StarVaders

This game is really fun, not quite one of my favourites, but that really comes down to most characters being cool and awesome to play and two super duper doggy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ characters that were a blight on my 100% completion. Good things: Lots of build diversity, the game features "Synergy packs" which disproportionately seeds the runs with different kits you can mix and match with. Allows there to be 20 different archetypes without watering down the card pools. Fun characters mechanics, class relics can be entirely different system mechanics rather than just numerical passives. Lets each character feel truly unique. Mostly about puzzle solving rather than building infinites. The game is tower defense and making sure you have the ability to cover yourself for current and future turns. This game acknowledges the joy and whimsy that is Lotus Land Story by stealing two songs from its soundtrack. (/hj) Kaia.... Bad things: -Jesus christ Noel I need you to lock the ♥♥♥♥ in. -Zeke I just hate you. -Some of the achievements are just straight up only possible when you turn on assist mode. I was kind of sad at how uneventful this conclusion was when I made it to the very end and the strategy is just, "Yeah turn on infinite resets and make an infinite scaling attack". -For specifically the Act IV boss, you need like, a handful of specific cards or synergies to make it possible simply because of how much they throw at you. The fight consists of three separate puzzles and it's very hard to account for all of them without shenanigans. overall very cool and awesome yay 8.7/12

This is a very solid deckbuilder. The lack of a traditional health bar (as damage is tied to enemies reaching the bottom of the screen) really benefits the grid-based elements: There's a lot less "attack, then move out of the enemy's way" than what you may see in similar games. A few other things to know: - There are three different primary cardpools spread across twelve different characters each. The characters have a good amount of variety between them, and there's sure to be a few that you click with. There's a good amount of different card synergies, but the artifact pool (passive upgrades) is on the smaller side. - There are five different difficulties total. On the later ones, this is a very boss-oriented deckbuilder, meaning that the common enemies usually pose next to no threat. You do have to unlock the higher difficulties though, so if you're deckbuilder savy, expect an easy first few runs. - Speaking of the bosses, there is a definite discrepancy in their power levels. There's the standard three acts, three different bosses for each, but each difficulty has one that's either way more difficult or way easier than the others. Act 3's "kraken" is especially underpowered compared to the other two bosses. - The story is your standard paper-thin deckbuilder fare. A few quick cutscenes before and after runs. - The rewind feature is one of the coolest concepts I've seen in a roguelike. You can reset anything: turns, card rewards, shop options, etc. But since they're limited, the decision on when to spend them adds a great element to the strategy. Overall, the 8.5/10 the game has on Metacritic is well-earned.

if you like this genre its fun! i had a blast!