The Bazaar Reviews

If you're a casual player, this will be a great game for you. If you're someone who wants to invest a lot of time into the game and push for high ranks like me, then I wouldn't recommend it. After you learn what your character can do and how to put together most of their builds, you'll find that the only thing standing between you and rank 100 is luck. Will you find what you're looking for? Will you high-roll some broken-ass skill or transform? Will you get an enchantment that actually helps your build? Or will all of those things happen to your opponent instead? When you're highly ranked in Legend, a 10-win run will raise your rank by around 100, but if you get unlucky, you could lose as many as 300 ranks. So essentially, you're just gambling with your time. However, if you're willing to play whichever character is the most broken each season, you may fare better than I did.

Positives: Satisfying gameplay, great art and sound, high replayability, can close and come back to a run later. Also the free loot system is great for customisation. would highly recommend for PC but not laptop. Downsides: - while good quality, some of the menu animations and animations after each fight are far too long, those few extra seconds make it feel a little tedious at times especially for how often you see them. - Seems very poorly optimised, playing on my laptop that can run games like elden ring relatively fine but the Bazaar makes it close to overheating sometimes

The Bazaar is a fundamentally great strategy game that I cannot recommend in good faith because it most likely will not exist in a year. I could forgive the condescending devs; the corrupt balance dictated by a small group of "private server" players; the constant flip-flopping of monetization; the brutally time-consuming ranked system; the (what I suspect is) AI art... I could forgive all of that, IF those choices were actually growing the playerbase, turning a profit, and building a future for this wonderful game. Instead, the game's player count is a line straight down and to the right, the studio reported a multimillion dollar loss last year, and the only hope for a sustainable future is an out-of-nowhere renaissance when the fabled mobile app finally releases. I've played over a thousand hours. The core game mechanics are inspired - the best of Hearthstone, TFT, Backpack Battles, Slay the Spire, and so many more, all packed into one. I will keep playing it because I enjoy it. But I cannot recommend the game to anyone else because I am certain that outside of some mobile miracle from this team that is PHILOSOPHICALLY OPPOSED to marketing, The Bazaar (or at least the current multiplayer mode) will not exist by 2028. Unless of course they change their attitude and practices, which, over the last two years, they have shown complete unwillingness to do. But I hope they do.

The game was fun, played it alot. Too rng, too imbalanced, and the devs have no clue what theyre doing. The company doesnt have a dedicated balance team, they dont have a data scientist nor do any of their engineers understand basic stats and probability. They rely on a volunteer force of mostly bad players to test changes and propose changes. Shame, it could have been good. Oh well. Review from 2k hours and multiple rank 1 finishes. Avoid this game and company at all costs. - Urmia

My impression of this game so far is that the designers have never actually played it themselves - or at the very least, they don't have a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of all the classes. The game's balance feels like something they cobbled together on a whim one day - and with a foot that had just stepped in ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, no less. A perfectly good game has been forced into becoming a one-class dominance game in the new season - a one-way street where a single class reigns supreme. The season before last it was Karnok, last season it was Mak, and this season it's Vanessa again. With balance like this, why even bother selling multi-class DLCs? You might as well just allow only one class per season. Promise me - let's just change it to that, okay?

Great game, can't find a better game to play while you work your email job.

Over 700 hours later, I'm here. A game that was once so beloved, in which I had amazing times, there's no question about that. I loved this game so much that I purchased it to 3 other people and have every character except one, but I cannot in good faith recommend this game. The idea of "less is more" is definitely something The Bazaar needs very badly. The game feels incredibly bloated with half-assed content and interactions that don't seem to have proper thought behind them leading it to be derailing to a worse state with each patch. I get it, the devs need to make money somehow hence the addition of new characters and interactions. The thing is, this is not the only way to make money. A well balanced and fun game should be the main priority. You can buy characters, gift the game to someone else or buy gems/chests with real money. Gems and chests are not worth buying in the slightest because the game showers you with chests if you play the game at all. So maybe if there were any options for players to engage with to both support the game and have cool stuff in it, more focus could be spent on the gameplay which is what brought so many people to it. And I can say with certainty that this is not a balanced game. One can argue that it was never supposed to be and that's where the beauty in it lies. I can see that point to an extent, but that's different from a game with completely broken mechanics that should have never been there in the first place. Some of the balancing is done by volunteers from the Discord server, who are kind enough to lend a hand on that regard. But they are players with their own biases and thoughts on how the game should be played. The in-game translations are also very poorly made and the devs have the audacity to ask for "feedback" from the players, who are in reality just people fixing translation for free. There's definitely a trend here. The most recent examples of absolutely insane game design are "start of combat interactions", meaning items or passives that trigger as soon as the battle starts. These had been reworked and removed pretty much entirely from the game (save for a few skills) because they were too much. But with the latest patch, they were restored with the reasoning of "item identity". Yeah I'm talking about Holsters, but even before Holsters were restored to start of combat, they added items called Lag Bolt and Spark Plug which were also start of combat items, among others. How about our boy Karnok? Yeah man let's just give a character that already has charge on basically single item get MORE charge value whenever enraging so that he can go infinite every single round. I've seen Karnok infinites on Day 2, which is just absurd. Or just give more multicast to his items that are already super good. Either burst him in 2 seconds, which seems to be the only way to play the game now or lose. Amazing game design philosophy. Not to mention his skill which removes Freeze and Slow while also giving 10% cooldown reduction to every single item on the board when enraging. This skill is so good that you are missing out on it no matter what character you play, meaning that keeping a Karnok item to get the skill on level up is really important. Talk about identity. Just to make it very clear, every single character in this game has absolutely busted interactions and that is by design. Some are just obviously more apparent and problematic than others. Anyway, don't buy this, these devs really don't deserve the support or your precious time. There are many games out there.

800 hours played. Top 100 every season. I wanted this game to succeed. I can't recommend it anymore. Ironically, it's not even the balance that's finally pushed me away although this is easily the worst state I've seen the game in. Problematic builds dominate for weeks, balance concerns are brushed aside, and each patch somehow feels like an experiment in seeing how much patience the remaining player base has left. The monetisation has also changed multiple times since release, rarely in ways that benefited the players. Every time you think you understand what you're buying into, the goalposts seem to move. But the biggest issue isn't the gameplay. It's the attitude from the top. When long time players raise concerns, the response isn't "we hear you" or even "we disagree." Instead, we get gems like "Your hours don't pay the bills..." and the wonderfully professional response to criticism "Losers stay losing." Nothing inspires confidence quite like being told that hundreds of hours of feedback amount to "buy more copies or your opinion doesn't matter." Apparently, the correct way to enjoy The Bazaar is to buy the game, avoid criticising it, and applaud every balance patch regardless of the outcome. The sad part is that there really is a fantastic game buried underneath all of this. That's why I invested 800 hours into it. But good gameplay can only carry a game so far when the people steering the ship seem determined to argue with their own community instead of listening to it. If you're thinking of buying this because it looks like a deep, competitive strategy game, I'd wait. Not because you'll lose remember, according to management that just makes you a loser but because investing your time in a live service game means investing in the people running it. Right now, that's the part I can't recommend.

[h1] The studio owner hates his own players. Do not buy. [/h1] It's one thing for a monthly patch to have bad balance (Vanessa is currently breaking the game with a ~50% pick rate across 7 classes). It's a whole different level of toxic when the developers leave it broken for weeks and the studio head insults the community by calling frustrated players "losers who stay losing." To make it worse, they are actively censoring their Discord. I called out his condescending attitude without using any profanity, and they instantly hit me with a permanent IP ban. This studio cannot handle any accountability or negative feedback. If you don't enjoy being insulated by developers and banned for speaking up, do not support this game.