FLERP has an interesting premise of combining a tower defense based gameplay with autochess and rougelite/rougelike mechanics. All genres I loved throughout my entire life, so I thought I can't really go wrong with this game. I was both right and wrong. It isn't really a bad game. Especially not for a price of 3 euros, or 1,19 if you get it on a sale like I did. I would've given it a positive review if it weren't been for the fact that there are so many of those already, not pointing out some pretty big issues with the game, which it has a lot of.
First things first, the gameplay loop. You buy towers and place them down around your base to defend it from the hordes of enemies. Towers work like units in any autochess, having their own classes and abilities. You get more unique towers of a class, it makes them stronger. The idea is good, and it could've worked. Problem? Well, neither the towers or the classes matter. Sure, they have somewhat unique abilites and attacks, but in terms of the actual gameplay, none of that matters. Some deal damage, and a few of them provides buffs. There are no real combos, but even if they were, you wouldn't really be able to tell, because the game becomes a big mess after only a few towers, where you just can't tell whats happening with all the enemies and projectiles on screen. The only saving grace is a dps breakdown, where you can kind of see which units are bad and good, but it really isn't neccessary because of my second issue with the game.
The game is extremely easy. Like, laughably so. I tried every class and every tower in several different combinations, and I never even got close to losing. You do get a new game+ mechanic, increasing the difficulty after each victory (which in this case is surviving for more than 20 minutes), but also increasing your tower limit by 1. Honestly though, I would say higher new games are even easier. Which is an insane thing to say for a new game+ mechanic and is a sign of severe balance issues, not to mention the more towers you have, to more glaring my first point will become, making every individual tower less and less important and the screen more and more off a mess with no way to even see what's happening.
As a third, smaller point, there is not much tower defense in this game. Sure, you can more your towers around, but there is really no reason to. You want them as close to your base as possible for best coverage, and that's it. There is an armor and taunt mechanic, but it's just simply useless. Why bother putting your towers really far out for enemis to attack them, when you can just put them closer to your base and kill every single enemy before they could even get close enough to attack them? And if they do get close enough, probably after around 22 minutes (after the 20 minute mark, enemies start the scale rapidly in order to kill you), you will die no matter how much armor or healing your towers have.
So we have a rougelite autochess with tower defense mechanics, that kind of fails in all 3 of these categories really badly. Still, it did get me to play for 5 hours and get all the achievements, which is not bad for this price, but I didn't really feel anything other than disappointment and indifference while doing so.
