Movement Over Deckbuilding
HIGH Easy-to-learn mechanics and beautiful pixel art.
LOW Progression isn’t interesting.
WTF Nobunaga being a heart in a trenchcoat.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everyone! Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com!
It feels like I hear about a new roguelike deckbuilder every day. It’s a popular genre in the indie sphere, which means finding quality titles among the mountain of releases can be daunting. Shogun Showdown, developed by Roboatino, is the next one to come down the pike and eager to stand above the rest.
Shogun Showdown is a 2D pixel-based, turn-based roguelike deckbuilder, with the ultimate goal of stopping an evil Shogun and the dark ritual they’re trying to complete.
Players move back and forth and attack using cards in their customizable deck to defeat waves of enemies and bosses. As players defeat foes, they’ll earn money to purchase upgrades and items like health potions, shield potions, or damage-causing items like poison vials that affect all enemies on the field.
Attacks can come from either the left or the right, so players must be aware of incoming foes — it’s important to be aware of distances, direction and what attack they’re performing. Some cards offer strikes, like a sword swing or an arrow shot, but some are more focused on movement — with the right card, the character can dash across all open tiles, or use a grapple hook to pull the nearest enemy toward them.
All actions take a single turn — things like moving one space, turning around, priming an attack (more on this later) or executing an attack, and enemies will act at the same time. Luckily, players can see what enemies plan to do before they do it, so taking that information and planning appropriate actions is key.
So as a concept, this all sounds great and I expected to love Shogun Showdown, but it just didn’t hit like I thought it would. The entire experience feels slow, and it largely has to do with how attacks work.
In a design that’s pretty different from most games of this type, Shogun Showdown asks players to prepare attacks before executing them. It’s the “priming an attack” that I mentioned a minute ago. This means that every attack ultimately takes two turns to happen in most cases, and that’s assuming the enemy is already in range and the player is facing the proper direction. If not, that takes even more time. To be fair, players can prepare multiple attacks to be used at once, but this still made the action slow to a crawl, even for a turn-based game.
Another issue is that progression just didn’t feel satisfying.
As a roguelike, each run is unique but there’s an overall, persistent level of progression in the systems. One type is to upgrade shops with additional item slots so there are more choices each time the player visits. There are different kinds of shops and they all must be upgraded separately, even though it seems like they all stock the same few items.
Another kind of progression here is unlocking new cards for future runs. While some of the options feel unique, like the grapple hook that pulls enemies or the crossbow that takes a turn to reload, many of the additional choices amount to slightly different movements or effects that feel similar to cards I already have in my inventory. There just wasn’t enough to keep things feeling interesting and fresh on later runs. I didn’t have a lot to look forward to, and had little reason to deviate from earlier strategies that were proven successful.
My last hope was that unlocked characters would offer different strategies to keep me interested, but the ones I gained access to didn’t feel different enough, even though they are different. The Wanderer can switch places with the opponent, the Ronin can push an enemy across open tiles, and the Jujitsuka can throw an enemy from behind her into an enemy in front of her. Each one also starts with different cards, but they don’t have cards unique to them. Ultimately, there wasn’t much reward in finally getting someone new to play, only to find that each new face played similarly to the last.
It’s also worth noting that after defeating the Shogun once, additional difficulties unlock that give enemies more health and limit the resources earned in battle. However, this didn’t really make play feel different or more difficult — it just made it even slower.
On the plus side, I do have to note that the pixel art is well crafted. Each arena has a lot of visual depth to it, so each fight feels like a duel right out of a samurai movie and every scene was picturesque, whether I was clashing with enemies on a dock over a still lake in a moonlit harbor, or in a mountain temple where spilled blood mixed with falling snow. And, atmosphere aside, I do want to call out that all of Shogun Showdown‘s UI including cards, character models, cooldowns and health trackers, are all easily readable at a glance. Kudos for that.
While I appreciate that Shogun Showdown distills the roguelike experience down to its essence, the overall speed of play is too slow thanks to preparing attacks and dealing with facing during fights, and this pacing is a big problem for a roguelike since they’re built on frequent runs and repeat plays. Even so, there’s a lot to like here for fans of the theme, or for roguelike players wanting something a little different.
I’m guessing Shogun Showdown will be someone’s favorite roguelike this year, it just won’t be my favorite.
For me: Shogun Showdown gets 7.5 pixelated blood flicks out of 10.
Disclosures: This game is developed by Roboatino and published by Goblinz Publishing and Gamera Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 7 hours of play were spent playing the game, and the multiple runs were completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Violence. Players will control a warrior and attack enemies with swords, arrows, kunai, and other weapons. There is pixelated blood when enemies or the player are killed. Some enemies will explode into fire, which can hit both the player and enemies.
Colorblind Modes: Colorblind Modes are present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles, but they are not resizable. Audio serves aesthetic purposes and is not needed for gameplay. The game is fully accessible.
Remappable controls: Controls are completely remappable.
While Sonic and Street Fighter were great places to start, his first love was Final Fantasy X when his dad bought a PS2. Ever since, that love for gaming has evolved -- there are a number of game worlds out there, and he intends to explore them all. RPG to horror, platformers to casual and everything in between -- if it’s available, he’ll play it.
While his time is short between writing reviews, tabletop gaming, and attempting to start a cheesecake business, he has caught all 806 pokemon and can speedrun Star Fox 64 in less than 40 minutes. He’s always looking for new things to try and new challenges to conquer. You can find him on Twitter -- @eugene_sax.
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