Follow our curator page: IndieGems if you like and want to see more reviews like this one.

Guild of Ascension is a strange game, to say the least. It is both turn-based and timed-action and that combination will definitely not suit a lot of players. For people who can look past that and get used to it, the game is played out in 3 biomes and multiple floors in each, with the subsequent floors unlocking as you play through the previous.

The game features some randomization in the floor map generation and also the actual spawning of enemies, traps, as well as rewards seem to be from a pool of possibilities as well. Even though this adds to the "difference" going from run to run, it does get repetitive after a while, especially when the game is actually rather diffulct and there is almost always a need to grind before getting past the floor boss and making it to the next floor.

The game is labeled as a roguelite, and that label is rather loose. Each run involves you taking control of your characters and exploring the map with visibility only to the available adjacent nodes and gradually getting a key before you can unlock the boos room and fight the boss. Other rooms involve regular enemies to fight, as well as some random challenges. Some rooms tell you if it will rewards you with in-game currency "wishes" or experience, while some others give a choice of 3 buffs at the end of the room. Other non-combat rooms involve random events, some with positive or negative effects.

You have dodge points that help you avoid damage and once you run down your dodge points, or if the enemies have a special attack, they will damage you for HP as well. You can recharge dodge points if you stand still and hold down the designated button during your turn. Once you start running down on actual HP, you can always return to camp any time between rooms and consume a meal to regain HP or you can use your experience gained so far to level up. That's right, you only level up when you decide to use your experience, and only in camp.

You can freely change up the deployment weapon in between runs, using any that you have unlocked for one or both of your characters. You will progressively unlock new tiers of weapons and charms, along with starting camp items that help with additional buffs. There are 3 types of weapons, a melee sword and shield, a ranged bow, and also a two-handed hammer, with different levels for each gradually unlocked as you play.

You only ever need to buy any item in the base camp once and after that you can use each deployment loadout however you wish without paying for more. But your in-run currency is spent only in the floor's shop and does not carry from run to run. In these shops you are usually buying power-ups, and you can only give each power-up you obtain to one of your characters.

Any one run involves only one of the floors of the overall "Tower" that you have unlocked, so you do not carry your experience and money to move from floor to floor. The more difficult floors will give faster payouts in terms of gaining unlocking currency in gold, as for how that is determined, it doesn't always make sense, instead it's just awarded at the end of the run.

This game does stand out in its very strange combat system. I find it rather difficult to get used to and not as intuitive. You carry out your actions in turns, and the movement and targeting is indeed on a grid. However, your turn is determined by whatever actions you can carry out in the allotted time frame, and you can do whatever you wish during this time, from attacking in multiple ways to running to a safe spot, to recharging your dodge points.

After attacking enemies for a while, you will have a gauge that fills up allowing you to unlease some special attacks. These special attacks are dependent on the deployment weapon, and if you forget how to use each particular type of weapon/loadout, you can always go back to the tutorial and try them out. Or you can just launch a new run, do trial and error, to probably have a short and pitiful run before getting your reins once again.

Most of the enemies are predictable, and you can experiement and find out how each enemy moves and predict how they will respond to your attacks. In tern, you may do well to attack in certain ways in order to avoid taking damage to your own characters. You can also predict with a gradually filling bar that will unlease an enemy riposte if they are attacked too much.

Nevertheless, the timed-action is an added layer of stress and difficulty that doesn't really go well together, especially when a lot of people have expectations that this game is more turn-based. Usually that means having the ability to take your time, but in this game, that's not an option at all.

All things considered, the game does have a variable difficulty setting where you can choose a relative percentage of damage dealt and received, in addition to giving yourself more revive potions at camp, just by choosing some stuff in the menu. As you can see, that roguelite label is very very loose indeed.

Everything is optimized for controller, KB+M feels a little weird, not to mention there are some bugs with using KB+M. So definitely recommend using a controller.

There are a decent number of regular enemy types, traps, as well as bosses. The designs for the individual levels are also nice to look at, with its smoothed low-poly look. It's nothing too fancy but overall looks nice.

Music is fairly straight forward and the sound effects definitely feel a bit lacking especially in combat.

I have no idea who would be an ideal player for this game. I definite recommend that anyone interested to actually watch some gameplay footage to see whether they can and would like to get used to this very strange combat system.

At $14.99 USD base, it's not unreasonable for a price, especially with all of the different things featured and I expect that it would take quite a lot of effort and repeatedly dying and restarting in order to make it all of the way to the end. With its short runs and relatively high difficulty spike going from floor to floor, I think that most people coming in with a curious mind would not get to the end and would not see most of the game, which is unfortunate.

Guild of Ascension is really odd and definitely a game I think is going to have a love-hate relationship with most of its players. That in mind, I highly recommend that anyone who is interested to watch some gameplay videos before making the purchase. I think there was a demo but it no longer seems available, so videos are probably the way to go for now.

Decent: 7/10.

I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.

I found out about this game by chance from Steams 'Popular Upcoming' section and I am so glad I did. This game manages to merge Action RPG play with Tactical turn base gameplay.
TLDR :
PROS :
- Lots to unlock and experience
- Engaging gameplay loop with many customization aspects
- Flexible Fighting systems
- Clear and informative items/buffs/events etc.
- many unique monsters
CONS :
- menu is totally silent, music starts as soon as you start the game
- Mouse and keyboard can be a little awkward in the same way games like Ori are. Nothing terrible, mostly just menu things. (based on recent patch notes this has been fixed)

Overall :
If you enjoy Tactical or RougeLite games, give this game a shot. It is well constructed, fun, and engaging. The entirety of the game is enjoyable and it does not suffer from annoying parts like many games do. If you want to see some gameplay and a little more of my thoughts on the game I made a 5 min review on youtube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP5y3s-t7_Q

Awful pc controls, beginning with a starting options screen that doesn't even fit on the screen, and doesn't respond to mouse clicks, so if your monitor isn't the right size you get to guess what settings you are fixing.

But it doesn't get better from there. The controls are not pc friendly, its clearly built with consoles and steam being an after after afterthought. clunky and obnoxious to navigate.

And all that would be forgivable if it was a decent game. it isn't. The "real time" aspect is used to hide the fact that the strategy aspect is so poorly done that the game would be laughable without making button mashing a thing instead. This is a strategy game in the vaguest sense of the word only... its a button masher on a grid pretending to be a strategy game. At no point do you feel like your mind and tactics are challenged, only your button pressing memory and combos... like a fighitng game without the pesky skilled opponents!

A pretty good game with some issues.

The Good:
I love the the core gameplay of this. The real time turn based system is a lot of fun. While not really similar, it reminds of older games like Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter. I'm always here for variations on the classic turn based and am glad to see this addition.

After the tutorial the game does a pretty good job of easing you into it. The first floors are basic and make sure you understand the core gameplay before involving more complex things. As you climb higher the enemies get more complex as do the various blessings (basically relics) your Ascenders can get. The curve is pretty smooth and they did a great job there.

The Bad:

Meta Progression. I'm not against it in general, but it feels really tacked on to this game and if anything makes the experience worse. You can will unlock stronger weapons by clearing higher floors. And you can use those weapons to just crush lower floors if you choose to go back to them for achievements. Makes clearing those achievements a lot less meaningful. At the very least, the meta progression is not grindy in this game. You will always have enough gold to get everything as you unlock them.

UI: This is just something that needs a little polish. You can make selections before the menu is loaded and the mouse and keybaord controls are a tad clunky. I know the devs are looking into this now and it shouldn't be a problem in the future.



The game is lots of fun and I think I'll end up getting about 15-20 hours out of it. Writing this review at 8.5 hours in.

A little bit thin, but I keep playing so it's doing something for me! The short turn timers tilt the game more into action than tactics for me, but it's pretty satisfying when you do manage to execute a plan.

Good points : Game is pretty good, the art is amazing and it's a cool mix between strategy and action. Not too heavy in strategy, allowing for relaxing rushs, not too heavy on action so I don't fell dumb smashing buttons. Ennemies variety is interesting.

Bad points : I feel like sound design is missing a bit of love, especially around feedbacks.

The main draw to Guild of Ascension is the gameplay. They managed to combine action RPG and tactics into a cohesive and entertaining experience. The character portraits have a unique art style. However, some things such as menus and the hub world... or town, in this case, seem a bit bland. The game is relatively short, although some additional challenges within each floor add some replayability. I would love to see the developers add more content to the game, such as skins for the player characters, new weapons (currently there is only sword & board, bow, and hammer), new floors/environments, new enemies, new skills, and interactions between the two player characters to provide some additional lore.
Overall, GG.

I played several demos of the game in the past and it is great to see the game finally releasing !
The gameplay is THE highlight of the game: it is a grid-based tactical game where you move your characters in real time during their turn. It is quite original, and the implementation is solid. I've been surprised with nice design ideas which makes me want to play more (i.e. enemies' behavior and retaliation, challenges, puzzle-like bosses...)
The difficulty ramps up fast, but there are nice accessibility options if you really are too bothered by the rogue-like structure of the game.
I also really appreciate the refined visuals and music.
The in-game encyclopedia is complete, but being able to re-read the tutorial pop-ups would be a nice addition.

Nice idea, but not enough meaningful content

I enjoyed my time playing this, but the repetitive nature and lack of content makes this a: 'wait for a sale' game.

The gameplay is similar to tactical turnbased games like "Into the Breach" or "Advance Wars." But what makes this game unique is that you only have ten seconds to plan out your moves, and then you actually control the character for x amount of time either moving, attacking, charging your shields (called dodge in this game, but it's really just like shields) or more typically, a combination of all three. There are also special attacks that can attack multiple enemies in a row, etc. You can use the environment on the map as well to trigger attacks, or push an enemy onto a spike floor. There are also synergies to be had, and there are a couple different ways you can plan your run.

The levels are somewhat like The Hand of Fate, in that there is an overhead map and you search for a key and the boss. There are shops along the way, and random areas. You can finish the level once you find the key and the boss, or you can try to clear out other rooms in a risk/reward type play as the rooms get filled with more enemies with every step.

So far so good, right? Well, yes. But that's kind of where it ends.

There are weapons you can buy (It says craft in the description, but you are not gathering materials, you're simply unlocking them and buying them) but the weapons are doled out one per level. And the only difference is a +5 dmg buff, and a +2 crit. buff. The next upgrade is the same. And the same thing for the next 8 levels or so. Now, add that to the fact that the enemies scale up, and... well, you can guess what happens. The same exact gameplay for every single level. OK, there are three biomes, with some different items and different enemies sprinkled in, but you are basically doing the same thing over and over. "befriend critters" and "learn skills" are dubiously the same. Befriending a critter involves finding one in a random room, making it available for purchase in the town. Learning skills? There are only 4 skills per weapon (and only 3 types of weapons) that you start with and end with. We're not talking skill trees, or Diablo-style customization of equipment and build types.

Overall, the description over-hypes the game. The game is fun, but it's shallow. Additional heroes, weapon types, a choice of skills, more environments, or some sort of variety would have greatly enhanced the game. Into the Breach has a bunch of different teams, each with a unique feel. If this game had taken that extra step, we could've been looking at something special. As it is, the game has a good idea, nice graphics, and fun gameplay, but it's not something that you'll be playing for more than a couple weeks.

Pros:
+ Fun gameplay
+ A unique system that requires quick thinking
+ Some good synergies and combos that are fun to discover and use

Cons:
- Not enough depth in terms of levels, items, heroes, or skills
- Poorly implemented weapon/ item system that simply scales along with the enemies
- Doesn't live up to the game description.

Overall score: 8/10 - Because I enjoyed the game, and not every game needs to last 50+ hours. But it's up to you, depending on how much you want to stretch your dollar.

Boring game, same enemies, same bonuses every floor, you got all your stats reset between floors. Bosses are dull and beyond easy level. Plus you got a bug when sometimes if enemy counter proc, at your first hero turn, then next turn starts immidiatly without thinking phase. Cant tell you how frustraiting it is. Oh and if you are going top boss room without spending exp, you'll get to choose if you want to fight the boss or you want to spend your exp points, and when you choose to spent points, you get fatal error. And did i mention game doesnt save you midlevel? no? well thats quite everything you know to understand why this is still and early access game and you shouldn buy it.