Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch Steam Charts & Stats

I see the vision, but it's not executed well. # Mechanically First: It takes like 20+ minutes to play the game AT ALL. There are two separate tutorials, one "simple" tutorial which is essentially drag and drop 2 things then read through the story for the next 15+ minutes. The tutorial is just... It's not designed into the game, but feels like an afterthought. A good tutorial should introduce you to mechanics as they're needed while allowing the player to practice the previous mechanics BEFORE introducing more complicated stuff. For a deck builder in particular, things should begin feeling simple and slowly increase as mechanics are introduced naturally through the game. This isn't the feeling here. Instead, everything feels incredibly rushed and all-at-once. As a new player I get no time to figure out what's going on, how anything works, etc. I get told 'use your cards, press tab to switch things, you can only use these cards when your monarch is descended' and then just left to hopefully figure it out. There are so many units right out of the gate with so many different effects and synergies to figure out that I can't focus on building my understanding of the base mechanics. I think this could be good, but it's WAY too complicated with everything thrown at the player right away -- it's overwhelming and not fun. # Story I hate "start at the end" style stories. The fact it's a time-loop thing makes it worse in this case... I don't know who any of these people are. I don't care about them. Why are they doing whatever it is they're doing? No clue. What ARE they even doing? No idea. Why should I care? I don't. I'm just annoyed that instead of a 'tutorial' I'm clicking through the third act of a visual novel. # Final Thoughts The story interrupts the game-play and the game-play doesn't enhance the story. They're entirely disconnected entities and both are incredibly rough and heavy handed. I was excited to try this game and hoped I'd love it. The art style is my jam, I love both deck builders and tower defense games, dark fantasy is always cool... It has all the elements to seem cool, but it's just an overwhelming beginner experience and I 100% don't have the inclination to force myself through a rough on-boarding in order to experience the "good part". There are so, so, so many games which I will be instantly hooked into from the start, so why would I slog through a painful beginning in the hopes it's better later? Devs, if you're reading... I'd recommend checking out literature on invisible/integrated tutorials for the onboarding and maybe just cut the current VN "tutorial" section entirely. It's just confusing and overwhelming.