After 34 minutes open according to steam I have literally every achievement for this game and have seen everything it has to offer. I did two rounds and realized that they were identical in every way other than I was slightly more on top of upgrading things aggressively to get the last achievement in the second round for upgrading all monsters and was more efficient in how I built my dungeon and deployed my monsters to kill rather than use a room that has an RNG chance to have enemies leave right at the front causing me to miss out on income. I was expecting a longhaul, ended up I only needed to take on 20 waves.

This is a negative review. The thing is, I want to give constructive feedback while demonstrating the issues of this game. If this was flagged "early access mega pre-alpha proof of concept" then I could maybe forgive asking money for it at all, but even then it isn't at all far enough along or ready. Yet I want to see this improve because the basic idea is good actually. Just the execution is lacking.

This game would be worth its current price if it had twice the monster variety, twice the number of trap rooms to consider with some actual numbers for them displayed so I could be sure there was any difference between them, a massively increase in difficulty, an increase in the 15 minute game length of 20 waves before you have to start over from nothing, some variety to the map, a better UI experience, and the possibility for more interesting and deeper strategy.

With all that this game would actually be a really good idea. Like I genuinely really want to see this type of simple play expanded. Since this feels like a proof of concept of a better game before the long process of development lead to the systems being more fleshed out and the economy better tuned. The art is incredibly basic in this game, but other than the UI elements it has a charm I don't want to see changed. UI really needs to be bumped up though.

How bad is the available depth for strategy possibility in this? Well the issue is honestly mainly due to the unlock progression of your options. You unlock monsters in a fixed order and you start with all the rooms unlocked without any upgrade space as well as enough gold to get things going more than sufficiently and you get so much gold and summon energy that the cost of these things is a non-factor once you're going. The only thing really in your control for how you progress is the order you rank up your monsters instantly with coins from tier 1 to tier 2 to tier 3. This just increases their stats and there's plenty of money to unlock them all. There's an achievement for it. It should also be noted that each of the 20 waves are also predetermined so there's no variety there.

I am going to go over a surefire overkill strategy that is more than enough to beat this game and get every achievement in one run. I am doing this to show the strategy and gameplay here is severely lacking due to how shallow things are. There's no real variety once you even remotely just to optimize at all.

What you want is the big arena that can accept four monsters as the end of your dungeon's gauntlet, the start needs to be a potion trap room. In the middle you need, in any order, one lava room and one board game room. The plan is simple, debuff and thin out the herds with potions, board game room, and a lava before they wander into the arena to die. The potions go first to debuff them early, the arena goes last so that you have the minimum amount of fighting, the traps in the middle are just an effective way to target both reflex based and intelligence based enemy weaknesses.

The arena has the most interesting progression. It starts with four of the basic bat, goes into the tough bats, then it goes into snake, then spider, then a fancy combination of one ghost to tank and three candles to DPS down the invaders, before you max it out to be four hydras. Make sure you upgrade each monster as much as you can as fast as you can and to banish and replace the existing fighters with your stronger ones only once your upgrades are far enough to be an upgrade. Replace fighters if they die.

For the board game, potion, and lava trap rooms you're using a progression of basic bat, snake, vampire, hydra. This is because while there's a more gentle curve for your dexterity choices, the order you unlock things in means you get to skip huge chunks of it. It just so happens that this progression also covers intelligence, but you stop at vampire for the highest intelligence for the board game room. These will never die so you're just banishing and replacing as needed. Remember that you'll need to upgrade your monsters a bit on the way.

If you want you can be extra safe and add an optional two monster dungeon after this to catch anyone who pushes through which follows the same progression as the four monster arena, but uses two ghosts instead of one and a candle before going into hydra. This is because of the nine monster cap. The rest of the strategy uses seven monsters, so this lets you the last two in the most efficient way possible. After this once you have all your upgraded monsters just spam fake out rooms to send the invaders back through your dungeon at the end after the arenas.

You never need agile bats because they're worse than snakes in all ways, but come after snakes in the unlock order. This means they aren't even a worthwhile stepping stone. The only reason we use the ghost to tank instead of the vampire is that the ghost has more damage and a surplus of HP already so the tankier vampire doesn't matter. There's also no limit other than how fast you move your mouse to how fast you can deploy monsters.

If there was more here and this game was worked on to be expanded, well this is the type of concept that in its current state isn't worth half its current price, but has the type of potential to one day be worth being worth easily four times its current price. As is, I just can't recommend a proof of concept. If they addressed these issues though? I'd be happy to flip this to a recommendation.

Make the unlock order of monsters more dynamic. Make the waves go from preset to something a bit algorithmic as well as allow for an endless mode of endless scaling. Allow for more monsters. Create different layouts just for some superficial variety. Expose the numbers for the trap rooms rather than vague language that actually discourages much experimentation and instead pushes you towards just needing to realize "most expensive is best". Add a lot more content in tools to use and enemies to defeat. Tidy up the UI to be more visually appealing and to make things larger and clearer in a few places. Work on the controls to make it smoother to place multiple monsters. Tighten up the economy. It's a lot, but it is mostly just "more of what is here". Also the dungeon is way too big. There's way too much room.

The core gameplay loop here is good. I just know there's no enough here to go for a third round, and that actually makes me a bit sad.