SpellRogue Reviews

Really solid roguelike deck builder with nice visuals and a wide variety of spells and mechanics. They don't reinvent the wheel as far as map-traversal and relic+spells/abilities go (though you can get rituals which are a unique and interesting mechanic), but they do differ in the deck building in that you're building a loadout of spells, not cards. Each spell has 2 potential upgrades (A/B style) so you'll often find stuff that you can at least work with. I don't usually love dice-based games but this one has a lot of ways to mitigate the RNG (which makes it comparable to the unpredictability of a card draw) by manipulating your dice, as long as you pack some utility spells. Characters all feel quite different with different mechanics and general archetypes that their spells play into. Honestly a really solid game. Not sure why it's only around 85% positive. The only thing that isn't great, in my opinion, is the map traversal is ... not that great. It's often obvious what the single best path is, and the paths don't branch much so you're basically committed to your path or like ... 1, MAYBE 2 if you're lucky other paths which probably just suck. The map design could really use some work. Outside of that though? Game's a gem, in my opinion.

Fun game, until the repetitive grind kicks in, which is why I rarely play these types of games. About the time you get the hang of the game...you've seen it all, done it all. It's the same maps and same handful of mobs each run. XP and their associated unlocks are pretty slow going. You can go into custom games and give yourself easy mode big xp wins, but that makes the grind worse. Like any game like this, your runs boil down to mostly RNG. Still, if games like this are your jam, you'll enjoy it. Even though I won't bother to finish it, I got my money worth out of it.

nice builds, open space for creativity.

very pleasantly surprised about how good this game is. Played many games in the genre, but somehow avoided this one way too long. recommended, especially with it being on sale. If you like slay the spire and / or some thinking and tinkering, then this is a safe choice.

Really clever rogue like with lots of depth. Sort of feels like a deck builder, but you aren't shuffling cards and choose your powers to bring into each combat. The dice adds a ton of depth with many different choices on how to approach each turn. Game could use with a manual, as some of the symbols / one word descriptions for an ability don't make sense. Good controller support too.

The mixture of characters, dice building, deck building, card upgrades, shops, artifacts, variable maps, and variable monsters will keep me coming back to this game.

I had fun with this but not as much as I usually do. It could just be deckbuilder roguelite fatigue. This has all of the hallmarks of any deckbuilder you have ever played. If anything, the actual cards get MORE convoluted in what they do. Still, it's fun. If you are burning out on deckbuilders, this one isn't going to bring anything that revolutionary. If you are not burned out, this will be just a good time.

Thumbs down with caveats. Spellrogue is a Slay the Spire clone with dice used to fuel your spells (similar to Dicey Dungeon). It works well enough and I have played a decent amount I imagine i'll play more but despite being solid and reasonably fun it has some crippling downsides that might put others off. It's quite a slow game, runs feel like they take forever and slipping your dice into their respective spells, rerolling et cetera takes much more time than playing cards does in StS. There are a small pool of enemies and bosses so runs feel a bit samey. The difficulty is massively overtuned especially the true final boss. The worst thing about this feels like there are only one or two optimal setups and the rest are crap, there's no point in having a variety of spells and having most of them being unsuitable and borderline unusable. Trying to have fun in SpellRogue feels like its locked behind knowing which overpowered spells to use rather than building a working strategy out of what you find (which is the strength of most roguelikes!). The unlocks seem to take forever i'm on 50 hours and i have less than 10 successful runs, have only unlocked 77% of items and i'm only on difficulty +4 out of 13. Unlocks are also dependent on using effects, items, characters etc a certain number of times which is quite tedious trying to build into those strategies when those builds are fundamentally almost dependent on the higher level unlocks. In my opinion difficulty should be linear to begin with with all unlocks (read full strategies) being available to play with long before the game actively starts hitting you in the face, allowing you to play with sub optimal strategies to learn strengths and weaknesses therein. Difficulty should not be aggressively exponential. Nor is there any fun in abusing the same OP strategy every time to win because that's fu##ing boring. To put the above into perspective I have about 1200 hours in Slay the Spire (probably around 600ish unmodded), 600 hours in monster train and 200 in monster train 2 (so far) those three games balance difficulty exceptionally well with reliance on busted strategies being minimal due to the variety of strategy, strong cards and robust upgrades. Spellrogue could have been great, instead it's just fine with its best bits being inspired by better games and its game design hampered by questionable choices.

SImple to learn but deep to play. Don't let the traditional dice fool you, there' s a lot to unpack!

A fun roguelite that looks like a card game but is actually a fun take on using dice. You have abilities which require certain dice rolls to activate and you roll dice each turn and decide how to slot them in. There are 4 characters, each with their own unique skills/themes you can build around and each character typically has several different mechanics of their own they can use. There are quite a few unlocks you can get through each run in the form of new abilities and artifacts, as well as starting options for each character. Runs do take a while though and it can feel a bit grindy to unlock the later levels for each character. That said, the gameplay is very fun and once you get a build working properly you can get some crazy combos that trigger over and over again, which is really satisfying. If you enjoy this genre of game this is definitely one of the better ones to play.