RecommendedSteam player
Updated for Flourish & Mettle Update My opinion of Griftlands is largely unchanged from my original review (below). The combat is tight and you're frequently just a misplay or two away from losing a big fight, but the RPG elements get increasingly gimmicky the more you play. It's sort of sad that choosing whether to help someone or not really depends on whether the passive bonus they give for loving or hating you is important or not. At higher prestige runs then you feel somewhat punished for taking an in-character action that ends up giving you a malus - I understand that's a strategic trade off you have to make, but it highlights where the RPG and strategic aspects clash jarringly in Griftlands. My real disappointment with Griftlands though was the introduction of Mettle as an in-game currency. Hades uses a similar concept where continuous play allows you to get stronger and thus more likely to succeed at runs, but Hades uses this because Hades' game goal is to allow you to experience more story. Hades locks story behind walls for you to conquer, and giving you Darkness to boost your base character's stats made a lot of sense because you're still striving towards more story even after finishing a run. But finishing Griftlands story isn't hard in the slightest, even if you're playing at the lowest prestige level (there's also an even easier story mode). Sure it'll take you a few runs to get your first win, but once you've got there there's nothing more to see, the story's complete. It becomes challenge for challenge's sake and the Mettle just makes the challenge easier over time. Instead of teaching players to get better then you can just hit your head against the wall until you have enough Mettle boosting your base stats to give you the edge. And Hades manages to hold your attention in runs with dazzling and weird combinations that let your gameplay style shift and adapt to new quirks and patterns of combat with the power ups you get during the run. By contrast, Griftlands combat is flat and "realistic", which I still see as a big shortcoming. In short, Griftlands just doesn't benefit from the Mettle system, It feels like it's pandering to people that want its weak RPG experience without the roguelite challenge, but you could just play story mode if you wanted that. Griftland offers a cop out to actually refining your strategic skill. I just don't know. It feels like a huge misstep. On the positive, the Flourish system is well-implemented and fun without being overly power creepy. Overall, I continue to recommend Griftlands because developer, Klei, has done something interesting with the genre. However, I maintain that Griftlands does not have meaningful longevity in gameplay once you've tried out the fairly obvious strategic paths for each character. Original Review Griftlands is fun... BUT... I do have a lot of concerns around its replayability and to explain this I need to take a quick dip into Slay The Spire. When designing a game a developer has to decide how many resources they're going to commit to various aspects of the game. Slay The Spire focuses almost entirely on the card design and mechanical aspects of combat such that the combinations of powers and card effects lead to craziness and epicness akimbo. You'll have runs where you stack armour up to 500 and drop instant one shot spells constantly, or throw an endless stream of 50 damage shivs. These things are possible because all Slay The Spire cares about is the depth of its mechanics. In Griftlands, developer Klei has split its resources to offer an RPG experience as well as a deckbuilder. To be clear, the RPG stuff is really good fun, and the way they've implemented it with the combat and negotiation and the love/hate system is sublime. HOWEVER, at least at this point in time, there's only so much to the RPG aspect of it. The quests you get shift a bit between runs, and the bosses are randomised, but you'll see a lot of what's on offer quest-wise after a few runs and I found myself skipping a lot of the quest text even after just two runs. Now, that would be fine and cool if the mechanical combat depth that Slay The Spire does so well is on par, but sadly it's just not. By splitting the game development resources to add on this (initially superb) RPG element, they've taken away from the mechanical aspect that is the reason Slay The Spire is so engaging and replayable. What's worse is they've even implemented a brawl mode where you just do the battles and negotiations in quick fire (dispensing with the day-to-day travelling and chatter) so that players can focus on the mechanical aspect, which I do think is a nice option, but I also feel it exposes the lack of depth in available strategies and wacky combinations that comparatively exist in Slay The Spire and Monster Train. To counterbalance this, Klei has tried to create different characters with very different mechanical interactions in their combats and negotiations (i.e. I think there is a greater difference between Sal and Rook than there is between The Ironclad and The Silent), which is a bold undertaking, and I would say each character's design interesting and well thought out, but, again, another large drain on design resources that, I feel, ultimately stifles the depth of development into each individual. Now it could be said that Griftlands is opting for a more "down-to-earth" approach to the combat madness, by which I mean I'm willing to believe it's a design choice that the interactions don't get absurdly out of control. You do still get fun combinations in Griftlands and they feel powerful and silly at times, but always with that edge of "if this was the real world then this would be believable" kind of approach. And maybe that more grounded approach has value, but I feel what makes the roguelite deckbuilding genre fun is the complete insanity in the strategies you can produce. Thus, if you're not going to do this kind of genre with that kind of selling point, then the RPG stuff has got to be really top notch and, again, it's good, but is it enough to make up for thinning down what I believe is the core aspect of this genre? I don't know. Maybe the compromise is for the best, but, again, do you play a deckbuilder to see the same RPG interactions? Or do you play it to make something busted happen in your deck? I think it's the latter. To be clear, I do recommend Griftlands a lot and Klei are a solid, clever developer and I want to know where they'll take the game. I think the genre combination is really cool and fun, and while I've ragged on the mechanical design being a bit lacking, I do think that people who want a lighter experience than Slay The Spire's more hardcore approach will appreciate it. However, I remain concerned that it doesn't have the depth of gameplay that the deckbuilding roguelite genre has come to be known for in terms of available strategies and the wackiness of combinations, and, ultimately, I think that's what these gives this genre its draw.Show moreShow less
14.3 hours at review155 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access