The Last Flame

The concept looks good on paper: A single player auto-battler with a roguelike twist. The implementation however, is extremely bloated. For example, Slay the Spire has two main ways for scaling: Cards and Relics, yet the game has nearly infinite depth. The Last Flame has 5 Heroes, Ranks, Recipes, Heirlooms, Forge, Relic, Perks, Origins, Surge and more. This turns a fun min-maxing challenge into an absolute chore. Rather than refining and deepening the existing concepts, the developer just kept slapping ideas on top of each other until it turned to an abomination. It also doesn't help that spending 5 minutes to optimize your items to get a %5 dps increase doesn't matter because you either one shot everything by rolling into a broken combo or suffer a slog of a gameplay, which makes %95 of the stuff you get irrelevant.

Yeah...the reviews weren't joking. That's a game. Plenty of stuff to unlock, combat is nice, nice heroes, modes...pretty fun game. Like others mentioned, I don't like auto battler/chess (like TFT and some mobile games), but this game really surprised me. There is only one inconvenient for me: heroes don't have an exclusive Passive, instead they have (at level 1) a default Passive (which is one of the many ones every hero can randomly) and at level 2 and 4 you have 3 options (randomly selected from all those Passives) to choose one. I wish the heroes had a more exclusive and stronger (or better synergy) Passive, but it's not a big problem, at all. The biggest problem is the item panel, which can't be hidden, gets in front of some very important things (like heroes and recipes), which happens when you get too many heroes or recipes. In the latter one...when you want to dismantle items not only the item menu get in the way, but also the Dismantle menu doesn't have the ability to scroll down like the Forge menu, which is a huge mistake, so some items get out of the screen if you forge too many items. I hope these will get patched one day.

It is an auto battler that has a ton of variety in ways that you can play. I think it can be a little easy at times, but I don't know if that's just because I play a ton of games that operate on synergy. I like that it's made by a small team. The price seems pretty reasonable, though I did get through the hardest difficulties pretty quickly. Overall, I'd say if you like auto battlers and enjoy having a variety of builds, then this game is pretty awesome. They also have challenge modes just in case the game feels too easy which I have appreciated and want to disclose. There is also an endless mode on top of that which is pretty great.

Love it, need more games like it. Don't wait for a sale

I do recommend. Not really into auto-battlers, but this was quite fun. However, there are relics in the game that allow you to have more heroes on the board at once, and if you, like me, managed to get three of them, it didn't allow me to progress the game. Frame rate chugged during combat and it wouldn't let the after battle chest spawn. More funny than irritated, but it would have been disheartening a few runs ago.

Extremely happy this game is getting controller support. It’s an amazing game already, and is a steam deck Essential!