Combolands: Roguelike Citybuilder

Combolands is a neat little game in the subgenre of Balatrolikes. As the title suggests, the game encourages the player to build combos to create highly synergistic builds and score points. I'm not sure if this is a direct source of inspiration, but I found some parallels to Monster Train -- specifically the way in which you combine two factions to create the card pool to use for the entirety of your run. The unlock / completion screen also bears some similarities, which is a good thing as it's very concise and provides a sense of satisfaction as you progress through the game. The gameplay itself reminds me of physical tabletop games of the Tableau-building genre. Though one of the steam community-given tags is Deckbuilding, you won't be doing any actual, well, deck-building in this game. Instead, you will be solving positional optimization puzzles revolving around the adjacency of buildings, mainly pairing them up based on their keywords. As such, it doesn't really [i]feel[/i] like a City Builder either -- it's simply the aesthetic the game uses to facilitate its gameplay. My "cities" often involve messy arrays of rock, shopping stalls, fishing boats, and farmlands that nonetheless generate "populations" of tens of thousands that, I assume, live under those rocks and inside of hay bales. This isn't a flaw, as I think it adds to the ambient humor of the game as your cities create some nebulous value that then translates into your city earning the title of "Metropolis" at the end of the run. There are 10 difficulty levels, though in my climb I've only lost once, so I wouldn't say the game is all that hard. Other than difficulties, playing with each faction will unlock up to 10 buildings and passives (collectively) for said faction. I do want to say that the game lacks variety when you start off, as there aren't nearly enough buildings in the pool for the runs with the same faction to be varied, even if you match it with a secondary faction, and this is only made worse when you lack any unlocks. Maybe adding ~5-10 buildings to each one would fix that issue for me, I'm not sure. Regardless, this is a pretty chill game, and I would recommend it given the low price.

Absolutely amazing game!

Pretty fun and has lots of replayability. Great deal.

Lots of fun discovering new combos 10/10

Gem of a little combo building game. Perfect for a morning game with a cup of coffee sort of deal; good lop, interesting tiles to place, and rewarding feeling when a run really pops off. Well worth the price.

I waited until I 100% the game to leave a review, and I can say that this game is fantastic and challenging, but accessible too. Having gotten to play through and beat every combination the game currently has to offer, there are definitely weaker match ups that were hard to wrap my head around. I think if I'd like anything, off the top of my head, being able to reroll the map without a loss statistic would be great. I'd also love if there were an icon on the weeks that a new hazard spawns. I can't recall how many times I messed up and skipped a week because I thought I needed that week's gold to counter the hazard. Otherwise, the game has been fantastic and those pain points were not deterring enough to keep me from completing the content as it stands presently. I look forward to seeing further developments, including paid DLC, as I feel the game has been well worth the price and would love to support future development <3

very cute, chill roguelike.