The Deadly Path

Just not good enough for me. It's an interesting game and fairly priced, but I couldn't see myself returning. I was excited when I saw all the different characters to unlock and play, but once I realized these are more of a difficulty slider, I got pretty discouraged. The game is a bit wonky. For example, if you pause the game while there is text on the screen from something like the Killing Moon event, it just stays there. So you have to unpause and wait for the text to go away and pause again so you can actually see. The controls get a little weird at time when dragging locations. Like the game will stick your mouse to a location and have a weird delayed drag. It's an interesting concept, but at the end of the day it's just placing buildings and waiting. It's a resource management style game where you try to keep up with the ever increasing upkeep costs while constantly having to expand as your tiles become exhausted of resources. You have goals to meet like building a certain building or defending against X amount of raIds. My biggest gripe is that this is supposed to be a real time game, but the visibility options are not very good. The grid starts filling up and becomes a giant cluster ****. Even fully zoomed out you still have to drag the board around to see things. This really made the game feel like a chore to play, especially when they start introducing raids where enemies will attack your tiles. At this point, keeping up with what was happening with the poor visibility became more of a chore than a fun game. It's just not polished or fun enough for me to keep. Best of luck to the devs.

Part of me really wants to recommend this so consider it more of a mixed review than a straight downvote. The timed econ management is right up my alley and the random tile reveals and building unlocks combined with the challenges and god variety make each run feel unique. When it's working as it's supposed to I greatly enjoy it. The issue is that it has quite a few bugs. Some runs the cycle timer stops working leading to the run becoming trivial. Some runs your buildings will stay when they're supposed to be depleted(more of a problem than it sounds as the depleted tiles have their own use). Sometimes it just crashes late in a run, which is made worse by there being no save feature in the middle of a run. If you've got a high tolerance for putting up with bugs I'd say go ahead and buy it, I know I have a higher one than most which is why I'm not giving this a recommendation though. The good news here is that the devs have done the hard part, they've made a fun game for those of us who are into this type that's simply dragged down by things that can be fixed. If the bugs are fixed I'd put it right up there with Against the Storm, which is one of my favorite games of the past few years.

A balance pass may save it but until then you are too much at the mercy of the RNG, and I say this as someone who likes randomness in games. It's an exercise in frustration

I really hate having to leave a negative review for this game because conceptually, I think it's a great little game. Art is nice, the lore is interesting, the idea is fun. But the UI is so janky it's almost unplayable. Pausing the game can cause interface issues that will force you to abandon a run because things will become unclickable. Even without the pause bugs, the pause mechanic is poorly conceived and don't work fully in the "real time strategy" sense. You also can't zoom out far enough to see the entire game board, which makes game play very clunky and annoying. In order to enjoy the positive aspects of the game, which definitely exist, you have to push through so many of these bugs and similar issues. Hopefully these things can be addressed by the devs. I think the review could have been a positive one if these issues were resolved.

in this day and age, i rarely negative review, but this one should be considered a open beta, and the devs should get feedback to make the final finish.. it's missing too much QoL stuff and gets to be a pain if u wanna play fast, no hotkeys does not help this premise and i hope the devs make some nice updates but i doubt it, the moment i wrote something in discord it was more of a funny reply and more made fun of then taken serious

The great trailer made me want to play this game. I had to stop playing when I realized output per cycle is hidden in a tooltip. I can't play a game where the key information about whether the game ends or continues is hidden behind a mouse hover.

Game is broken to the point of not running on my machine.