With a few updates under its belt, I no longer need to have a gun put to my head to reccommend Viractal. I had a review before, which I saved for posterity, in which I was conflicted on whether or not I could earnestly tell people to buy it due to how the game was still very early in development. As of writing this its still not 100% feature complete, but I feel its complete enough to where I can give my thoughts on whether or not you should play it. So, let's take it from the top: Viractal is a roguelite combined with a dokapon-esque board game. Given its the same developers, that shouldn't be too much of a surprise. The game's structure is that you pick one of a few select boards to play, each having its own little "campaign" associated with it which tell the story of a hero starting out his journey to slay the demon lord. The story of each campaign is very simple and straightforward, but the boardgame aesthetic makes it really charming despite its simplicity. You'll pick up to three pieces to play the game with, which to start you'll only have the Hero, Mage and Warrior unlocked. Each piece will move independantly on the board, but progress in the campaign is cooperatively shared between them. The game supports local and online play to let your friends control one of the characters. On the board will be several different event tiles, some of which are enemies, and you'll have 25 turns to prepare for the bossfight at the end. Each board follows the same structure of visiting 4 towns which grant you powerful items if you complete their quest. Notably these quests are static- you'll always be asked to slay a giant kobold from the very first town in the game, and you will always gain a random item upon completing this quest too. The roguelike elements in this game come from the randomly generated boards and how you can unlock more characters and cards every time you finish playing a board. Right- cards! Did you know this game has a slay-the-spire esque combat system? Only instead of controlling one character with one deck, each piece has its own card pool and starting deck. When a piece engages combat with an enemy, all three pieces join in for it with a set turn order- combat is always with your full party. There's a large variety of cards with unique effects in this game and the combat is very addictive once you start figuring out what cards are good and which are not. I find this gameplay loop rather satisfying. Boards take anywhere from an hour to two hours to clear for me, and the game makes it easy to quit playing and resume the campaign at a later date. Runs feel neither too long nor too short, and its great fun playing with friends as you now no longer have full control over which strategies you develop and what you'll be doing to deal with each encounter. For as positive as I am on the game, its not without its flaws. The character balance is rather poor- two stand outs in this regard being the Warrior and the Thief. The Warrior is meant to be a hard-hitting fighter who has a lot of HP but quickly accumulates debuffs to make himself take more damage, or just outright inflicts himself with damage. The thief is a low-damage speedster who can hit twice with every card. The issue is that the warrior's cards have such crippling downsides they're near entirely useless most of the time, and even the ones that aren't so bad, barely hit any harder than the other characters' cards, making him fall behind fast. Meanwhile the thief is easily the best character in the game, because buffs and debuffs ramp up very quickly once you're past the first few turns, leading to him running away with every campaign he's in by shredding regular enemies and bosses alike. Not only are his double-hits strong, but he has some ridiculously powerful cards all to his own that vastly outclass what most other characters have access to. These two have been in the game since launch, in this state, and no character released after has gotten even close to as powerful as thief is, or as bad as warrior is, without any rebalancing to either of those characters to make them more in line with the rest of the cast. The replayability and meta progression are also rather weak for being a roguelite. The unlocks you can get are either terrible, or extremely powerful, with no real inbetween. It leads to me not bothering to unlock half the available options since all they'd do is gunk up the card and item pools for no benefit, and even though they've added an option to let you turn off certain items you've unlocked, I sitll don't see why I would unlock them in the first place only to turn them off. Also, once you've beaten a campaign there's very little reason to return to it, and there's only so many times you can play the same map before the novelty wears off. Mind you, you can look at my playtime- I don't think it wears off so fast that you can't get a good deal of fun out of it first. I paid 15 for this in early access, but even the 25 they ask at the time of writing this is well worth the fun I've had. The game's good. Its even better with friends. I don't regret my purchase and I'll probably still play a fair bit more after I post this updated review. But its not perfect, and I won't pretend it is. ________________________________________________________________________ OLD REVIEW BELOW ________________________________________________________________________ Put a gun to my head. Tell me "Reccommend" or "Don't reccommend". I will hesitate and get shot. Listen, I put down the reccommendation because its a fun game, but it comes with a LOT of asterisks at the time of posting. Viractal's a roguelike, taking a combat system akin to slay the spire but dressing it up as a miniature D&D campaign. Pick up to three pieces at the start of the game, letting either your friends control up to two of them or have you control every piece yourself. You have X amount of turns to prepare for the boss at the end of the campaign, progressing through a randomly generated map with a preset campaign, You roll dice on each of your pieces to move hexagons on the board and once all your pieces have taken an action, the turn passes. Landing on certain squares will triggers random events, give you new cards or boost your drop chances for better items. The vibes of this game? Absolutely great. I love the board game aesthetic it has, its simple but really animated and vibrant. I get the feeling these are souls trapped in a board game, straight out of the shadow game against Bakura in the early yugioh manga. The writing is competent enough, not having too much to it and mostly being set dressing. There's a light meta element, but I'm already struggling to talk about details. That's because of the BIG, BOLD "EARLY ACCESS" label on this game. I'll be blunt. It has only one campaign at the time of writing. It only has four actual characters. The game is a little buggy. The campaign isn't very long. The balancing is kind of skewed. The replay value is a little lacking. The permanent upgrades after every run are VERY slow to unlock. This game is like, VERY fun to play with friends, and still offers a great deal of fun even solo. But after maybe three runs you'll have seen pretty much everything the game has to offers aside from a couple random event outcomes you've not seen in the campaign. The bosses don't take a while to learn, its already pretty easy to consistently win after only a few runs. The game is really fun. I mean it. Its also very cozy and pretty. Its also pretty cheap in early access right now- 15 euro is a lot less than what most mid-tier developers of Sting's caliber would charge you. But its incomplete. It doesn't have a lot of content. Its hard to recommend, but I DO recommend it. Just know that what you're buying is far removed from a complete or polished experience, and investing right now you're most likely investing in the game its about to become rather than the one it is right now.
Expand the review