Review anarchistica 2/5 · Oct 9, 2024
A strategy game without strategy
Playtime: 3,5 hours (three short runs completed)
Intro
LOKCOAD is a roguelike "strategy" game that combines a simplified version of Darkest Dungeon's positional turn-based attacks with node travel like in Monster Train or Slay The Spire. You pick an area to defend and an overlord, and that's it - everything else is pre-determined. After the starting battle you can pick …
Playtime: 3,5 hours (three short runs completed)
Intro
LOKCOAD is a roguelike "strategy" game that combines a simplified version of Darkest Dungeon's positional turn-based attacks with node travel like in Monster Train or Slay The Spire. You pick an area to defend and an overlord, and that's it - everything else is pre-determined. After the starting battle you can pick between 1-3 nodes where you buy/sell stuff, get an event or fight another battle.
Battles take place in pre-generated dungeons where you place two traps and two groups of monsters to fight incoming heroes. The traps trigger automatically, monsters have one or two different attacks to pick from, or three in rare cases. Attacks always target the front, rear or middle enemy - you don't get to pick. Dungeons can also contain other rooms where you cast one of your three spells (and only that), fight with a set monster, enemies heal, etc.
Review
As you hopefully gathered from my description, the main problem with the game is lack of input. The only permanent upgrades are the skills you pick on the very limited skill tree.
You don't get to pick different factions or anything that really lets you strategise. Dungeons are random so few options there. You can't even pick which monster to attack in many cases. There's no changing positions either. When placing units you can only try to match resistances with enemy attacks, and hope they don't scramble your formation. Your units will die quickly, sometimes even before you get to use them. You do get to upgrade units a bit, but there are no choices there and you need money and the right node. There's all kinds of different artifacts, attacks and status effects that are somewhat interesting to interact with, but getting to do that is randomly determined.
Conclusion
Legend of Keepers is a game that makes you feel useless. Your carefully placed units get moved randomly. Your carefully selected unit dies before it even gets to act. You end up with a ton of some resources and a lack of others because of the randomness of nodes. And after an hour or so you lose all progression except for some XP that you get to spend on exciting skills like "+x% bonus to y".
This had a lot of potential. Dungeon Keeper has always been a fun concept and the various units and such are nice. It's just overly random and kind of feels like it plays itself.