Dice Gambit

I dunno. It's not a bad game, but it feels like it would've made good use of an early access phase. There's things which are never explained, like personalities sometimes override each other. And then there's bugs which are a bit annoying... like those personality traits only preventing their counterpart if you select them in a specific order. So ... maybe they left a feature in they planned to remove, or maybe they just forgot since it seemed unimportant, but that's a character-creation bug right off the bat. There's also personalities that are missing lines etc. Little things. Or, most things on the turn counter tell you what they are when hovering over. Most. Not all. No idea what some of those markers are. They seem to represent mechanics rather than enemies, but which mechanics are not always clear. Sometimes the mechanics are new to the level, so there's no way to know what they are until they trigger. (Act 1 final fight is an example of this — it marks when the difficulty incr...

Edit: I've seen claims the devs are actively looking to fix a lot of issues I had below. I'll probably look back into this once some more changes come in, but I'm hopefully they help. I was really enjoying things at the start of this game. Fun premise, good world, interesting characters if a bit weird. The class building was interesting and getting new characters was pretty fun. Then i got to the second act, and things quickly started testing my patience. First of all, you cannot manually save your game, at least as far as I can tell. So the only time the game saves is when starting a new dungeon run and after every move in a dungeon, and right after a dungeon run in your hideout. If you want to quit after allocating all of your gold and choose your next dungeon next time, you will lose all of your progress spending your gold. This no save thing also made me lose all my progress for a fight after it soft locked. I used a move the game evidently wasn't fond of, and my end turn bu...

Style and flourish: this game has it. Character customization, both aesthetic and mechanical, it all works really well. What others here have to say about how the game looks and presents itself, it's all true. The problems lay in the systems themselves. You are informed about new concepts as they arrive (marriage, children, reputation gain to unlock extra classes) but it's harder to tell how you're meant to engage with them in order to match the difficulty curve. Personally, I took the intro cinematic as presented on its face; you're the new Inquisitor! You have to keep the family running! Get out there and kick ass! But all of the decisions you make in conversation don't seem to do anything, which is forgivable, but then you notice that whoever was selected first for each mission is referred to as the Inquisitor. Because you can, and should, I suppose, be churning old characters into money to start afresh with newer, younger characters...then how am I supposed to stay attached to th...

Unfortunately and with a sad heart, I can't recommend this game. I really REALLY want to, but I just can't. This is a hard one. The game itself isn't bad and the art style I personally find fantastic BUT the game content isn't just enough to be satisfying. I can feel the passion of the devs that made this as I continue playing, but as I grind and do the same-y quests over and over and over again it just felt boring. Even enemy/environment mutations didn't help at all and it just became an annoyance. Character classes help a bit as it's unique enough, but considering you can only have 1 UNIQUE SKILL (Which can't be change unless in a rare event) and 3 CLASS SKILLS are just not enough to be fun. Maybe if you can equip and unequip the class skills once you unlock them it can be fun, letting you try out what skills can work with what, but their system of overwriting skills whenever you give a new class a shot just ruin characters build and doesn't encourage players to try out new thing...

I really wish I could enjoy this game. I'm really trying to. I absolutely adore the art direction, the humour, the lovely soundtrack and unique worldbuilding. I love the idea behind the game — mixing XCOM's combat style, Fire Emblem-esque class system, Darkest Dungeon's character rosters that you grow attached to over time (and ragequit the game when they inevitably die) Hades-like NPC encounters and how your relations with them build up over the playthrough. And I love any game that gives you a family tree that you can expand and build your own legacy. But, after just having finished Act 2 of the game, I just find myself wishing I was doing something else with my time. For all that I like about the concepts of the game, the game itself is just [i]bad[/i]. The systems are narrow and shallow. The classes are few and their mechanics for a large part are very self-contained, meaning the more you are forced to multiclass, the worse and more diluted the characters end up feeling. The cha...

I really want to like this game. It has a lot of things I like. I like the combat. I like the art style. I like tactical RPGs and this really scratches that itch... Here's the problem. This game is incredibly unfriendly to new players. You will go into a mission and will be given an order like, "I need you to capture a blend." Cool. Got it. What's a blend? I look around the field at all of my enemies, and I don't know what they are. I mouseover them, and they become highlighted, but the game doesn't provide ANY information about them. Not even a fucking name. How the fuck am I supposed to know, as a new player, what the fuck I am supposed to be doing here? So then you go to the map, and you're given your move options represented by a bunch of icons. What do they mean? Fuck if I know. The game doesn't tell you. You mouseover them and it highlights aaaand... nothing. No title, no description, no information AT ALL. You're just flying blind until you memorize what a...

Quite note: I played a fair amount of the demo before getting the game. If you're looking for a tactics type game with a system that "inherits" traits from characters, this is great. A lot of tactics games don't really hit the right notes for me but this one really does it. It has... soft roguelite aspects where your characters gain new traits and classes and you learn the game more and make your next "kid" better. You mess up and make characters that aren't great but then you make their daughter a monster and she marries a guy who looks like a weirdo but he's okay cause he's great at what he does. If you are on the fence, try the demo and decide for yourself. The progress carries over. It's worth the try and I definitely recommend it. I really like this game! I really don't leave many reviews but seeing as this game just came out and I want the game to be supported, here I am.

The thing that stops me from wanting to boot this game up again isn't the dice, the progression or the obfuscated mechanics; it's the waiting. For a game with such explosive art and personalities, there is so much dragged-out bloat that it's unreal. The early fights show fantastic promise - tight arenas and a handful of enemies for you to map out in your head - but by the second act things go in a disappointing direction dramatically quickly. Everything just becomes swarms. Difficulty by numbers, punishment by attrition, and an exhausting amount of time watching enemy turns - *even in fast-forward*. So not only are you not even playing a huge chunk of the time, but there's so many useless guys that you don't even care what you're watching. [h3]The combat slog[/h3] You'll start a fight against 20 enemies, then three of them will summon five more goobers each. Some of them will cluster their actions together (like all attacking simultaneously) but more often they're all off wandering...

I had the pleasure of meeting the team and play test the game before release, and since then I couldn't wait for the game to finally come out, the passion on this game is overflowing and you can see the care they took in every aspect of it, from the art, to the writing and the music. I'm not big into strategy games like this, but somehow this has managed to hook me. It has so many skills and ways for the runs to go, the social mechanics are interesting and the characters are charming. So yes, I would recommend this game 100%. But hey, you can check the demo out if you are not convinced yet!

Can't help but recommend this one, loved it. As someone who was a fan of Darkest Dungeon, but thought the combat balance in that game was a let down, this is a huge improvement on a similar formula. Essentially you build up a roster of characters of various classes and send them out on expeditions, the goal is simply to get stronger and build an increasingly more powerful squad to take on the game's toughest challenges. What's great is that all characters have the ability to fully multi-class, and there are a ton of class options to choose from. You can really dig into the pros and cons of each class and the selection of abilities/passives they come with. The game outright encourages mixing classes and breaking the game by finding overpowered synergies. In combat, you're rolling to determine what actions you can take in a given turn. A big part of the fun is mitigating the impact that RNG has on your action economy and taking strategic risks. For example, you can forgo using a re-rol...