A surprisingly deep strategic dungeon defense game with excellent pacing, sense of progression, and replayability.



Premise: Your spaceship crashland on an unknown planet. You find yourself burried into an unknown facility, trapped, with only the hope of find an exit out of this treacherous dungeon. WIth a team of heroes, you must plan a strategic escape by moving your ship's powercore to elevator. Along the way, without knowing where your destination lies, you must open doors to dark rooms populated with monsters, hazards, or if you are lucky, treasures, recruits, resources and special events. One of your main decision lies in using the game's main currency to power rooms, preventing monsters from spawning. You also have to allocate resources to build defenses, improve your hero, and invest in long term tech growth.



===Review===

*Note: this is a beta review.



Gameplay:

+++ Great balance betwen Macro and Micro management. Macro involves resource allocation, where and when to power/unpower rooms, tech progression, defense placement and combination. Micro involves allocating heroes to point of defense, creating chokepoints, using abilities, etc. This is a huge plus because at any given point in the game, you will always make meaingful decisions for which you can be rewarded or punished.

+++ Great Pacing. Pacing is determined by opening a door, which begins a new round: you gain resources, monsters spawn, you fight, etc. You can open as many doors and at whatever speed you wish; in doing so you dictate the flow of action. There's definitely as sense of joy as you become better at the game, especially in regards to making efficient decisions and this becomes every evident in your pacing.

+++Customizable experience = Replayability. You can choose heroes and your spaceship in this game, which modifies the starting and persistent conditions of the game. For example one of the spaceship in the game changes the number of starting heroes from two to four and boosts their damage, but disables certain resources/defensive structures.

+++ RNG = Replayability. Many factors are random as you progress through a level, such as what items you find, when/where you find merchants, which/when recruits you find, what special events occur, which monsters spawn, level layout, etc.

--- Uneven difficulty. Do not make this mistake of using difficulty metric from other games. EASIEST difficulty = NORMAL, play on easiest difficulty to learn game's mechanics. But once you've learned the mechanics, you'll find that easier difficulties take away from the play of the game, as abundent resources, weak monsters invalidates the need for better strategy.

--- This game could benefit HUGELY from having a campaign mode that ease the process of unlocking ships/heroes and also add to the lore of the game by letting the player find bits of additional back story and lore about the universe/dungeon. What about an in game lore-pedia that you unlock entries for by randomly finding them in the campaign.



Strategic Elements:

+++ Monsters have differentiated goals. Different monsters will prioritize different targets, be it your heroes, resource producing structures, defensive structures, NPCs. As such their pathing is different. Learning such differences adds depth to the game.

+++Well defined Hero roles. Most heroes in the game are specialized, which means that for any given situation you'd prefer some heroes over the rest due to their stats and abilities. This is good because your hero composition matters.

+++All Hero stats are relevant. This is impressive because 99% of games out there get this wrong.

+++All but one building in the game is useful.

--- Why is this building in the game???

--- Need more environmental hazards, such as cloud of slowing. I feel like this aspect has so much potential, as it makes certain locations more strategic/important to defend.

--- Need more NPC types to protect. The merchant is great for the game since the bonus of keeping him alive is huge. But the game could be better if there are more NPC types that offered different benefits.

--- Carrying crystal phase needs to be harder. I think there should be more of a sense of panic, with more monsters spawning, and maybe even random power-downs that are only alerted seconds before they occur.

--- I want more Ships!



Interface

+++ Clutter free

--- Skills need more information

--- Need customization hotkeys

--- Devs should merge the inventory window and the hero window, I understand that maybe the current implementation has concerns in screen clutter, but this can be solved by efficiently organizing screen real estate.

--- I want to be able to click on a building and see information on its stats instead of having to navigate through the buildings menu.

--- There should be a mouse over the research artifact to see what I'm currently researching. As in the case of having multiple artifacts on the map, one can lose track and its very annoying to traverse huge distances to view this info.



Visuals

+++Great color pallete

+++Stylized characters

--- hard to tell towers apart if build in very close proximity

--- hard to tell some lower tier offensive buildings apart from others due to their small size and some having similar looks.



Theme

+++ Interesting character bios

+++ Flavorful naming schemes

--- Wierd assortment of obsolete technology and futuristic technology for item choices.



Verdict:

Speaking from my perfectionist self, there's definitely room for improvement. And for a game in beta, it is quickly reaching its full potential. There are several improvements that the devs could implement that would make this game hands down THE BEST game in its genre.



In any case, this game is worth a buy if you are interested in the defense genre. Though it's hardly fair to pin this game down to any one thing in particular, as you'll find many elements from different genres that will add to your enjoyment, be it strategic planning/resource management, hero building/progression, basebuilding/defense, and a small slice of MOBA-esque hero micromanagement. In the end, all these things would be meanlingless if they didnt add up to a cohensive whole, but in this case, they do, and the game shines because all the parts ultimately add up to form a more intricate and interesting self.

Hi,



Thanks for this very interesting review, especially for your ideas to improve the game

Some of these suggestions are in our list of community feedback, and we plan to implement some of them for the release.

Hi Mysterarts,



It's always great to hear from the Dev community that potential improvements players themselves see in the game are already on the dev's list. I am very excited to see the game in its full implementation, as I am confidant, seeing the game in its state now, that it will be even more extraordinary.



And thank you for taking the time to read this, as writing this review in this particular style, focused on mechanics and being more critical, was actually a bit difficult, given the overwhelming positives that I see in the game.



I hope that others reading won't equate the sums of + and - that I've given to mean a balance of goods and bads; if i were to list every good mechanic I find in this game, this list would be much much longer.



On a side note, any ETA on MOAR ships arriving? You'd have to excuse the anxious kid in me.