The Bazaar (2025)

Talking about The Bazaar is tricky because this game has a solid core to that comes apart as you scrutinize its live service elements. I'd probably most directly compare it to Backpack Battles - in both games, your character is effectively your inventory of items, and your goal is to make the strongest possible synergies to make your build as powerful as possible. Each "day", you pick events that will allow you to shop, find items, gain experience, and gain a variety of buffs, and at the end, you fight another player. Your goal is to survive as long as you can.

This premise generally works great. There's a lot of really cool details in the massive set of possible events, PvE encounters, characters and their unique items & mechanics, and passive skills your character can gain. It's just a good formula. Honestly, one of my favorite parts of the game are the PvE encounters, as it forces you weigh the benefits of getting increased rewards against the risk of losing the battle and gaining nothing. There's also item enchantments that can add an extra dimension to your builds.

However, this is one of the types of roguelites where you goal is to break the game as much as you can. Builds will regularly either one-shot you or rapidly go infinite. This may be preference, but I find I strongly prefer games where you need to make more considerations than your one win condition.

Regardless if you prefer or dislike that structure, it leads to a bit of a hole in the gameplay loop. In a game like Backpack Battles or Teamfight Tactics, not only are you trying to refine your build as much as you can, but you may need to make different choices based on what your opponents are doing. For instance, in Backpack Battles it may make sense to add a defensive items instead of stacking all of your eggs into a weapon based win condition. In TFT, you can adjust how much money you're spending on tempo (rerolling or leveling early) based on what the rest of the lobby is doing, or prioritizing armor or magic resist based on the other players' comps.

In The Bazaar, that's almost never the case. Builds are almost always optimized to do your win condition as fast as possible, which usually means one-shotting your opponent or infinitely scaling your defenses. There's not really moments where you consider, "To counter a burn build, I can add this item" - your item inventory is very limited, and you'd almost always be better off just focusing on your own win condition. You just don't have the literal space to make counterplay work, and even if you did, players would likely use that to just stack their win condition even further.

As a result, the PvE and PvP battles feel the same. There's technically interactivity between you and your opponents, but it's never really intentional. The only element introduced by having builds from real players is that there's a meta. Think of it like this: let's say that in an alternate version of The Bazaar, all battles are PvE, and they simply choose random bosses from a pool like Slay the Spire or Binding of Isaac might. This would effectively have zero impact on how you play. At least in Slay the Spire, you know what the boss is ahead of time, and you can change how you play based on that. In The Bazaar, you don't know your opponent until the last second, so there's no ability for you to consider what build you're fighting against.

And that also takes me to my next point: The Bazaar is a live service game, and its pricing, for lack of a better word, is atrocious. $20 per character is just way too much. And again, the game already feels like it doesn't really justify being PvP instead of being purely PvE. Even though the game gives you a few characters to play if you buy the base game, I just can't imagine paying $20 per character.

As a result, I really struggle to recommend this game. There's something in there, but it comes apart when at best this game ought to have been a singleplayer roguelite instead of a live service game. I hate to just measure this game against Backpack Battles, but again, it seems to do what the Bazaar does but better.

3/5 for the gameplay, and minus one for the pricing model.

(edit: This game's monetization model has changed along with its Steam launch, so what I wrote about it below is not all accurate anymore. I'll update it if I go back to playing the game.)

The Bazaar is a pretty interesting roguelike auto-battler I've started playing recently that alternates between PvE and asynchronous PvP battles. Once you get past the initial information overload and get a basic grip on what's going on, it's a lot of fun to piece together its different items, upgrades, and perks into a wide range of different builds. The game flow consistently gives you interesting opportunities and trade-offs, rewarding those who can keep their options open and recognize when to commit to a strategy. While there's a wide breadth of stuff you can run into and things to learn through experience, it's not too hard to pick up and intuit some kind of semi-reasonable strategy thanks to the clear design of how things might fit together.

Although the ultimate cap for your run is a gold trophy for 10 PvP wins, rewards and recognition are also given at both 4 and 7 wins, nicely framing "winning" as something that doesn't have to go all the way. After all, the game can still be really fun when you're just experimenting with something new, or trying to succeed with your favorite build from a bad spot, or some other situation where you just may not be able to survive against lategame number scaling. And this game really does have so many decisions, exciting possibilites for good luck, and ways to feel your growing strength and meta knowledge that it's usually fun to play even on a run that doesn't go super well. I do wish the runs went by a little more quickly, but admittedly a lot of it requires just learning the game to go more quickly yourself, and it's hard to see where it could be heavily trimmed down.

This is a free game, but there is a bunch of monetization stuff including some kind of subscription I've ignored and a boring battle pass. More concerningly, there is a "ticket" system for ranked games which may occasionally require players to pay $5 for 5 tickets if they're not willing to play unranked. I don't mind too much since ranked is much harder, but this system further lessens my interest in getting deep into it. There are also card expansions that honestly I don't really understand the distribution of, but which seem like they can cost money for early access. Just playing the game gets you some ranked tickets as well as some in-game currency (albeit with the added steps of opening chests from claiming battle pass tiers...), which is also used to unlock more characters with their own distinct build paths, cosmetics, and more. I don't love the whole setup, but as a casual player I do feel like I can just play and enjoy myself without spending money, so it's whatever.

The game's particular blended genre (marketed as a "hero builder") brings to mind many other games but feels unique overall. The multiplayer component in particular is something I've been thinking about, since your actual engagement with other players is the bare minimum, no way to properly plan and build around them other than seeing what character they are before the fight starts, no shared resource pool, no particular positioning outplay you can do. As a result it seems to come down to a general meta read if you actually want to play competitively, but this game doesn't really have the resources to make that easy to break into (even though there are some good build guides out there). I have to wonder if the game might be better as a pure offline roguelike that puts more into designed boss encounters, adventure, and an ultimate true win state, but it's fun as-is, just slightly odd from my casual newcomer perspective.

I have had some runs of this that were an absolute blast as I just barely lost any health for many rounds or instantly one-shot my opponents, but even some of these runs eventually hit a wall full of stuff that I haven't even engaged with yet that totally destroys me. It is definitely a game that you could put many hours into, particularly with how often they are updating it, but also one where I think you can just play a bit of unranked action and have a good time with the stuff you start out with. Certainly planning to keep playing it for now, and I think it will be a really really great iPad game when it eventually comes out on there.