the graphics art is really cool

Really cool idea and theming. I feel it's lacking tension since it seems impossible to lose since you just resummon your defeated armies. It's a cool concept but feels like it needs a cost or downside. This also meant it didn't feel meaningful to me to pick one type of unit over another. But overall I really love the theme, I think it just needs some balancing or additional mechanic to make it feel more interesting

wow i love this art style, interesting game!

Loved the simnple pallette choices and congrats on implementing an "auto" mechanic - this is a great entry especially for such a short timeframe. It felt good to beat and recruit that bear!

@schu Thanks for thoughtful feedback! I completely agree about the lack of tension and meaningful choices. We misjudged time needed for balancing, and it's a key lesson for next time. 👍

I really like the idea of building your own army using the fallen enemies. Very cool concept.

Pretty fun, but at first I didn’t realize where the currency you use for summoning comes from — and I also didn’t understand that you have to collect it from defeated ones in the collection.

Really cool concept here. I always enjoy games where you can use enemies against each other, and this has a cool ramp where you're using your weaker guys against stronger guys to get stronger guys for your army. I see you've mentioned that you didn't have a lot of time for balancing, so I don't need to talk about it being a bit too easy (in that I didn't feel like my decisions really affected how well I did).

Like someone else mentioned, the differences between different enemies didn't feel very significant, with some notable exceptions being the healer, the bear, and the lightning guy. Other than those three, they felt like they perform the same function; I'd have liked to see some more specific utility or team synergy so it feels like you're making meaningful decisions when you decide who to take and who to drop, rather than just having straight upgrades like hog>wolf. E.g. maybe wolves work better in packs and buff each other, so you could make a wolf-only build that can actually hold up.

But I think the biggest obstacle for me was information. Firstly, I didn't really understand what was going on (granted, I didn't look at the page description, which covers some important stuff). I could figure out how to collect new guys, but I didn't clock that when they die, they are summoned back only when you click them (or you have auto on). (To that point, I can't think of any reason not to always summon them back, so probably the default should at least be auto on?)

Then there's the blue bar that I still don't know what it means. I beat the last battle, and I had 600/2000, but I don't know what that means. Is it my health? Or is there some kind of cost to collecting, or to summoning (which would explain the option to turn off auto summon)?

But overall, I really like the concept and the implementation was fun enough that I played to the end. Nice job on this!

@jaco-van-hemert
Thank you for such a detailed review.
In the original idea, racial synergy was planned, for example, bonuses for the army of undead, animals and elves.
It was also planned to level up allies and locations with certain types of mobs.
The blue stripe is mana for summoning units, it was supposed to be replenished when moving from location to location. But, when switching from multiple locations to one linear one, I just had to increase the starting amount of mana without testing the result much.
But I had to give up all that, unfortunately.
The original idea was for a different gaming experience than what came out now.
In my defense, I'll also add that I managed to play the game for about 10 minutes. Realizing that there were two hours left before the timer ended, I just had to give a lot of mana and starting warriors and start making a build of the game so that the game would somehow play.

I really like the art style and I think the idea is great. As mentioned by other comments, I felt some elements of the game were a bit confusing - at some point I collected multiple hogs, but their cards were green and they didn't seem to spawn (or I overlooked them being there). It might also be helpful if there would be some information about the size of the enemy units, as it seem the enemies can be stacked onto each other. In those cases I thought there would only be a single enemy, when it was actually a group of enemies being on the same position (I think the last mission has multiple bears, but it looks like a single bear).

I reached the finish line, but for some reason it didn't open for me. The graphics are mesmerizing!

Very nice graphics for the units. I just wih jou could see better what units atre on the field if they stack on top of each other. Great job.

I really like the color palette and creature design. The game looks a bit weird, but intriguing and appealing. UI, on the other hand, looks last a last-minute addition, without any theme and with overlapping bars. But it's to be expected from a jam game. 😁

There is a problem with creature sprites overlapping, so it's really difficult to guess how many enemies there are on screen. Maybe they need some kind of tiny colliders to separate the creatures a little bit. That would make melee creatures less powerful though.

Also, in this kind of game, you probably want to introduce new creatures every fight or every other fight, because defeating and recruiting new, more powerful creatures is the main way of progressing through the game as a player. So if it was a bigger game, you would either need lots and lots of creatures or some other way to progress (like items, skill trees, etc).

Seemed to get kinda far by not knowing how to even play. The collection screen seemed to be the biggest issue for me having no feedback at all to what was happening or what was supposed to happen. When the next round started I only had the starting units from the start. I'm sure all of the mechanics have a reason to exist but the first 5 rounds seemed to go by without any input on the battle. The character art was done in an interesting style, but the rest seemed to be placeholders so not much to say on those.

Nice little auto battler! As others have said, the creature sprites were definitely a highlight. And I thought there was the right amount of variety in enemies for the 5-10 minutes of current play time.

I switched up my team consistently and tried to make a balanced roster (healer, archers, tanks, etc) but I am a bit suspicious that those synergies mostly existed in my head. I feel like there's something missing at the core that would make the decisions of which creatures to collect for my roster more interesting. Maybe that's a refined mana system, or maybe that's a more complicated system of buffs and synergies between different creatures.

Overall, nice entry!

Nice game! Also I like art. But I didn`t really know what I do... and after 5 min I left game.

Really good concept. The kind of game that instantly become addictive to me.
Pretty well polished, but I got a bug with a "lose" screen appearing in the middle of the fight while winning, with the battle still going on behind

Very cool. Needs some play testing to balance stuff, maybe add a new layer of strategy by having some sort of equipable trinkets with passive bonus. I finished on my first try