At its core, The Bazaar is a great game. I've played the game before it came to Steam since March 2025 and have just short of 400 hours in it. I've seen its highs and I've seen its lows. Sadly, despite how good the game itself might be, the reason I don't recommend this game isn't because of it, but rather because of the development team. Here's why.

• Balance Up to this point, there's been four seasons. Each season has introduced ten new cards for two of the heroes. Every single one of those expansions has dominated the meta, before being heavily nerfed. The design team is clearly inexperienced, but even worse than that, it's painfully obvious that they just don't balance test the content they're putting out. When patch notes are released, the problematic cards are blatantly easy to identify, to the point where it's baffling that they didn't see the issue. No one is going to get balance perfectly right all of the time, but they drop the ball 100% of the time. To add to this, now that heroes are locked behind a $20 purchase, when those heroes get a new expansion and are crushing everyone else as a result, you're going to have to either fork out money or just accept that you can't make it to 10 wins until they get nerfed. Stelle is already looking exactly like this.
  
  
• Censorship Tempo Storm doesn't take criticism well. Like, at all. Even constructive. Fortunately, they can't silence us here in Steam reviews so we can speak freely, but they won't hesitate to ban you from the sub-Reddit or their Discord if you speak out. With the recent announcement of the game switching from FTP to BTP, they were explicitly instructed by the CEO to perma-ban anyone voicing any form of concerns. I myself was banned for questioning why existing users of the game should be expected to pay $40 to play a game they already have access to. It feels especially telling that after all this backlash, they changed up their plan and decided to sell the game with Stelle for $20 (although, for three days only). As usual, the community is right, they realize they screwed up and fix it, but of course they're not going to un-ban anyone who pointed this out to them. It's childish, and not at all professional.
  
  
• Monetization This is possibly the biggest issue. At this point, the game has changed its monetization structure four times. It started out as an NFT game. Yeah. Then it turned into a FTP game for its closed beta. With the release of open beta, when I started, they had the brilliant plan of asking for a $10 monthly subscription to get double chest rewards, AND to have a separate $10 seasonal battle pass. This battle pass contained the expansions mentioned above, meaning that if you didn't buy it, you didn't get the new OP cards. It was directly selling power, and as you can imagine, people rioted. (And got banned, of course, cause that's the only way Tempo knows how to deal with upset players). Realizing they'd screwed up, Tempo pivoted into a FTP battle pass with paid skips, allowing people to still spend money (or gems!) to unlock the card expansions earlier than FTP players who were stuck slowly grinding them out from daily play. As a result, players who did buy the new cards on day one had a massive advantage over those who did not (as we already mentioned, Tempo cannot balance anything without community help) and then by the time FTP players finally did unlock the new cards, they'd been nerfed into the ground, quite often to the point where they made the hero weaker thanks to diluting the item pool. This is the model we've lived with for most of the game. And now, the final fourth monetization transition, they're going drastic once again, and taking a game that was entirely free to play and asking for a whopping $40. And then if you want to play any of the heroes beyond the first three, you need to fork out an extra $20 per. It's insane, and not even remotely worth it (imo). Because at this point, after changing things so many times, how can you trust them not to change it yet again? Just as an example, they've talked about a mobile port for a long ass time. You can't charge $40 for a mobile game (seriously, no one would ever buy at that price) so how is that going to work? Are they going to make the game FTP again? I haven't even gotten to the fact that all of this was dropped on players with only a weeks notice, and we all expected to be able to buy Stelle with the gems we'd farmed from playing the game, just like we had with every hero before. A typical bait and switch. Fortunately for me, I'd already cancelled my monthly subscription since the balance issues were already turning me off the game, but I know people whose subscriptions renewed right before this announcement and basically just lost all the value of that $10. It's gross and manipulative, and 100% defines everything Tempo stands for.

So there you go, now you at least have more context on the history of the game up to its Steam launch. If you choose to still give it a shot, I seriously hope you won't come to regret it, but strongly fear that you will. Especially if you buy in for the full asking price of $40.



For seven hours, this review had a developer response before they chose to remove it. While I do have that reply screenshotted and could post an Imgur link to it here, I will respect their decision to remove it. That said, it’s already been posted in multiple places online, so I’ll leave it to those who may be curious to look it up. Before its removal, I was in the middle of replying to it, and even though it’s now gone, I would still like to respond to its claims:

First things first, I certainly didn’t expect to wake up and find a developer response to my review. Thanks for boosting its visibility, I sincerely appreciate it. I just have a few quick things to say in response.

• The opening point frankly makes no sense to me. Those ‘imbalanced expansions’ are indeed still in the game, saying they aren’t would imply that they’d been removed. Rather, they were balanced after their initial release. This… is literally the entire point I made above. Brokenly OP cards are added to the game and then balanced well after people have spent on them.
  
  
• As the NFT system was before I started playing the game, I specifically left it as a mere seven-word mention in the main review. It’s an extremely minor aspect of the much larger monetization issues facing the game since its closed beta release, and it seems strange to focus so much on just that single point while ignoring everything else.
  
  
• Finally, the reply stated that bans happen for specific reasons, and yet none of the listed ones apply to the post I made that got me banned. I certainly didn’t attack anyone, and I didn’t lie or spread misinformation, I simply asked a question. For full disclosure, I already posted a link to my ban in literally the first comment to allow anyone curious to see what is considered a ban-worthy post.