By simplifying reaction-based challenges and exploration elements of a dungeon crawl RPG, this game emphasizes its economical element with three major resources: experience, equipment and currency. The feel of progression from one level to another is nice, and the loot variety allows for a constant distraction and provides a somewhat engaging strategic challenge.
Tactical elements of the game include attack positioning (a simple logical puzzle) and skill usage (potions can be counted as a special case of a skill). Good level design in combination with a skill points earning economy allows for several interesting instances, where the player has to strategically arrange his attacks in order to get to a powerup, avoid ranged damage or minimize healers influence, or to get skill tokens required to defeat large monster by defeating all the small ones nearby. As the difficulty increases, these instances are becoming more and more common: the game forces player to make more elaborate decisions as the healing potions are becoming less and less available, while balancing logic-based choices with reliance on luck. In my opinion, challenges, posed by these instances, form the most entertaining part of the game.
Unfortunately, though, they fail to compensate for the repetitiveness of the player's actions, as well as for the repetitiveness and hollowness of the environments. Creating replayability by forcing player to repeat same levels with same buffed enemies in order to get more stars or special currency points feels like a poorly concealed extortion or just a lazy game design. The sound effects could use lot of polish, and the art style feels very generic and boring. Turn-based combat encounters are needlessly slow and not engaging, since during them player can only drink potions and watch: due to the limited amount of skill tokens and the way they are produced (via killing monsters, i.e. after battle) player can only use one or two skills once per battle.
Overall this game feels as if it has fallen somewhere in-between the Diablo and some fighting-based clicker game: the reaction-based real-time challenges are gone, but some of the tactical challenges were left, the economical and character development aspects are pushed to the fore, but the uninspired setting and visual style fails to make them very engaging.
