Recent reviews by PeekingPanda3

No

Seal of Approval

Big Age of Empire IV lover, but I am disappointed with the glaring flaws in the new variant civs on launch. While I don't dislike the idea of new civilizations being overpowered upon release, such as the last DLC. These civs bring along several instances of simply broken tactics. While not even being objectively the strongest in all examples, they do create a terrible experience to play against.
No reason Horde should have shipped with 3 different bugs that warp their strength. Kipchak area damage, 'Stable Reinforcements' working on Torguuds, and Torguuds having Keshik healing without even researching the upgrade.
No reason Shinobi should have a debuff orders of magnitude stronger than any other defense debuff in the game, while also being a global summon on a low cooldown. Even if toned down for strength it will be uninteractive.
No reason Tughlaq, while ♥♥♥♥ in most regards, should have healer elephants so strong in feudal age.

Overall I'm glad to see my favorite game get more content, but this should have cooked in the QA testing for another two weeks before releasing. I would recommend you buy it, but please do better next time Relic. Its like the devs never even tested going Imperial on Horde.
Crucible is cool, the bug sucked but I don't like meta-progression anyway.

Gameplay - Certainly a slow start for what is functionally a pretty simple game; the RTS controls are bare bones but satisfactory, restricting you to single preset control groups of your up to 5 units. Once in combat though it all feels very soft and mushy. Attacks have little weight outside of large cool downs, and not much in the way of feedback or responsiveness. Combat loop mostly consists of standing still whittling down some HP sponges while occasionally moving units to either dodge or cast big cooldowns. An auto-battler with more effort is how it felt, little skill expression or tactics beyond the basics.
With combat presenting underwhelming, I was optimistic the overworld would present some very strong elements. But unfortunately this feel short as well; presenting little in the way of interesting gameplay choices or story elements, 50/50 knowledge check encounters rather than interesting opportunities for tactical tradeoffs(aka a lack of understanding what makes these mechanics good), AND BY GOD NO FAST FORWARD FOR A CARAVAN THAT MOVES ACROSS THE SCREEN AT THE PACE OF A SNAIL(I swear I spent at least a 1/8th of my time just watching this cart roll around).

Art- While my foremost priority will always be the gameplay; I did find myself a bit irked at some of the landscape and unit art direction. What could be just a stylistic preference isn't for me, it seemed just as likely that much of it was possibly the laziest option. I do like the effects design; casting abilities or falling victim to them was always a treat.

Do not recommend, but don't ignore, has potential for improvement for sure! Nowadays a lot of devs seem afraid to move away from the meta-progression emphasis in this genre. To each their own but it felt like you are playing with farming those very powerful persistent resources in mind as opposed to actually enjoying the run for what it is. <3

Roguelike deckbuilders have become my favorite genre in the recent decade. Despite this I still critique them just as harshly if not more harshly than any other genre I might rarely review. SpellRogue has some really solid gameplay here at its core. There is little I could find fault in with regards to the builds and journey of creating your deck, and many positives to be had with how fun playing your dice can be, though I can't say I've tried everything yet.

There is enough done very well about the game that for the sake of brevity I'd be better to simply list the things that I felt are currently (Update 5) not ideal, and you can infer that everything else not listed is done well!
Cons:

Crowd Control/Debuffs: Most negative experiences for me had to be just how severe some of the debuffs can be in this game, simultaneously presenting so many gameplay concerns at once as opposed to just the usual few. Debuffs in this game can and will restrict the options for builds that you can go for, most naturally significantly impacting 'few dice' builds as opposed to builds that may split, return, and roll more dice. Most debuffs don't present any counterplay either, which in of itself is not too unusual, but it seems common that a debuff will constantly be reapplied at times making you stuck in a hole you can't dig yourself out of based on which core ability it might have landed on first.

Overworld/Map:
The options and generation for the map on this roguelike has been underwhelming, presenting few interesting landmarks and only a few paths. And while I can't put my finger on it exactly, the RNG formula for generating the map feels strange at times, offering duplicates of locations in sequence but not spawning them elsewhere, or just generally being very clearly bad as opposed to good paths. I personally think expanding the map for more options for the player to take is rarely a poor idea, as even a single additional column of events could drastically improve consistency and decision making for the player without introducing balance concerns. And don't get me wrong on the critique of few interesting events, a MUCH more common critique I'll usually have it how many roguelikes introduce such a high-variance of RNG in events; SpellRogue doesn't have this problem at all, its the inverse I'd say.

Meta-progression:
A personal crusade of mine in some regards, you can ignore this if it personally doesn't bother you. I sound like a broken record complaining about meta-progression but SpellRogue slightly bothers me for a different reason than usual. It felt as though I had seen every unlocked relic/card within a few playthroughs that I could remember them all, and then new unlocks would be drip fed slowly after each run. It just felt a bit soon to have seen almost everything, and then I felt the typical FOMO and shame that so many possibly interesting options were cursed to be unlocked towards the end of my time spent playing, or never at all since I CHOSE to just play the character I enjoyed the most. Being pressued to play the others never feels good for the players in my opinion. The higher level unlocked relics do seem to also powercreep the base ones as well.

Conclusion is that the game is great and I would recommend to any roguelike deckbuilder fans, especially those fond of dice. I would personally recommend for enjoyment going for a sort of 'card-use completionist run' where you seek to win runs using all the cards and builds you hadn't used before, instead of delving into the Ascension mechanic.

Viscerally unfun game that fundamentally confuses the concept of difficulty with being unpleasant. I'm not sure who the target audience is that would enjoy this, I couldn't picture such an individual. In addition to the abysmal gameplay that I don't want to get into. The game has criminally poor explanations for its mechanics and bad UI.

Best case the game is funny to gift your friends to have them experience it and hopefully get a laugh out of it before uninstalling. The bad and the ugly is found here, go somewhere else for the good.

A bit too much of a hyper casual button mashing beat-em up for my tastes. Even goofing off with friends we appreciate there being more competitive integrity than exists in 'Crawl'. Concept is exceptional but nothing stood out as feeling 'just right'.

Every now and then I look back at this game in my library and reminisce a bit. It was honestly a ton of fun while also delivering a gameplay system that is unique among the droves of roguelike card battlers on steam. For every bit the enemy mobs were unfair and overpowered, you equally had potential to find ridiculous combinations and abuse the AI to survive. Possibly not for the most casual of gamers hoping to coast along without worrying about their every action, as your action economy both in battle and overworld travel is vital. All I could possibly ask of this game is for the developers to release a sequel or DLC; but that seems unlikely at this time.

Is it balanced? No. Is the game play diverse? Arguably no. Are lobbies free from droves of bots? Strangely no. But nonetheless the game is a fun, casual game to play with some of your friends when you want to chill.
- Cute furry characters with years of content to equip themselves with to show off.
- Easy to pick up game play elements with a high skill floor so everyone is pretty impactful.
- The core relationship between the short TTK, but extremely sluggish healing/recovery options creates poor game play scenarios where the slightest pain of an ambush or stray damage can feel figuratively permanent. Many a times you'll be better off simply spending time spraying towards enemies than slowly leaving yourself defenseless to mend yourself or others.
- The nature of peeking/spraying leaves a lot of be desired, encourages lots spraying towards an opponents directions, much of which at a screen's length ("blind spraying").
- The balance of the 'equipment?' slot items is honestly baffling; unless I'm unaware of their recency, I'm not sure how the variety of these items could remain so poor for long. Many are downright useless in any real imaginable scenario, and/or adding not interesting contribution to the game play either. This almost feels like more a blight to the very casual players at the heart of the game who are being distracted with lose-lose decisions of terrible items. I'm optimistic they could get much more creative in this department as the sky is the limit.
p.s. Please let my people unlock the Panda sooner.

*Review is based solely on the Roguelike mode solo*
Not worth writing a whole long story, watch some youtube gameplay for a minute and you'll get the gist. Pretty underdeveloped, gearing/skilling up doesn't feel good unless you hit the giga-highroll. In a few years a game made like this will be able to be instantly AI generated.