07.08.17

I started with Monster Slayers today. It is, as the description states, a deck-building rogue-like. You start off with a class that determines your starting deck. You have HP, MP, and AP as resource pools, and cards that use your resource pools to decrease the enemy's resource pools - mainly their HP. As the game progresses you can upgrade and delete your cards as well as add new ones. Battles are fought 1v1 in rapidly increasing difficulty and you can buy permanent upgrades that persist through deaths.

I don't usually give a game's full feature list. When I do, it's probably because I wish to point out that that's all there is to that game. Now, generally I'd follow that up by calling the game shit, but I'm not going to do that here. I quite liked Monster Slayers. Despite being turn-based, it feels quite fast, and instead of the usual "attack the enemy once, enemy attacks you once" combat these kinds of games provide, this one had a lot of focus put into attack chains, to chain together lots of cards. The longest card chain I got was 11 cards, and this mechanic feels really, really good. The progression system also keeps you playing for a long time, as I'm not even nearly halfway through after 5 hours.

But the problem is mainly the lack of content. This combines with the fact that the game doesn't require all too much thinking, and suddenly you feel like you're on a treadmill, except you're not even getting any exercise done. I would've loved features like bigger parties, bigger groups of enemies, cards that depend on one another a little bit more... I don't know... something. I really wanted to like this game more, but playing it literally made me nauseous. I've no idea why, but it consistently happens when doing repetitive low-effort tasks for a long time.

So, would I recommend this game? I'd recommend to try this game, it's really fun for the first couple of hours. But ultimately I can't say it's a good game. Great idea, great execution, just not enough content and possibilities.