Astronarch (2021)

Playtime: 1,5 hours (one run, died at third boss)

Intro

Astronarch is a roguelike autobattler. You pick 3 heroes at the start, then pick one of up to three possible area to move to with each giving you a fight, event or merchant. You get permanent and consumable items along the way, and beating a boss allows you to upgrade two skills in total. Your only involvement during combat is using consumables.

Genre

I love tower defense games and technically autobattlers are a subgenre of those. But i don't care for them, because you have almost no control over what happens.

I generally dislike roguelikes, except when they offer lots of starting choices or have solid permanent upgrades. Astronarch lets you pick three of up to 21 heroes at the start, plus a global upgrade, but that's it. There are no permanent upgrades.

Gameplay & conclusion

Aside from selecting a pth, starting picks and using potions during battles, gameplay mostly consists of deciding who gets which item. Items are random, which means that strategising is too dependent on luck. More starting options and permanent upgrades could've mitigated this. Now it just feels too much like gambling away my time.

This is an auto-battler take on the Slay the Spire/Monster Train type rogue-lite. You pick 3 heroes initially (and 2 more over the course of the playthrough) from a decent sized roster (~15), and then progress through a game board with various types of nodes, much like in the aforementioned titles. Being an auto-battler, your decisions are in which heroes to select, what to equip them with, how to position them at the beginning of battle, and when to use consumable potions during battle. There's a surprisingly good depth of gameplay for the simple concept. As with the other games in the genre there's an incremental difficulty increase unlocked as you beat the game each time. I've managed to make it about halfway in (8/20) without repeating the same strategy twice so far, so there's a great variety of options that are viable.

I'd definitely recommend giving this a shot if you're looking for another rogue-lite fix. I've already put in 11 hours this week, and see myself jumping in for a run or two here and there for quite a while.