Shogun Showdown

I've owned this game for 2 days. My wife keeps telling me to do something else. She just doesn't understand...

I must defeat the Shogun.

This game makes you feel like a genius.
Pulling off a combo where you swap places with an enemy so they hit their own teammate, then follow up by backstabbing another one... you just think, "Damn, I'm so clever."
But the truth is, that's exactly how the game is designed. The devs are literally encouraging you to play this way. Still, it feels like you've just broken the system—in the best possible way.

Alright, so I put over 110 hours into this game and finally beat day 7 with a single character.
The runs are always fun and different.
The weapons and skills ALL work.
But when you get to the later days, it simply becomes a game of RNG. If you don't get the right options there's spots where there's no way to win. It's just that simple.
Because of the RNG of the runs, I don't intend to pursue day 7 with anymore characters.
All in all I highly recommend this game, but it's not perfect.
8.3/10

Great replayabilty and exciting unlockable progression. The achievements are also very entertaining to attempt. Jiujitsuka is my favorite so far.

Every month I try to play all the Humble Choice games just in case there is a hidden gem in there somewhere. This game is the hidden gem. I tried this one with a pretty negative attitude towards it. Once I started I had a tough time putting it down. This game is worth it at full price and even more so on sale.

One of my favourite games of recent years. The closest game I can think of is Cobalt Core, but this has less random. The game comes down to learning and exploiting various enemy sequences, and the (overly) responsive controls feel great when you're in a flow. I 100%'d it and it felt like a challenging but not absurd goal.
As other reviews have said, this is better characterised as a puzzle game than a rogue-like, although there are random elements from run to run, and luck can make or break you.
There are some bits of information that should be explicit that aren't (boss health, wave spawn times), that prevent this from being a super crisp puzzle game, and the controls are at times overly sensitive, but the game overall is tight.

I slept on this when it released and only recently found it; I wasn't expecting *too* much, but honestly this game is outstanding.
A key component of what are now called roguelike games is that you should learn by doing, and 95% of the time you die, you should know what you did wrong and understand how to've prevented it. This.. is not really the case for many of them -- but it is for Shogun Showdown. I always see when I've misplayed something that will get me hit in a few turns, and each time I do just a little better,
The nature of how the progression is structured is about standard for what you expect for a 'roguelike' of this era (I am never going to excuse the misuse of this term), which is to say you accrue meta-currency and use that to unlock more tiles, the game's term for weapons and repositioning abilities. I would say that they are all extremely close to one another in terms of power level; each tile has three to four qualities: its cooldown, its damage, and its number of expansion slots. There is also the option for an enchantment on most tiles; these four qualities are used to balance tiles in their beginning state, and you only modify them for the duration of the run while you're making the run (which is, of course, a large part of the game's strategy).
You are given a random upgrade shrine for the expansion slots CD, an enchantment, higher damage, etc) and a choice of two tiles every stage, with the ability to select which shop you'd like to go to in-between stages, each of which has two traits: the upgrade shrine that's in there for your tiles, and the type of *traits* it sells, which are modifiers to you and your playstyle for that run, which you cannot get elsewhere.
There's five or six characters, each of which has three starting loadouts you can unlock (two fixed, one that's random), and each of which has a special movement type ability.
This game is really, really good. I honestly cannot stop playing it; it's very satisfying.