Against The Moon

Lots of replayability, tons of interesting to look at, beautifully designed characters, and really unique story that has you agonising over every decision you make. Complex drafting combat with many different strategies to master. If you like slay the spire or monster train. You will like this one as well

Against The Moon
Humanity has lost its future.
Strange beasts have flooded the earth.
The last of the human civilization gathered in an ancient fortress.
Against The Moon is a promising game of the Roguelike genre.
The game just collected all the best of my favorite and long forgotten games.
The developers also added to it a huge number of their own concepts and mechanics, decorated with a beautiful visual component and its stunning animation,
wrapped all this in a very interesting story, which opens up in the game.
I am sure that you will like it as much as I liked it.
As a musical accompaniment there was chosen a some great music.
The threshold to the game is quite low.
The player, who has never played anything like this, without problems will master the basic mechanics of the game.
But this will not be enough when it comes to really challenging stuff.
I like the abundance of content in the game.
Cards can evolve into 2 opposite ones, and you can combine them to achieve your own unique style of playing.
Support the review if you, as well as I, a fan of Roguelike games, if you already have, or only plan to try Against The Moon.
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Against the Moon is a pretty great game, for people who like truly challenging roguelite deckbuilding games. It also has a decend rogue like mode that reminds a bit of Slay the Spire. Progress system is not bad, but not great. Graphics and animations unique and looks cool for indie game

The battle takes place on three lines, and you have to fight very interesting monsters and bosses. An interesting story campaign, not typical for this genre, cozy graphics and musical accompaniment. The game has interesting champions (ultori) with many ways to upgrade and what else is needed for a pleasant evening))) I recommend everyone 12 chthonic monsters out of 10.

Against the Moon is a roguelike Deckbuilder and just as fun as you expect it to be. It's not one of these "Slay the Spire"-clones and that is a good thing.
There are 3 Lanes in total. On each lane you have a "hero" unit. Each lane has the possibility to put out three units. The "Heroes" add six cards each to your deck and have a special attack you can use with energy. Each turn you get one energy. When a hero dies, the damage will attack your Main character. If her HP reach zero the game is over. The Main Character also has a special ability which can be activated through energy.
Aside from energy you do have points to play cards. There are monsters and abilitys (Like 2 dmg to an enemy) to play. Sometimes you get to upgrade your cards. For each card there are 2 possible updates. You can only chose one of them.
Like in many similiar roguelike deckbuilder you can remove cards from your deck. You also can level up your hero units (each of them 3 times). Throughout the run your main character can get more HP, your starting hand grows, you can earn more energy a turn etc.
Overall there is a progression. You earn something like points each run and spend them to unlock cards and upgrades of cards. You can't upgrade existing cards if you did not unlock the upgrade.
Aside from the Roguelike mode there is a Story mode. Atm there are 2 storys whereas one is the tutorial (albeit a bit long). In these storys your heroes regenerate if they die and you also get to try the battle again, if you lose. The writing is okay. It's a bit dry in the beginning and gets better in the end (even a bit interesting). When the characters talk to each other it's always interesting. I would have liked more of that to tell the story.
The performance seems not so good. Loading screens are sometimes a bit long and when you start the game it crashes sometimes even through my pc is more than able to play this game. (Note that not everyone has that problem!)
I now played over 5 hours. I finished the story mode and have 4 heroes unlocked (there are 3 or 4 more to unlock). Also, each hero has a second form to unlock (different ability and cards). In the shop (NO Microtransactions!!), where you can spend points and unlock new cards you can see how many cards there are in total. It seems like there aren't that many right now since most of them are upgrades. I also have the feeling after 5 hours that i almost saw every card. Other games in this genre did not gave me that feeling after 5 hours. I would strongly recommend to add a lot more cards.
In total the game is pretty good. It's addictive and everything you would expect from a roguelike deckbuilder. The Devs also already postet a roadmap and promise a lot of new and free content in the next few months (2 new campaigns, new heroes, new cards and new spells). I definitely recommend it!
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🌎 Overview 🌏
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Game Breakdown
🎮 Gameplay 🎮

Battlefield & Heroes
The battlefield is set up with three lanes and five spaces in each lane. This is mirrored in the Moon’s side of the board. Heroes are by default on the back space of each lane so that they can protect the player’s health and so they don’t die immediately. Each turn the player gets a single tick of energy which is shared between heroes. They can then use this energy to perform a unique power. These can be very powerful, and the more powerful it is the more energy it takes. The power to draw an extra card and get an extra point to play cards costs three energy whereas the power to reduce up to three random enemies attack to zero costs four energy. The most expensive power would be the field obliteration which the player character has. It destroys everything on the field, but it takes eight power. The heroes that are taken to the battlefield aren’t static though. There are four to choose from and they all come with different starting cards which allows for a decent amount of starting decks to choose from.
Adventures & Decks
The player’s deck is determined by its starting heroes initially. Once the player starts their adventure, they are able to acquire cubes which have three different cards inside of them. The player is able to do one reroll of the cards. The adventure map is comprised of nodes that the player can choose between depending upon the rewards given. Besides the extra cards, there are also upgrades for cards which can be collected, upgrades for the player’s heroes and upgrades for the player’s battle resources as well.
Upgrades
Every card in the game has two different upgrade paths that they can take that change and improve upon how the card works. One such example would be a shield generating unit which generates three points of shield in the lane it was played in can be upgraded so that it will either generate shields in the lane at the beginning of every turn as long as it is alive, or it will generate shields in all three lanes. These upgrades are integral to making sure that the payer can match the power curve of the moon. The player does have to focus on balancing the energy required to play a card, as some upgrades increase the overall cost of a unit which can make a deck lopsided in terms of its power curve. To help with this, the player is able to upgrade their battle resources. Some nodes will reward the player with an extra card in the starting hand and others can increase the amount of card playing power per turn. Finally, the heroes themselves can be upgraded which may directly improve the hero itself or it may improve the player’s resources. One upgrade for the heroes, known as Ultori, increase the hero’s health and moves it forward on the battle board which allows for better protection of a key support unit. An upgrade that indirectly helps would be that a hero upgrade provides are large amount of card upgrades immediately which can provide a large burst of deck power and help greatly if RNG isn’t providing upgrades itself.
Battles
Battles take place on a three tile high and ten tile wide grid. The fifteen grid spaces on the left are reserved for the player’s creatures and heroes while the right side is reserved for the enemy creatures and heroes. As mention before, every card has a cost associated with it, and the player will get five card playing power at the beginning of the battle. The reason that this is important to manage and get more of is because this pool of resources doesn’t increase naturally on its own. It is only through the use of cards that increase the power pool and overworld events is the player able to expand their resources which is a unique mechanic that I liked and really helped to sell the fact that humanity is on the brink of extinction and there aren’t a lot of resources to be wasting.
Unlocks
At the end of a run, the player gets some unlock points. At the beginning of the game the player’s pool of cards they can receive and upgrade into is quite limited. By spending an unlock point, the player is able to randomly unlock a new card from the pool. This is a fine way to unlock things, but I would have liked to pick which card to unlock. This does make it so that the player has to use cards they might not initially because it has the best upgrade in that particular run.
📚 Story 📚
The story is quite unique. It is a twist on the dystopian apocalyptic genre where humans have created a sentient AI who is hellbent on destroying the last dregs of humanity. This itself isn’t unique, but the AI is stuck on the Moon and thus does its best to make due with the various tools it has available to it on Earth. This allows both sides in the story to feel like they are scraping by with the few resources they have. The humans are not doing well, but neither will the AI if the player is able to take out key targets that will cripple the Moon’s armies.
🎧 Sound 🎧
The sound design is great. The voice acting is quite good in the intro cinematic. The small bits of voice acting when the heroes act are also quite nice as they provide a sense of power behind actions and their death cries caused me sadness due their loss, but similar to the theme of the game’s themes, this was more due to the loss in battle strength than their actual demise.
📺 Graphics 📺
The graphics are a stylized two-dimensional art style reminiscent of some comic books. The characters appear to then be animated using the two-dimensional bone method where the characters’ animations are made by subsequently moving the pieces one at a time in a separate program and then exporting it as an animation. It looks all right, but also a little stiff. The “cutscenes” between dialogue are well made and I greatly enjoyed the black and white style that did very well with its contrast to create a sense of power and pain.
⌨ Controls ⌨
The game can be controlled entirely with the mouse. There are keyboard hotkeys, but they aren’t needed which makes this a great game to enjoy in a console setting. The mouse controls can at times be a little difficult because they require a lot of dragging and dropping which can sometimes not be registered well causing the occasional error.
⚙ Performance & Bugs ⚙
Specs

Cpu:
AMD FX-8350
GPU:
GTX 1080
RAM:
16 GB
HDD:
7200RPM 2 TB
SSD:
Corsair 240 GB

Easy to Alt-Tab: Yes
Game works fine, no bugs noticed
💰 Replayability & Price to Content Ratio 💰
The game has permanent progression which unlocks new cards and their upgrades. In a vein similar to Slay the Spire, there always feels like a combo that hasn’t been tried yet. The game is a bit unfinished though and has more content on the way.
PrCR: 2x - Great
🌟 Overall 🌟
👍 Pros 👍
Great story
Fun gameplay
👎 Cons 👎
In an unfinished state
Gameplay
8/10
Story
8/10
Controls
8/10
Sound
8/10
Graphics
8/10
Game Length
6/10

👑 Final Rating: 7.7 👑

I spent quite a lot of time in the game to give an objective assessment. The game is definitely not the easiest, and certainly not for everyone. If at the beginning the battles are quite simple, then in the late stage of the game you will have to think about the choice of each creature, and use the ultori skills only at the most necessary moments.