Recent reviews by Fizzicles

Honestly not sure where the negative reviews are coming from - the store page is very clear about the current state of the game and it is still well worth the cost of entry. I'm really enjoying myself after my first run and I'm looking forward to 1.0. It feels like a shortened, lighter version of a Darkest Dungeon 1 campaign, with runs taking a couple hours instead of days and combat being short and sweet.

I also love the art and production, special shoutout to the music.

I had high expectations, considering I rate MT1 as my favorite deckbuilding roguelike of all time over giants of the genre like Slay the Spire, and they somehow threw them into the floor and stamped on them. Absolutely phenomenal game.

Probably my GotY for 2025. Incredible vision and aesthetics, one of my favorite visual styles in the last decade.

Instabuy just to support the devs to be honest. They're working incredibly hard on the game.

Instabuy to support the insane amount of effort and cool stuff in Kingdoms. The skins look great too, hopeful for more skins of this quality in the future as I'd buy more.

I'll put this as a tentatively positive. Why? Well, there's some polish missing that other reviewers have noted (menus not stopping input in the game, building placement not feeling 100% there, SFX is hit or miss), but I do genuinely love the concept and ideas here.

What really has started to grate is the abundance of, for lack of a better term, anti-competitive strategies. More than one game now has had one or more players pick Fay + Forged and completely turtle up, building multiple layers of walls in front the siege engines that will, with no exaggeration, one shot large clumps of even the highest tier units. I played a match for almost an *hour* against two other players doing this, the unit buff got to over 100% damage amp, and I still could not break them playing tech+forged myself. No amount of spell spam, unit spam, or any other strategy worked and eventually I got meat grinder'd down.

EDIT: There are even more problematic strategies than previously thought. While some things are certainly annoying, I don't think anything matches up to "My opponent built 25 layers of walls and built up enough mana to one shot my core with spells." I legitimately do not understand how this made it through testing in any regard. It is completely unfun and unreasonable. Please, please address this kind of thing. I will be taking a break until updates are out.

I have faith the devs can resolve situations like above, or maybe it's intentional, but it is for sure not a very fun experience. You may ask, why not try to target them down if they're just turtling? Well, the Battle Royale mode was set up such that I did not encounter them until it was me and the other two in the final 3. That's not a fault of the Battle Royale mode per se, but just to point out that I can't specifically target these players down, because I don't have access to them.

It's a shame because I love so much of what's here. The pixel art is gorgeous, the concept is very fun (Reminds me a lot of WC3 custom games) and I think it deserves a fair shake. I really hope devs read reviews like mine past the thumbs up and understand what I'm trying to communicate, because I would love this to be a game I put 200+ hours into, not 20.

A genuinely excellent game - played for 9 hours in a day. This feels like the kind of game I've been wanting to see made for years now after the success of games like They Are Billions. I still love Age of Darkness but this scratches an entirely different itch and I'm so excited to see how the devs evolve the game through early access.

Already well worth the money.

Genuinely one of the most novel, well crafted survival-craft type games I've ever played. I thought I was done with the genre but it's probably the best survival-craft I've played in at least 5 years. Please give this one a shot if you're on the fence, you will not regret it.

Excellent game, really excited for the future too.

The dev asked very nicely for positive reviews if we want to show support, and boy do I.

I didn't touch the game before the 0.2 update, I saw gameplay and it looked fun! But I wasn't in the mood for it at the time. I can say definitively though that, having watched a lot of pre-0.2 and now playing 0.2+, the game went through an incredible amount of change and improvement. I am seriously impressed reading through the patch notes at the amount of work and level of care involved in this game.