Hey fellow pilgrims!
I just wanted to reach out and let you know about Crownbreakers, the next Sharkbomb Studios video game, and it's another unique deck-building roguelike! If you loved Nowhere Prophet, enjoy tactical decisions and hate capitalism, you can just wishlist right away. Otherwise read on and let me tell you why this combination of deep, dynamic gameplay, colorful characters, and a story of anti-capitalist resistance is for you!
The Basics
First, let's start with core of the game:
You take your crew of fellow Champions and you crash into a district controlled by a tyrant. Your goal is to beat them and take as much of their stuff as possible. The more resources you earn, the more you have to share with the communities of the city. To win your battles you need to knock enemies into each other, build up your momentum and keep rushing forward.
Check out the announcement trailer for a good look at the gameplay!
Control the Battlefield
The core of the game is to manipulate the battlefield. Sure, you can move your own units but you can also push obstacles and enemies around and into place. There's a lot of fun in shoving enemies into each other for some extra damage. But there's even more interesting environmental hazards to knock them into: Thorn traps, explosive barrels, and more. Figuring out how to maximize the battlefield each turn is such a rewarding puzzle! I live for the moment when I can pull off a chain reaction of barrel explosions blowing up half the screen.
But there's not just the traps and explosions. You've also got a lot of cards and attacks with specific area-of-effect shapes! So besides using the traps, you'll also want to position the battlefields just so to make the most of your cards. The synergies are not just bound in abstract status effects but in the spatial configuration on the battlefield! And man do I feel clever if I find the perfect sequence to use the battlefield as a weapon to pulverize the opposition.
Build up Momentum
But if that was everything, the battlefield would turn into a barren field of craters pretty quickly. So a core part of the game is to advance and move forward. After all, the tyrants hide behind rows of minions and you have to fight your way forward.
To reach a district's boss, you need to build up momentum! Then at the end of your turn you can rush deeper into the district. The entire battlefield shifts to the right! It's a great moment but it also keeps the battlefield fresh: New hazards and new enemies appear giving you a totally new puzzle at the start of your turn!
But advancing also lets you find treasure chests. If you spend your attacks breaking those you can upgrade your team and deck with rewards. You'll have to balance between getting rid of enemies and breaking open treasures. After all you need to survive but you also need to grow powerful enough to beat the boss. It's a deck-builder so new and more powerful cards are the most obvious reward you can get. You can also find powerful relics that can be the motor for your synergies.
But the most fun reward are the stickers: You can put these on your cards to modify them for the run! There are stickers that increase the damage of an attack, stickers that let you draw a card each time you play that card, stickers that reduce the cost of a card. But the most fun stickers are those that add to the area of effect of a card! Make your own weird shapes.
Unite the City
In the world of Crownbreakers modern technology and magic coexist, magic is made possible through the strength of one's own soul. Unfortunately the capitalistic tyrants have found a way to exploit the nature of Magic for their own ends. Who would have thought.
And if you can literally turn souls into a resource for profit, finding ways to trap the poor and downtrodden in eternal soul debt is a logical step for the capitalists. Right? Especially if all that magical power they accumulate along the way lets them hyper-charge their stranglehold on the city. Man, fuck those guys.
To fight back, you go on short randomly-generated runs to take what you can from them. Once back in the city you share your bounty with the city's communities to help and unite them. The more you give, the more powerful your champions become and the more the city rises with you. Crank up the mayhem and grow powerful enough to break the tyrants.
Be the Guillotine! Wishlist Crownbreakers on Steam now!