Battle Train

An indie gem, an interesting and captivating tactical roguelike. I honestly don't now why this game has less than 100 reviews, it may not be perfect but I found it great. For me, it scratches that roguelike itch like few games since slay the spire. Its not so good, "slay..." hooked me for over 100h, this one I gave up (more like rage quit) after 15h, but it did all I wanted up until around 12h. After this it falls into one of the problems of story-driven roguelikes, the gameplay gets repetitive and the story doesn't advance (or maybe I'm too bad a player). It may not be worth full price, but I bought it on a sale and did not regret at all. It helps that the story is a very nice satyre of profit-driven management of culture (in this case, a TV show) and characters are great, funny, smart and a little absurd. I honestly hate this tendency of framing roguelikes in a narrative, but in this case its well done (and was required, the devs had a story to tell and knew how to tell it [except I thoght it should have been shorter]). Also, the whole thing is voice acted... a labor of love, really.

delightfully weird little deckbuilder reminiscent of those pipe building games from the 2000s except with multiple tracks fighting for map control. My favorite part about this game is how much the campaign plays with changing the visuals of the gameshow to match the story. There are some very silly jokes that made me laugh and the gameplay has enough variety for some cool strategies. The main thing killing this game for some people seems to be how story progression is handled. There is a literal gate before the final area that blocks you from proceeding until you've watched all the story cutscenes found on map events which is a bit disheartening since you don't get the closure of beating a particularly good run fully until then. With that said after about 20 of these cutscene events (of which you can see 3-4 per round if focused) the game starts doing some fun stuff with the story. I'd suggest approaching this game as you would a one-off story game rather than a rougelike with lots of replayability.

I love the goofy style of the story and characters. It reminds me of the Venture Brothers. Well done! The card<->track laying dynamic is interesting. I still feel I don't have a grasp on the general strategies yet.