Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles Reviews

I love gambling

i wan put the dice in mu moth

I've played A LOT of roguelike deckbuilder games. StS opened the gate for me and since then I became obsessed with the genre. After putting 150 hours in Astrea, unlocking everything and beating the hardest difficulty with every character I can say that, afterStS, no other game felt as satisfying as this one. - The massive amount of thinking that you need to do every turn is unparalelled. The order of everything matters and you have to take into account many factors, specially all your blessings and the enemy's abilities, to figure out how every dice you play will work out. - The deckbuilding aspect is so well polished and balanced, you have at least 4 or 5 viable builds with every character (there are 6 of them), so you never feel that you are obligated to go with certain build to beat the game. In that regard Astrea is even better that StS, as there are no "must have" dices or blessings to beat the game at all, the strenght of every blessing or dice you get offered as rewards depends entirely on your current build. - It has the same thing as StS where you find certain blessing that interacts well with some of your dices so you decide to make a build based on that alone. And as there are tons of blessing and dices, the amount of possible options is very, very high. It's very common to discover along the way some of those interactions for the first time, which makes every run feel pretty unique. - There are not as many enemies as in other games of the genre, but each of them is very well designed and makes you think hard how you can adjust your play to beat them, specially when it has something that counters some important aspect of your build. - You can have up to 2 sentinels (companions) that add to the general complexity, as you can use them to improve your build or cover some weakness of it. - The pathing has a lot of interesting options and forging dices feels really good. All in all, congrats to the devs for making such an incredible game. If you are a fan of this genre, Astrea will defintely scratch your itch.

EDIT: The same day I posted this the team announced a wide range of changes coming to the game which address a lot of the concerns I've written here. Once the beta test update goes through, assume that many of my complaints are no longer the case for the game. That said, I won't be playing the updated content as I've moved on to other games! There aren't many good roguelikes, specifically in the vein of Slay the Spire. Astrea gets the closest to being as good as StS, but falls short in a few areas. I'll point them out, and if they aren't dealbreakers for you, I'd recommend you buy this game. First, the UI is very pretty, to the point of distraction. It's very easy to miss dice you could possibly roll. True, if you hover over the end turn button any dice you might be able to use will wiggle, but you get used to clicking it (or the spacebar) to end a turn, and there are no speedbumps to ask if you're sure you want to end turn. Dice actions also have abstract images with simple color patterns. They don't always speak to what they do either. Much of the game is about throwing complexity upon complexity, which is why Astrea isn't as good as StS. Too many developers confuse complexity with quality. Astrea is one of those titles where you're often spinning plates to perform even the most basic of functions, and you don't always know how certain dice interactions will play out until they happen. All this to say, the abstractness of the dice works against the flow of the game. Unlike other deckbuilding roguelikes (or perhaps, like too many bad builders), Astrea frontloads a lot of the skill based on your choice of character. There isn't much in the way of "working with what you're given", since each character has, more or less, a single build that works. Too many character options are simply weak compared to others, or outright bad. Some builds feel as though the developers were afraid of a character being too strong, so any small gain you may have in one area is shackled with an innumerate flaw. The character Sothis is the crown jewel of this amateur design, as much of the debate over characters will attest. That said, I did put 61 hours into this title and beat the game (the true ending) with each and every character, unlocked every relic and die, and max-leveled every oracle. For things I like, the art is good, it's just much in the UI. Sound design and music is good, this is one title where I've wound up listening to tracks outside of the game, it's quite enjoyable. Despite how much spinning plates you do, and the narrow builds, the game is not as bad as Ballionaire, Chrono Ark, and similar titles in this genre. As I said, it's not StS, but it's the closest in terms of quality. The mechanics, while overly designed for some, do work more often than not. When you get a successful build going, it can be very satisfying to down bosses on the harder difficulties in a turn or two. So if any of what I said didn't sound like a dealbreaker, then by all means I highly recommend Astrea. I know I will be looking forward to future games by this dev team.

It's a different twist on deck building. Even though I've spent hours on it, I think the graphics and gameplay consistently bring me back to play even more of this.

I love roguelike deckbuilders. I thought I would love a roguelike dicebuilder. I was very wrong. Astrea has a delightful, unique artstyle and some unique ideas, especially in its power mechanics that revolve around losing and regaining health. However, when going down to 1hp repeatedly is a game mechanic, the ability to easily and correctly observe how much damage you are about to take and how big your healthbar is are important. Couple this with the fact that you have 6 sides per dice and a reroll mechanic and it quickly becomes apparent that Astrea has a MAJOR information visibility problem.