![]() ![]() Once you get used to that core loop and learn how to read it, it works very well. Enemies' abilities, your abilities, bosses, collectable energy points on the ground (tempting you into dangerous areas).Īnd all of that, I'm sold on. That's the recipe in its most basic form, but of course, all kinds of ingredients are thrown in to spice it up. A choice of transformations for a power - that fireball-like one you see on the hotbar below. These enemies turn to face you each time you attack them, and some of them attack when you use abilities - it all gives you more to think about. On the left of the hotbar are my abilities and their costs and cooldowns and on the right, my relics. You see my energy below on the blue bar, and health on the red bar. That blue circle is an extra energy point I could collect. Those pink rings, they denote areas that will cause damage when the turn ends - not a great deal of damage, but if they're overlapping, you could be in trouble. This is a particularly busy example! A boss battle. It's a balancing act that requires concentration and forethought - and it's a lot of fun. And enemies mix things up with their behaviour too. Also, you have to remember to attack rather than run away or you'll find yourself trying to fight a battle on a pin's head of safe space. The safe playing area shrinks each round, as in a battle royale, and as it does, the areas enemies will attack take up most of the available space. The idea, then, is to get yourself to a safe, clear patch of ground - but it's easier said than done. They telegraph what they're about to do with drawn shapes on the ground - hover over an enemy and you'll see a large ring around them, or a cone, that kind of thing. Where it gets interesting is movement and enemy intention. And when you're happy with what you've done, you end the turn and the enemies take theirs. ![]() You have an amount of energy you use to move and attack, and abilities have varying costs. It's governed, though, by turn-based principles. Combat is turn-based, though it feels real-time in how you move around, which is maybe why it feels a bit strange. There's one huge difference though, and it's combat. This is a recent dev stream of Inkbound, showing some co-op gameplay and giving a good sense of the flow of the game, and the choices you make in it. It's very familiar it's almost as if, having 'done' Slay the Spire, Shiny Shoe looked at the newest popular Roguelike when working out what to do next. And when you progress from a chamber, you choose which kind of chamber comes next. And there are NPCs to talk to with illustrated character portraits. Also, you're in a 3D world and you run around it in real-time. There are no cards but hotbar abilities, and as in Hades, your abilities can be transformed and modified. I mentioned Hades there - Inkbound is much more like Hades than Slay the Spire. And Inkbound absolutely understands that. It conjures that beautiful moment where you suddenly make light of all the heavy work that's come before, and for a glorious moment, nothing seems to be able to touch you. It's in allowing the player to break the game in their favour if they gather the right abilities and upgrades and power-ups, just as you can in Slay the Spire, and just as you can in Hades. The magic revolves around, I think, an equation of powerfulness. Availability: Demo in Steam Next Fest.This is the new game from Monster Train developer Shiny Shoe, so perhaps that's no surprise - because if any game can claim to have taken the Slay the Spire formula and made something memorable out of it, something of its own, it's Monster Train. It understands what makes a Roguelike really compelling and exciting.
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