The game looks promising at first, but it has almost no substance.

Some skills or classes are way better then others.

The battles get boring and tedious soon.
You do always the same. The enemies are not really smart.

I completed the game at 3 hours.
But the last hour was only boring battles and then the game was over.
I had max character level even after 1/3 of the game.

The game is clearly overpriced.
If i had stopped after the boring grind later i would have refunded the game now.
But i hoped at every new level that the game would introduce new mechanics or better things, but nothing came.

The game needs way more of everything.
Like stated at first, it has really potential, but at this state it is a bland and boring turn based combat game.

I like turn-based tactic games, and I am hardcore gamer who dedicated many hours to the XCOM series. However, sometimes I turn to obviously more simple games, like Guards of the Gate.

Pros:

- Nice look, for the game of that kind quite fair;
- Interesting map system without out-of-battle healing and statues which strengthen teams in next runs;
- Some skills that I have not encountered in other games of this type;
- Simple but enjoyable battle system on small hexagonal fields.

Cons:

- The game is very badly balanced, for now. Some classes are more useful than others; teams of certain type make walkthrough very easy, and others - very hard, but irritating hard, because of bad skills combination and artificial weaknesses. This is very important, because for turn-based tactic game to be replayable it must have various strategies and approaches. Now there is only one effective approach.
- Poor AI. It just strikes the hero with lowest hp. Also they do not try to move their place to free space for their ally, doing that they would be able to strike twice. How they use abilities? I received 1 sleep and 2 stuns on the same character in one turn - and they do not stack, so they are basically wasted.

However, I really liked the game taking into account the criticism mentioned above. You must understand that this is a game for 1-2 evenings. I prognose blind walkthrough for 4 hours. Knowing best team combination and skills, you will pretty much complete it in the first time, taking 2 hours.

I would 100% recommend for discount price and with regional discounts. However, I would pay even the full price to appreciate the hardwork of game creators.

This is a VERY casual game. My first play through took 32 minutes. Success or failure seems to be dictated by your initial character class selection and less on skill or tactics. Given the short duration of the game, mechanics such as skill and talent leveling up seem pretty pointless.

A genuinly charming indie game with good combat, that has its flaws and drags a little too long.

After having been burned by early access games in general pretty hard i waited for the full release and voila, this is a good game. The baseline is just that you choose three out of six heroes and attempt a roguelite dungeon run with them. There is barely any story, just go and kill stuff on each level until you kill the last boss. There are generally three types of encounters on the way, monsters, which you fight in good hexagonal combat, traps, which feature a simple and rather stupid minigame, which however fulfill their job to make the game less monotonous, and stuff that powers you up (treasure, merchants, statues). It is roguelite because you keep the statue bonuses for your next run, which makes you incredibly overpowered after playing a few runs (30% base crit chance kek) The heroes only level up 5 times each, but at each level you can choose one of two perks. Also each starts with 3 attacks and 4 attack slots, while having about 8 attacks in total. You can unlock those through shrines for your current run. All choices are redoable, making character building flexible and decently challenging. Hero balance is mediocre, the wizard and the shaman are way stronger than all other heroes. Overall combat is this games strong suite and it relies heavily on it.

The cons of the game are a rather bad UI, only very few levels before the heroes reach max level and a very stale late game . I had my heroes maxed out 3 (out of 8?) stages before the final boss and i had very potent combos which made short work out of all foes. Those last stages were mind numbingly boring. Also you can not choose which skill to unlock at shrines, so you get odd results like not being able to utilise and item because you do not have the skill it enhances.

Overall i give this game a solid buy recommendation as a good indie game. Good job Dev!

I am definitely having fun with this game, so I can recommend it. I didn't really like it at first, but as I experimented with the different team combinations and learned more about the game play, I really started to get into it.

This isn't a fancy game. You create a team of three characters. Mutant, Knight, Ninja, Ranger, Wizard, and Shaman. You navigate a world map by moving from spot to spot. Each spot is either empty, has a battle grid with monsters, has a reward statute, has a merchant, has a new skill, etc. The maps aren't that big.

My only real complaints are that you can't heal outside of battle, very few classes have healing, and you can't make separate saves. You can have up to 6 different parties with different combinations and there is supposedly benefits across games.

This game is all about casual, tactical battling. And the skills that each class learns and the treasure you find or can buy is random. So some teams will get better stuff than others.

Experimenting with different team configurations is pretty fun and the learning curve isn't that bad.

This isn't a game you get for story, plot, puzzles, character customization, open world exploration, etc.

But overall, I am still enjoying taking multiple teams though each map level. And the maps are random too.

Haven't experienced any real bugs and no crashes. I did see a bug where your HP doesn't always show right at the start of a battle, but once the battle gets going, it has always fixed itself.

If you are looking for a simple distraction with lots of grid/turn based battles, then you should probably enjoy this.

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Guards of the Gate is a turn-based strategy game that is still in Early Access. The story unfolds as the gate opened and the lands have been invaded by evil. The few who are brave enough to fight back and to protect others are called the Guards of the Gate.

At the beginning of the game, you can select 3 (out of 4) members for your party.
You can choose among a mutant, a wizard, a knight and a ranger.

The game starts out with a small tutorial, so you can learn the basics of the game.

You move around on a board-like environment on a hex grid. Along you way, you will encounter shrines, campfires, and merchants, where you can learn new skills, recovery health, and make purchases, respectively. There are also treasure chests on the map for additional bonuses and rewards. Of course there are enemies you have to defeat as well.

Not everything is visible and unexpected things occur. For example, sometimes when you land on a new hex, it will turn upside-down and reveal an enemy.

All battles are in turn-based. You control each unit seperatly. You move first and then attack/use a skill. As expected, some skills have cooldown periods.

If one member of your party dies, they will get revived after battle with 20% of their health. They won’t get any experience for that battle.

If all members die, it will be game over.

If you level up, you can upgrade your talents.

The game saves automatically. There is only one save file. That means if all your party members die, you have to start all over. You will keep some stats you earned during the previous run.

There are some minor spelling errors that do not affect gameplay.

I really like the graphics. They look nice and colorful.
The music is fine too.

Guards of the Gate is still in Early Access, and not yet complete. It has a good pricetag in my opinion. If you like turn-based games and don’t mind playing a game in Early Access, I surely can recommend this game.

Score: 8/10

Please see the following video for an example of gameplay:
https://youtu.be/jaYVpnbiHQw

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.

This game is good looking and fun for a few hours. It gets old pretty fast though because of the really small number of usefull skills and items and starts feeling quite repetitive. It takes round about 10 hours to get all of the current batches and after that the gameplay does not offer anything new at all. Rating this game is a close call, so I recommend it only if it is on sale.

I don't really mind the simple aesthetic and low production values as the actual art-style is fine and the straightforward game-play mechanics are interesting and intriguing to me. Unfortunately it is the only game I have ever played where the English translation is so bad that it completely put me off from actually enjoying the game.

This game isn't bad. It's not something you're going to dump 1k hours into, but it's a nice time waster when you want to relax and just play. The start is a little tough, but as you play through and boost your stats, learn the compositions you like, it's a fun game. The first playthrough is pretty quick, but you can continue to play for a bit.

To summarize, it is a really nice turn based game with hexagonal style combat and simple exploring elements with rogue lite gameplay. Combat is rather simple but not boring. Only donwside is you can do pretty much everything in the game after couple of hours. It needs a reward mechanism to promote replayability like new stuff/modifiers after completeing the story or arena, with different characters or team combinations or something like that. Then it surely will be my one of the favourite roge lites. Definetly worth to buy in my opinion.