Dragon Eclipse has not long hit Early Access, and while it’s a little light on stuff to do right now – what with it currently only having one run boss, three difficulty levels and a few different monsters and tamers to pick from – it’s already an incredibly cool take on the roguelike deckbuilder that has got us excited for what’s time come.
That’s because it takes all the classic bits you’d expect from the genre spawned by Slay the Spire, and then adds in a bunch of Pokemon mechanics. Just like choosing your starter Pokemon, you’ll pick a loyal companion monster to begin your adventure and then, building out your team, you’ll select three additional creatures, each with unique stats and passive abilities in order to try and ‘be the very best’ on a roguelike run.
As you progress you also earn special berries after each battle, which can be spent on special upgrades for your monsters. If you put four berries on a single monster, it then – perhaps unsurprisingly, if you are a Pokemon fan – evolves. This upgrades the general stats of your beastly companion and also upgrades their unique card, enabling you to choose one of three different options for a brand-new effect. It’s so incredibly cool, and while there aren’t that many creatures in the game right now, every new creature has three different potential play-styles, which enables a huge variety through mixing and matching monsters.
As long as Dragon Eclipse keeps to its planned development roadmap – and we have no reason to believe it won’t – and adds in new levels and more monsters as it goes through its Early Access phase, it’s going to be an absolutely stellar game. That’s not to say you should sleep on it right now, it’s already a lot of fun and is surely only going to get better. So if any or all of this sounds good to you, then go and check it out, because it’s a great way to spend a few hours of your time, and it also means you can pick it up every few months to see what’s new – a pleasant perk of Early Access games.
