Say it with me now: ROGUELIKE De-. A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES. Roguelike… Autobattler??! Yep today’s review is indeed not on a roguelike deckbuilder, but rather a party-based turn based autobattler RPG roguelike. It’s very minimalist in terms of its design, in a good way. There’s really little fluff, and you get straight into the gameplay. There are a few worldbuilding dialogue bits to break up your team management escapades, but the story in this game is very secondary to the mechanics. A basic rundown: you go to your tavern to scout out the next encounter (usually out of 5-10 encounters per run – maaaybe more at different difficulties?), swapping in and out up to 5 party members before locking in the combat. Each character has its own attack and defense stats, and can all be equipped before combat with various weapons, armor, and trinkets to support their abilities. Units also have an associated class (which can be collected autobattler style for team synergy bonuses) and one of two combat skills you lock in per character per run. I found the party customization really easy to get into, but deep and rewarding to experiment from run to run. I think this is a very approachable turn based RPG for newcomers to the genre, while giving veteran players that Autobattler twist to shake things up and really sink their teeth into minmaxing their units.

There is also the concept of physical and magical damage, as well as ranged and melee, which factors in as you deploy your units to the 3X3 grid in combat. Each row and column has formation bonuses you can abide to, as well as a randomly designated bonus tile chosen at the start of a battle. The closer your units are to the front of the grid, the more likely they’ll draw Aggro from enemies. Combat is automated, meaning you do not choose your party’s commands, and they auto attack on their own based loosely on their positioning and where their opponent’s are. Targeting is still technically randomized from my understanding, but you can tilt things in your favor by lining up your units with the corresponding monsters you want to hit. In addition, melee units will deal less damage if there’s a friendly unit blocking their line of sight, so positioning your frontline and backline units is essential to proper play. Player do have an input they can give in the form of commander abilities: up to two per run, and each has its own number of uses per battle. They often provide party wide buffs or a way to heal or defend your units when it looks like things are going south. They will go on a short 5 second cd before you can use it again, so it’s up to the player to use them where they count. Remember when I mentioned each unit has its own respective combat skill? That is activated after so many auto attacks have been performed. Skills have their own cooldown cost ranging from 2 to 5, so some take longer to charge up than others. But also, some support units, as well as certain equipment, can provide skill charges and accelerate how often you use them. That’s the bulk of combat in a quick summary: there’s a decent bit that’s out of your control, but it’s kinda part of the fun. You get a chance to pick your encounters, previewing their team compositions, as well as the potential drops you can get after winning. So for instance, in one of my runs, I had a magical assassin character, so I was focusing on beating encounters that helped me stack magic damage items. This assassin character was pretty squishy, but also my major damage dealer, so I had a lot of tankier characters in the front to help minimize the chances that she’d take a lot of damage and die. And I also gave her a ranged weapon to make sure her damage wasn’t nerfed because as I mentioned before, melee units deal less dmg when there’s someone in their way towards their target. I wanted her to hide behind my beefier units while still dealing tons of damage. You might find your own team comp that you prefer!

So yeah needless to say, I got pretty hooked to the simplicity of how quickly I can get through runs and get to the meat and the potatoes of the combat. Some people who are more driven by narrative and choice may feel like the game gets repetitive after a while. I found the steadily increasing challenge from run to run to be plenty motivational for me personally, but I tend to value gameplay over story or aesthetics personally. I did have a bit of an issue with the difficulty curve. I feel like the first difficulty level is too easy compared to the next stage of challenges. I found the early game relentless with enemies soaking up significantly more damage no matter what items or high DPS characters I picked. Whereas, the early game missions really teach you nothing for what’s to come considering there’s very little need to pick specific team compositions to win. In that way, it feels like the later difficulties might shun any sense of creativity when it comes to picking characters, as some just can’t make the cut with how artificially inflated the enemy stats are. It also means that the randomized targeting system can feel especially brutal when the enemy is still hitting your backline for half their health despite having two frontline units to prevent that. It can feel like you just have to get lucky that the enemy misses their blows and your guys survive because the AI fucked up. So yeah, I think some difficulty tuning could go a long way to help make other abilities and kits feel more viable at different stages of each run.

Despite my grievances, I think Kilta is a ton of fun in terms of experimenting with different versions of the same characters, graduating winning team members to new ranks and new power levels. All of that is super fun to experiment with and create busted squads. I think the difficulty curve can be a bit off-kilter at times, but I love the core game in terms of the team management, and the positioning. It’s really easy to hop into a run and quickly knock it out in around 30-45 min. Highly recommend.

Kilta is developed by myTrueSound

Available on Steam for $12.99

Received free review copy via devs

Hellfirebam has unanimously rewarded Kilta the Indie Gamer Seal of Approval