantastically thematic location that adds variety to the dungeon roster, but lacks a lot of the gruesome pixel art that makes some of the other dungeon locations memorable.

Most of the mummy units you’ll get at the beginning are mildly uninteresting but you’ll quickly be offered some visually distinct and fun mummy monsters to play with, such as an undead sphinx with poisoned claws, bipedal cat mummy with a bleeding swipe, and a crocodile mummy with a fan-like axe polearm.

Toeris herself is really well designed. She’s huge and powerful looking, and her wrappings and armor are much better fitted and maintained, as would befit a mummy of her stature and importance. Her attack animations are probably her weakest visual aspect.

Replayability:

At the time of this review I have only played through the first mission (around 1.5 hours, your time will vary as I was recording for YouTube). I think she has potential to be my favorite master (right behind Sarel, my corrupted dryad crush), as her talent tree has some interesting build paths in it to try out, and her mummies bring a fair few ways to play, such as morale damage, elemental attacks, and debuffs/dots.

With 5 more missions to play with a new master plus endless modes, the replayability is fairly high.

Conclusion:

For $5.99 USD this is kind of a steal. I’ll easily get 8-10 hours out of this DLC if I only play each mission and the endless mode once. The visuals and theme fit very well in with the original game and the new monsters and master bring excitement and new interest to the game. I got a good few laughs out of the new traps and some of the monster animations. One of the biggest strengths of Legend of Keepers is the satisfaction of solving the “puzzle” of each dungeon - setting up your monsters and traps to deal with the latest set of three foolish heroes. This expansion gives you new challenges and options to empower you for that very purpose!

My YouTube channel has playthroughs for all the masters (which is still ongoing), and at the time of this review I have already started my Toeris missions. You can watch here:

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUImnUaUUjufW7mu32qNRQVTeBJB1MnNb

Legend of Keepers is a great rogue-lite game in which you manage a dungeon as part of a monster corporation. This corporation employs powerful dungeon keepers that set up traps, cast spells, and train monsters to protect the treasure at the end of the dungeon from heroes,, which are seeking to enrich themselves while destroying monsters and reversing all your hard work.

Gameplay:

The game is played over weeks, each week having one or more options for you to choose from. It plays a bit like slay the spire in that you can't backtrack to any nodes you skipped, but it being framed as a schedule makes a lot more sense than the more abstract way a lot of rogue-lite games do this.

You'll have a variety of tasks to choose from over the weeks, including defending your dungeon, hiring more monsters, building new traps, upgrading and training, sending your monsters to therapy, training your master, dealing with visitors, renting out your equipment and monsters, and much more.

Battling the invading heroes involves setting up your dungeon to the best of your ability, and thankfully once you head into a dungeon there is very little randomness. You can see heroes damage types, targeting parameters, and special abilities, and you can set up your monsters, traps, and spells to accommodate this information. If your defenses don't go as well as you planned, the heroes will make it to your master, who is often a powerhouse capable of making short work of heroes. Don't get overconfident however, as your master's hp is not fully reset after a dungeon and regenerates fairly slowly, so multiple unfavorable dungeons in a row could spell the end of your run.

The game has missions as well as an endless mode, both of which help you unlock more monsters and artifacts that will become available in the future.

There are three different masters, a slaveholder, an enchantress, and an engineer, who specialize in monsters, spells, and traps respectively. They each play very differently and tend to have access to very different monsters and traps. Each of the three masters has a unique set of spells only available to them, and they can be very powerful if used to combo with your monster and trap synergies.

Graphics:

The game features sprites that honestly look amazing. I’ve looked at the animations frame by frame while video editing and it seriously enhanced my appreciation for the art style. The monsters are creepy and sometimes goofy, the heroes begin to look epic as they level up, and the spell and trap effects have a weight and crunch to them that really makes you feel like you’re punching through heroes with a huge ballista, or bloodletting them with an angry swarm of huge insects. The graphics and effects are gruesome, cute, and fun to watch.

Replayability:

Each master has 5 missions as well as an endless mode. The missions, though not described this way, serve as a tutorial for each master, giving you more and more challenges while unlocking new dungeon gear with which to play. The early missions are fairly easy but ramp up in difficulty, and once you have finished those you can switch to endless and see how many years you can run a dungeon before the heroes finally get through. Masters gain experience after missions and endless runs which you can use on their talent trees to make them even more powerful and unique.

Conclusion:

I really love this game and find it even more fun than Slay the Spire. I love the graphics quite a bit (which is something that kind of turned me off to Monster Train) and always enjoy watching the attacks and effects, which are fairly quick so even after seeing them a hundred times you likely won’t feel bogged down in animation time. The slow but steady leveling of each master leaves me wanting to start new missions/runs, and beating a mission usually takes less than a couple hours. You can quit at any time you’re not actively defending a dungeon and come back, making it a great game for both a lunch break or a marathon. Legend of Keepers is easily an 8.5/10 for me.

Thanks for reading! If you want to see some of my playthroughs, please check out my Youtube channel. I’ll link my introductory playthrough - the first episode is a tutorial on how to play!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUImnUaUUjucxJ6RN6YRejzCVPUskIVbs

This is my favorite video game. Let that sink in.

Why is this stupid train game so fun...

It's weird that only one of my steam friends has this game. Many of my steam friends play lots of role playing games and strategy games, and I hope that they grab this game some day and give it a try because it's very good. Moreso than most strategy games I play, each game of Fallen Enchantress feels so different than the last, and the variety of faction/leader traits, monsters, resources, and unit gear combinations makes for a very rewarding experience. Ramp up the monster level and spawn rate for a challenge that can threaten to destroy your cities, or add extra wildlands so the map is filled with strange phenomenons and epic creatures!