Hex of the Lich Reviews

This game is great. I just wish there was some way to customize your loadout before a run.

While the first hour or two can be very intimidating due to all the keywords used and the various ways they can interact, once you find a strategy that works and that you can put intelligent thought into building, this becomes a wonderful game with a very enjoyable creation system and very interesting combat encounters! Would recommend to anyone looking to add some variety to their library!

Very interesting game with a cool spell building mechanic. The interactions between abilities can be confusing at times, but you can make some very intricate spells once you understand it. I wish there were more variety on the paths you can take, as currently there is only enemy encounters, bosses, and the shop. If you like tinkering with builds to make busted, unstoppable characters, you should pick this game up.

There are so many ways to navigate this game, but I can't help but draft every little critter I can to my spell book. I can tell that this is going to keep me interested for a long time. Well worth the purchase!

Pretty fun and arcadey, you can get some crazy hex combinations...

Feels more like pre-alpha demo than the full game. Bug where you leave a shop and it resets your game to zero is... an interesting one

Game is not perfect, and, be warned, you will not find dozen of hours of original content here. But is it good ? Yes, if maybe a bit hard to understand at first. Customizing your spells is fun, and so is blowing up the screen 30 times in a row !

Hex of the Lich is a game that deserves a bit more attention than it's gotten. It's a deckbuilder roguelike in the same vein as Slay the Spire and Inscryption, but instead of playing cards you're building up an arsenal of spells to use in hex grid tactics battles. While it doesn't exactly stack up to the titans, it's still good enough to be worth the asking price when it's on sale. + The spells and their effects are creative, interesting, and take full advantage of the board layout. You have spells that move you, swap positions of you and the targets, summon things, push and pull enemies, apply buffs and debuffs, do damage in an area or a line, and more. Each of these effects can show up as an individual upgrade hex that can be applied to any spell up to its upgrade limit; the more times you can upgrade a spell, the less charges you have to cast it in combat. + Deckbuilding choices are difficult to make, as they should be for this genre. You get one new spell and one spell upgrade per fight, while the shops give you a choice of 4 of each + the ability to reroll but at a price that (except for rerolling) increases every stage. Do you want the spell that summons an explosive at range and pulls surrounding enemies towards it, or do you want the spell that lets you cross the entire map as long as you move in a straight line? Do you want the hex that pushes surrounding units away, or the 2-pack that summons minions to soak up enemy aggro? Do you want the hex that becomes slightly more powerful based on how many turns you've taken, the one that becomes significantly more powerful if the spell hits a lot of enemies simultaneously, or the one that makes the rest of the spell twice as powerful but only if it [i]doesn't[/i] hit the enemies simultaneously? + Despite the added complexity the hex grid gives combat, turns still go by quickly. You won't spend too much time waiting for your next turn unless you and/or the enemies are spamming minions that get to take multiple turns in a row, and even then it still shouldn't take more than 15 seconds or so. * Enemy theming is pretty good, with every kind of enemy having its own set of attacks that are always the same for its particular species. However, while you can tell what the enemy layout is on the node map, you can't look up what spells they have, and a lot of enemies look a bit too similar to each other. You might remember the difference between single-ghost and triple-ghost, but you probably won't remember the difference between green-thing-with-too-many-eyes and other-green-thing-with-too-many-eyes. - Some mechanics are very poorly explained even by genre standards; I'm still not sure what Ultima and Duo actually do, even after experimenting. - The variety isn't quite as strong as it first appears. There's no way to tank damage other than just not being in the enemy's range, which makes movement spells, ranged spells, and minion spam disproportionately stronger than melee spells. Charm is also brokenly powerful if you're able to cast it at range - many bosses just delete themselves and their adds when under its effects. Some artifacts are brokenly powerful like the one that gives all your minions a range bonus, while others like the one that makes explosives go off immediately are useless since all your explosives have push/pull effects baked in anyway. - The only kinds of nodes on the map are regular fights and shops, with no more than one shop per stage regardless of your path, and of course the bosses at the end. I almost always went for the routes that had the shops as close to the boss as possible; the only times I did otherwise were when the shops all showed up way too early in stage 1, or when the latest shop in stage 3 sat behind a node with a truly cursed enemy combination while another much easier route had its shop only one node earlier. - The starting RNG has a bit too much influence on your ability to win. Your starting spells are fully randomized with the only caveats being you always get Magic Missile, Blink, a 10-charge spell, and no spells with less than 4 charges. If you get Warp or Blob Lob as one of your starting spells you've got very good odds of surviving at least as far as the first shop, but if you get Grave Beam and a bunch of melee-only spells that don't summon minions then you've got very good odds of dying before you get there.

If you love to customize your abilities like in noita or path of exile, this turn based roguelike has ya covered. This one certainly takes the crazy spells up a notch and encourages you to figure out overpowered combos to break the game with things like summoning crabs that mind control your enemies or lasers that make lines of slimes that also shoot lasers. :]

Only one successful run so far, but I can still tell this is a very solid game. Use of distinct effects built into different spells, which can be later modified with more and different effects, lets the pre-made spell book's stuff have distinct identities while letting the customized ones reach crazy heights. The art and music are also pretty darn neat. Different enemy families are visually distinct while keeping the overall style intact. Blob best summon don't @ me.