Roots of Yggdrasil

Cozy and engaging roguelike deckbuilder/citybuilder. I'd give it a 7/10 at this point (tutorial and 1 loop completed). Pros: - Nice story (maybe a little light but I don't mind that) and cute, cozy graphics. - Plays well on my 15 year old computer. - Fairly engaging gameplay loop. Each stage of each loop feels a little like the first 20 minutes of a Civ or Age of Empires game. We'll see if it stays "fresh" as I ramp up in difficulty and # of Loops. - Retreads very old gameplay elements (roguelike with progression, building placement/engine building with exploration), but combines them in a fairly unique way. Cons: - Despite what it says, controller support is bugged to the point of being unusable. Right in the tutorial it wouldn't register any response when it prompted me to "press the top button". Had to switch to mouse and keyboard. - So far, it seems like the way to play and win each stage is very same-y without many decision points, which has me wondering if this game will stay fresh and if the real challenges and losses (when they arrive, I haven't felt challenged at all yet after 1 loop) will feel fair and hard in a fun way.

lots wrong with it. but the citybuild-roguelite-deckbuild combo works. +short missions +good mission objectives -buggy -few buildings. very slow unlock rate. -mission variety. all similar. -UI problems.

Pretty interesting adjacency game with metaprogression

It's fine. The framework they built for the game is great, but there's just a low number of cards, the unlocks are not great, levels are very samey, so while a lot of fun at first it gets stale fast. Probably buy it on sale.

Roots of Yggdrasil is a difficult game for me to review. At its core it's a turn-based city building Roguelike deckbuilder. It's got all the hallmarks - runs, meta progression, story that you unlock piece by piece, etc. The art style is really charming and the gameplay works really well. The story so far is interesting, if a little played out in terms of the subject matter. It's a great time killer and in general runs don't take too long. It's significantly more relaxed than the average roguelike. However, there are several things that annoy me with this game and encouraged me to put it down. The metaprogression is sloooooooow. You do 3-4 runs to unlock the ability to start the game with 1 extra resource (which is 1/5 of the cost of most buildings). The story progression (at least when tied to the characters) is gated behind adding difficulty modifiers to your runs very early on. Also there is a clearly best option for a "hero" - the one that gets to blop down a free building every few turns. The others don't even compare, but you need to take them along to progress their story. Essentially adding another difficulty modifier for yourself The variety is not really there - the maps are fairly similar, the objectives are all the same and the cards are mostly pretty boring. Runs barely differ from each other and when they do, it's essentially by the end of the run. I don't know if it's the number of cards or how weak the artifacts are, but something is off about it. With all those things together, Roots of Yggdrasil pretty quickly becomes samey and rather boring. To a degree, this is the "fault" of the Roguelike genre, but it just feels like something is missing here. I wouldn't really recommend it unless you really want the novelty of a city-building Roguelike.

5hours but no battle or at least, not the type of battle I expected.

Incredibly enjoyable, originally recommended by a member of the Civ (Sid Meier's Civilization VI) community. Had the privilege to being able to play test in the earlier stages of development.