Combolands: Roguelike Citybuilder

I Don't usually write reviews, but considering that I've 100%ed this one I figured I should. It's a fantastic Balatro inspired, bite-sized, city building roguelike. The various guilds all play fairly differently and have some very interesting and potentially powerful combinations and interactions that are a real joy to discover and implement. I do think it's a little too easy once you have a solid grasp on how each deck plays, and I'd personally love to see more guilds and more ranks of difficulty but these are minor gripes in the face of such a fun game. Kudos to the developer, this is a game I will very likely keep installed and fire up when I feel the urge.

Balatro meets Backpack Hero, as a city builder. I could go into more detail, but that's basically it. Select two guilds that complement each other, place your tiles to synergize with one another, learn how the games' systems interlock. There are a lot of little flourishes in Combolands that show how attentive the team is. For example, ending a Milestone early. Do you want to gain some precious extra gold, or spend another turn building out your economic engine for the next milestone? The game is full of little things like that, small risk/reward tradeoffs that test how well you understand it. It's exactly what I'm looking for in a roguelike.

Super fun concept and solid execution

Really fun, scratches the balatro itch.

Just an amazing game. A game-feel akin to Balatro, with different vibes. Satisfying, short runs, just as advertised. Maybe don't expect to actually build proper and pretty cities in this one, treat it like a puzzle and you should have a good time.

Very fun little turn based roguelite. Similar to 9Kings mixed with Balatro in its playstyle. Great pixel art, music, and styling. Plenty of replayability for my needs.

An excellent little game that makes you feel clever when you assemble little engines and combos, highly recommend. I'd love for there to be some harder difficulties though, I've not lost a run yet and am already at the maximum difficulty!

A charming little rogue-like with a lot of good design decisions. This is a point salad game built largely around synergies between building types; each building has some guild it belongs to as well as one to three additional tag-like types. Even natural features have tags, though they lack guilds (neutral building specifically have the "neutral" guild tag). Buildings and Items frequently (almost always, in fact) refer to specific other types of buildings, and so emerges the synergy. This is a simple system as a baseline, but it rapidly grows more complex as various features allow you to change tags, add tags, modify building stats, and build interconnected towns where each building feeds off the next in a carefully crafted chain. This ends up being very fun, and I would highly suggest trying it out yourself if you're a fan of games like Balatro where you build sweet combos and watch your points rocket to the sky. I would like to see some expansion on both the guild count and in-guild strategy level -- though each guild theoretically offers a variety of strategies, in practice playing on max difficulty there are usually just a few strategies (or even one, in some cases) that you should be trying to "force." These are a bit too consistent and generally constructed too easily, in my opinion, because of the relatively small number of buildings offered to each guild. For instance (though this is the most egregious example), when playing as the Maritime guild, in the first round you will be offered fishing boats, which you can use to pass the first couple milestones. Soon thereafter as uncommons enter the pool, you will be offered fish traps (which trigger all fishing boats in range) and trawlers (which trigger one fishing building in range every 5 weeks -- but this is easily reduced). With good planning, you can easily force the trawler to target the fish trap, which will in turn trigger every fishing boat. The entire guild is full of additional ways to buff the fishing boats as well, so this very quickly will snowball out of control. I did this consistently for every single guild combination with the Maritime guild and failed to assemble the combo in time maybe 10% of the time. Overall, I would still highly recommend this game because it is in the end a very fun and strategic experience, and the level of optimization that makes it repetitive is only going to be reached many hours into it.