➕Thorough D&D mechanics
➕Encounter choices
➕Music
➕Loads of content - campaigns, endless runs, dice defence, local coop

🔹Constant pausing to take in board breaks the flow a bit
🔹Could use options to interact with dice board, i.e shuffle, spawn specific dice, etc

➖Can’t buy weapons/spells at shop, RNG can screw you if you don’t get a good selection after end of stage
➖MUST use weapons or spells - why can’t Monks attack with fists?
➖Lack of unlockables limits repeat playing

Game world is pretty much just D&D character sheets, though props to the sheets being accurately represented.
Narrative is very light - just a couple of sentences between each round. Nothing spectacular

There are 2 main mechanics here - match board and tower defense. The match board is simple match-3 on the same dice. Matching 4 or more sends out a shockwave that damages enemies.
The tower defense part takes place on a D&D character sheet. Enemies swarm and attack various elements of your sheet. If enough attacks hit your weapon section, you may lose a weapon. Same with spell, armor, and gold. You get them all back after the battle, so essentially the only thing that is important is health points. Each weapon/spell is unique and has an aim component and/or an AOE effect. Things like bows hit enemies in a straight line. To use each weapon/spell you must gather the corresponding dice in the match board. That dice then powers your weapons/spells to defend your D&D board.

i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD

Great music. I loved the “Irish jig”-style music. Felt that it not only fit in with the D&D setting, but was upbeat enough for the chaos happening constantly on screen.

There doesn’t seem to be much to do long-term after you beat each campaign once. The other modes, Endless and Dice Tower, provide some good replay value and seem to be the main draw after you finish campaigns, but the longevity of those modes are questionable at best and repetitive at worst.

Crossover: Roll for Initiative (CROI) does a great job at blending your typical match-3 games with a D&D coat of paint and a Slay the Spire roguelike-type campaign. At its core, CROI is a tower defense game that uses the match-3 resources to power up your attacks.

I don’t have any big negatives for CROI, it’s mostly just a bunch of smaller issues as I listed above in my cons area. I’d say to me the most impactful negative is a lack of unlockables/replay value in the long term. For comparison's sake, I wish CROI had some of Slay the Spire’s longevity - it could use things like a daily run, leaderboards, and unlockable weapons/spells. I’ve played about 7 campaigns so far (died a few times in campaign 3) and each time I tried it with a different race/class combo. I didn’t notice anything cool happening after I finished the levels. You get a diamond currency, but all this does is unlock a couple races or classes and pay for stat boosts that are only for a single run. I want to be able to unlock some cool weapon/spell combinations. Something that really enhances or creates builds in a cohesive manner.

As for the positives, there is a lot that CROI does right. CROI almost feels like a Slay the Spire gameplay loop, but with no cards and a tower defense game. If that wasn’t clear enough, I’m a big fan of Slay the Spire mechanically, so as long as you differentiate your game enough, and CROI definitely does, then it's always a positive. Still, I’d say my biggest positive that CROI does is the D&D-inspired game world.
CROI oozes D&D from every angle. You can truly see that the devs are passionate about D&D and aside from some mechanics that had to be changed to work in a tower defense environment, the vast majority of the game is very faithful to D&D.

Overall, CROI was a surprise to me. I wasn’t expecting an odd combo of a D&D match-3 tower defense game to work well, much less be interesting. I got to give credit where it’s due, CROI pulls it off and I definitely recommend checking this out if you are into D&D at all.


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