Monster Slayers

Score: 3/5 It's only a tentative recommendation, as it's a good attempt by the designer(s)/dev team, but it is destroyed by the competition. I strongly recommend playing Slay the Spire or Monster Train instead. The primary issue is that I'm not the target audience for its style of humor. [b]The Good[/b] 1. Mechanics are solid. 2. Technical aspects seem great. No bugs/CTD. Able to perform high APM turns without the game breaking, and the animations will chain pretty fast in response. [b]The Bad[/b] 1. Main male VA (I think he's the narrator and one or more of the selectable male voice packs) is a well-known content creator on YouTube, and it's moderately distracting. Some of the selectable voice packs are going for over-the-top action-comedy, and I find it very tiring/annoying. 2. Internally consistent as it may be, I do not appreciate my character and the enemy hovering in the air like super-heros as they prepare to attack their target. It looks goofy as hell, and detracts from the experience. I wish they would have stayed mainly on the ground. 3. Balance problems. Some classes are too strong, others are moderately too weak. Some meta-strategies are too effective on too many classes, and some classes do not have a strong selection of effective builds, moderately reducing replay value, which is a core feature of rogue-like deck-builders. Scaling is too strong for card and character upgrades, and for the shop/economy choices. 4. Perk system is visually difficult to manage, requires a lot of grinding, and gives really strong buffs for all future runs with a specific class. On the plus side, there are many exclusive choices here. And, although I didn't test it, it seems like you can reroll perk selections easily, which can keep you from being permanently stuck with a choice you end up disliking, or for experimentation later on. 5. The UI/visuals can often make it difficult to tell what options are available or what I should be looking at, as unreleated/unneccessary stuff is kept on screen instead of being wiped away with the pertinent visuals/text being front and center, or being on a new screen altogether.