Vampires are also included amongst Mages and Monsters!
It is fun, little game. It is worth the asking price and represents fine value for what developer asks for its product. However, game fails in being anything more than a passing fancy.
🌈My Hopes & Dreams🌈
When I’m looking for an autobattler, I imagine that I’m going to build my troops, direct them how to fight and then see how each of my decisions influence then battle. I would cheer my units as they fight and blame myself for my poor choices when they lose. This is what I imagine when I heard term ”autobattler”. This is what this game tries to offer, but completely fails at.When I imagine an autobattler, I think of a tactical combat where my actions and choices matter. Where each decision, each unit is important. This what I wanted this game to be. Sadly, this is not such game.
This game falls into the same mistakes as every other autobattler to my knowledge. It immediately devolves into incomprehensible mess of units and spells which are impossible to decipher. Gameplay becomes not about auto battling, but about picking meta strategies.
What I actually played
It is a game about meta strategies, resource management between waves and getting more ahead as you get ahead. Game is about using minimal resources to pass waves in order to stack gold which later can be translated to late end army with buffs.This then has the opposite effect where you play the waves rather than battles. You know some waves to be harder than others and thus you invest more into that particular wave. Game becomes not about micromanaging battles or having an impact on them. It is all about micromanaging your resources between battles with heavy bias towards winning more. That means that if you get ahead, you get even more ahead. This translates into your troops just rolf-stomping right to the end and game offering no challenge at all. Due to this game favouring scaling, you can easily get too powerful for waves and they pose no challenge. If you get to tier 5 and are above 700 gold, you already won the game.
Your units are unlikely to have any impact on a battle and types of units can interchangeably be taken. This game is not about auto-battling and influencing combat with spells. It is about meta gaming waves and frantically spamming your cooldowns while ignoring all action on the field.
🕹️The Real Gameplay 🕹️
- In this picture you can see various upgrades. Things like having additional options is largely useless as it is something you want to have early on, but 70 gold is a massive investment! You can get two draws of entire new tier. The best of it, you can start scaling sooner. Game is all about scalling. A lot of their upgrades are useless like additional options or more units for all tiers bbeside the last one.
In a same manner, getting upgrades on your draw is completely irrelevant, because you do not want to stay on low tier units. They are completely useless in this game. The only thing which scales well are the last tier units. In this game you want to get to tier 5 and as quickly as possible to get upgrade to amount of units you get. Then you want to get to 700 gold and get maximum gold bonus. This is how you really start rolling with the upgrades in this game. This is how you meta game. There is no auto-battling in this game, just meta-gaming the system.
Difficulty - You can’t even blame the player as game is designed like that. Real game is in higher difficulty settings. However, those are just +999% to enemy having everything more. Your units do not scale at all. Your units cannot be controlled at all besides speed slider which decides which units will likely to get to the front first. There is no value to be gained from influencing battles and thus game fails at a fundamental aspect of being an autobattler which is fine. I never seen a good auto-battler ever made.
Meta Progression - At last, this game has stench of Vampire Survivors. Some systems are outright copied without thinking if they are worthy benefit to the game. Game has that annoying pacing where you could just AFK for first 5 minutes. First waves in this game are completely pointless. It has similar scaling and hero unlocks too. It draws inspiration from that game. However, copying a bad system will still not make it good. It only gets worse. This is a game where you cannot progress to higher difficulties, because you need to grind flat out power increases.
💻An Entertaining little distraction💻
This game is fun for a while. However, there is little gameplay and variety. Longevity in this game is supposed to come from doing the same thing over and over again with different heroes on higher difficulty settings. Sadly, there is nothing tightly balanced. It is just throwing feces to the wall and seeing what sticks. Tiering is pointless. Some upgrades are useless. Unit abilities do not matter. Spells vary between game breaking and bad. Game lacks solid gameplay foundations to be interesting in the long run. It is just a small, silly flash game which is great for entertaining you for a few hours before you get bored with it.Calicifer’s Reviews
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