Wildkeepers Rising

A decent mix of a hub-based action RPG and top-down survivors-like gameplay, I'd recommend if you're into survivors-like games and looking for something new. I Like Nipper.

6/10

Great concept! I love creature collectors and roguelikes, but sadly this game is too undercooked. Monsters balancing is very off. Some monsters can scale to solo the entire map easily. Others have minimal effect from early to lategame and are only useful for activating equipment effects. And others are completely useless since they get will not follow you and get left behind fighting respawning mobs. Equipment is not exciting. The large majority is "deal X damage in a melee/projectile/line/cross/area every Y seconds", usefulness is directly related to monster stats. The remaining few range from expectedly overpowered (make a full copy of your monster) to impractical (buff monsters in a small area, i.e. only usable if you directly build a monster for range enhancement). Monster interaction is minimal. For example, you can burn/freeze/weaken enemies, but almost none of the monsters have any special characteristics to get additional benefits. So you just end up building direct damage and only use status effects as a binary "just get some source of weakness". Side note, there are no legendary rare monsters you build your team around, no monster fusions or evolutions, and I *think* that there are no randomly generated stats or passives on monsters either. That means very little variety when picking monsters. Finally, you have very little control over your monsters. Most will just follow you or keep a certain position relative to you, but you cannot command them other than using their single active skill (with a recharge). So the monsters end up feeling like auto shooting weapons from any other survivorlike. The last update added persistent equipment, some of which have effects other than "x% to stat y". Unfortunately, it didn't change the rest of the gameplay enough to pull me back in.