Recent reviews by Mazrim

Did you like the first game? If yes, you will like this one, because it is the exact same game with slightly different content. I'm not complaining.

What a strange experience.

As a newcomer to the series but experienced in the genre, the gameplay is excellent. Based on reviews, I'm looking forward to going back to FiTS. However, the story mode really kills the experience for me.

In a rogue like, I want a quick, complete experience that I can repeat many times. I want to beat the story mode, but then have additional difficulty settings to go through it again and learn more hidden secrets. If I fail, I want to jump right back in and try again.

The feeling of playing a run for multiple hours, only to lose from a single misclick or misread of the many, many low contrast icons (please make a colorblind mode or just improve contrast), makes me want to put the game down and not play for a few days.

Most bewildering is the option to "skip ahead" after you've reached certain milestones. What use is skipping ahead if you don't receive cards/companions/equipment to match the difficulty of that area?

All in all, I'm going to recommend because of how good the gameplay is. But I hope the run pacing is improved, or else I don't think I'm likely to play much more.

PS in case the devs read this, minor things
- holy hell the demon boss fight is bs difficulty scaling.
- Why is Vault a card when so few maps have vaultable objects in the room? Some maps have 2x2 objects in the middle, which is especially insulting. Why can't I vault those.

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UPDATE: After more hours, conclusion is the same. Gameplay good. Story structure bad. There's just no excuse for having a story mode this long in a deck builder. It's incomprehensible.

I love these kinds of games, I play them almost exclusively. Coming across a well balanced, fresh, and incredibly well executed strategy rogue-lite is a rare treat.

Shogun Showdown takes that a step further by also offering tantalizing progression. The difficulty ramps up quickly after your first run, and offers a slew of challenges to explore at your own pace. Too often rogue-lites burn everything on your first, second or maybe third completed run, with little motivation to keep playing afterward. Not so here.

- Fresh mechanical change to the deckbuilder genre that makes the combat feel fresh
- Great art
- Deep progression and constant motivation to go for just one more loop

What more do you want? If you like these types of games, you're going to love this.

For it's cost, this is worth it. It's got a great atmosphere, really good style, and unique gameplay.

However, it could easily be so much more. The gameplay system is so interesting and fresh, but it's held back by lack of progression. The standard experience I want in a deckbuilder is to start with boring, mediocre cards that teach me the mechanics of the game, then quickly upgrade them to more interesting, unique units to build a strategy around. In both my runs (which totalled about 3 hours), I used basically the exact units I started with the entire time. I see that there are more units in the game, but they're hidden behind hours of grinding. If there were 3x as many units to start with (and keep others behind progression grinding), I'd be playing this for days, maybe weeks. But as it is, I feel you get the entire experience after about 3-5 hours.

Effectively what I'm saying is that this is very worth it for $5, but could easily be worth 15$ with just a bit more. I'll keep an eye out for updates.

Really nice, well polished little rogue-lite. Not particularly difficult on the first run, but hoping there's more for me as I proceed further. If you like strategy indie titles, especially if you're tired of deckbuilders, this is a really easy sell. Clever, fresh combat mechanics that are easy to start but deep enough to make you think.

Fun lightweight little tactical roguelite

Great spin on tactical deckbuilders. Tons of content, good replayability and a lot of viable play patterns. Also, you get to customize your starting run (abilities, deck) after playing for awhile, which is a huge thing that I wish more rougelites allowed for.

Awesome little deckbuilder - despite being easy to pick up with very simple mechanics, the strategy and depth is incredible. You always know what's about to happen, so your skill is dependent on your ability to think several turns ahead.

Due to small deck sizes and the redraw bell, as well as a few other clever ideas, the game almost completely avoids the rng typically associated with difficult deckbuilders. As of playtime, I can only think of a 2-3 moments where randomness significantly impacted my run.

A huge variety of play patterns and deck types, fresh mechanics, awesome art and a fantastic run loop make this my favorite deckbuilder since Slay the Spire.

I'm 30 years old and I think this is the best game I've ever played. No notes.