I thought I'd put up a review for this really underappreciated little game. Developer Arcen Games makes wildly creative, deep, and eccentric genre-benders, the most celebrated of which is their asymmetrical space RTS/4x/tower defense, "AI Wars." AI Wars is clearly a great game, but somehow it's this one that I keep coming back to. Bionic Dues is Arcen's take on a "roguelike," but of course in proper Arcen style it is totally unique. Basically, it has a lot in common with a proper roguelike: you guide your characters through a series of procedurally generated dungeons. But there are a *lot* of interesting twists: - You have 4 characters, (which are actually some sort of mecha exoskeleton?) in any combination of "classes," but can only use one at a time, and it takes a turn to swap them out. - Loot and inventory customizaton is of primary importance. Each bot has *tons* of inventory slots, in several categories, and each class is different. Carefully poring over the hundreds of co...

Basically, Bionic Dues is a rogue-like mix of rpg/strategy dungeon crawler with hi-tech setting, where you fighting ever growing hordes of killing droids with your own droid. War of the machines, basic "save the humanity from annihilation" stuff - that's all you'll ever catch about story. You can think of it as of another small thing for touchpads, but no, it's not that simple. Actually, it is like an iceberg, where major part of the game is hiding beneath the surface. And yeah, if you're looking for light walk with painless achievements - that's a very wrong game for you! While its quite easy to catch an opening pattern, farther you go - more skill and luck you need. On Every Turn. Now, the real game is where its mechanics. You have dozens of basic options like which droid class do you prefer, what strategy will be the best with grading that given droid, and how do you planning to save the world? Destroying every enemy bot in the reach from the start, when they are still weak? Or jus...

Not my thing. I expected a team strategy game, I got a turn-based roguelike dungeon crawler where you control one mech at a time and swap them out like they are stances or armor sets as opposed to actual units. After getting over my confused expectations, I still found the game lacking. It's closer to a puzzle game wherein the goal is to maximize use of your resources (ammo, health, etc) to clear the boards in hopes of collecting loot you can use in upcoming missions. I can see the appeal, but it's just not for me.

At first this seemed like the perfect game for me: A roguelike with a tactics and strategic aspect on top of it. Unfortunately all the missions play very much alike and the game gets repetitive fast. Also, the loot is quite boring, since it's just an unending stream of similiar equipment with slightly different numbers. This also means that way too much time is spent between the missions comparing all these slight differences. Maybe some people like this aspect, but i don't. The loot should have been less frequent but more significant. I also question the aesthetic consistency of the game. It's very very ugly and the music is incredibly cheesy. The menu music seem straight out of some cheap anime movie.

On first impressions when I started playing this game, I wasn't too impressed. The difficulty seemed all over the place, there were a lot of numbers and stats everywhere, and things were confusing. But, if you stay on and keep playing, you eventually start to get a hang of it. There is a bit of a learning curve here, but the game has a very nice tactical depth to it and can be loads of fun. Upon starting a new game, you get to select your preferred pilot and 4 mechs/exosuits. Each pilot has a bonus perk of some sort, and each mech has its own strengths and weaknesses, some being more offensively based, others more to do with support stuff, like hacking and stealth. So it's up to you to pick your preferred team. The campaign itself has a simple concept - a robot army is going to attack your HQ in 50 days. Do whatever you can to prepare yourself for this attack. Each mission you do in the city counts as a day. You can go for missions where you find shiny new gear for your mechs to make...

Bionic dues is a roguelike, and plays pretty similar to standard rogue games. You take an action, then everything else does, repeat untill enemies are dead or an objective is complete. You get four party members that you can switch between at any point (costs an action) but only one of them can be on the field at a time, so you're really always controlling a single hero, not a squad. First it should be said that, like most arcen games, Bionic Dues has amazingly good music. Although they are merely adequate as a game developer, they have the amazing Pablo Vega on staff doing all their music. This is especially noticeable in the hauntingly beautiful title track, The Home That We Once Knew. A song so brilliant i'd recommend buying this game JUST to hear it, despite its other flaws. It really sets the scene and is a truly amazing first impression, sadly it's mostly downhill from there. This game has an unfortunate problem shared by other Arcen titles, in that the game bombards you with ...

A turn-based strategy game that goes straight to the point, but probably too much: you choose a mission, you fight, you loot, rince & repeat. There is no plot, no story, no character, nothing. And games end with some kind of "you win" message. Bionic Dues is a game mechanic, properly executed, but not much more. Despite these flaws, many players might still find this game attractive, except than: - loots are boring: they seem to follow the same rarity system than in well-known hack&slashes, except that there is little difference between a rare or an unique item. Uniques aren't uniques, and there is little to no variety in items - stats customization is dull - enemy bots are uninteresting - there is no variety in missions: same tilesets, same bots, only the goal slightly differ from mission to mission My note: boring/10

If you take out all of the human precision and care that goes into crafting a well-balanced tactical game and replace it all with procedurally generated hocus-pocus, you have Bionic Dues, a shining example of how NOT to do a game like this. For the sake of this review, I'm going to pretend that there aren't people on Steam who will try to act tough and say that beating a game that generates everything completely at random is based on some sort of "skill" or "good judgment". There's the power of decision making, and then there's just plain ol' being outmatched by a robot that leveled up several times more than your randomly-generated loot chest equipment can possibly hope to combat. No, there's good decision making, and then there's numbers. Tactical games have always been about numbers. They have always been about well-crafted maps with careful enemy placement as much as they have been about intelligent team setup supported by guaranteed available items in shops (because the game kno...

It is an interesting game, especially when on sale, there's a lot of playtime for your money. But you have to enjoy tactics and tinkering with abilities. If you are looking for high polish and story-driven adventures, this is not for you. That being said, the higher difficuilties are just frustrating and the achievements like winning with a single bot will only please a glutton for punishment. Totally ridiculous. In addition, the developers tried to be funny smarta$$es with their quips. Maybe focus on better balancing and a little more depth next time. This game could have been really good instead of "good enough when on sale".

A rather complex, but at the same time accessible roguelike involving tough meta choices on an FTL-esque campaign map, in depth exo customization and appealing combat mechanics.