A fresh take on a classic. So much variety and unique design around a simple premise makes it just as much a puzzle game as a top-down shooter.

A simple premise with beautiful execution and a stunning soundtrack to boot. It's fast-paced but feeds you new mechanics at the perfect rate to not overwhelm. Borderline educational and reminds me of high school chemistry. Looking forward to digging in to the full periodic table worth of levels!

TL;DR: I can't recommend this game at its current price.

I'm going to be honest, I wanted to like this game. I'm a fan of the genre, and there was a lot of potential to be had here. However, Guardians of Hyelore doesn't deliver in the ways I wanted it to.

For starters, the balancing between players and enemies is off - even on Medium I was having trouble getting significantly far into the game due to the difficulty curve. While upgrading my own units happens slowly (and on top of that I'm forced to pick and choose which to upgrade, leading to having only 1 or 2 that are capable in battle), enemies increase their strength at a rate certainly surpasses the rate at which I can get stronger. The first few levels are laughably easy, and there's a sweet spot after that, but beyond this it becomes incredibly difficult. On top of that, you can't play previous levels to gain XP/upgrade your units, so you're stuck depending on the consumable items to progress.

On the topic of consumable items, this aspect of the game feels unbalanced as well and seems like it was designed for a micro-transaction model (which fortunately wasn't the case, or at least it never made it into the release). Items that deal fixed damage against enemies with linearly increasing health means that many of the items are not applicable past the first few areas. I'm sure there are some consumables that are worth using, but the whole notion of these being the only way to progress once you've built yourself into a corner (see above) is troublesome.

Probably my biggest complaint is the feature bloat. While it's normal to have at least a few things going on to juggle (since I'm not controlling the units themselves), it feels like features were added without considering how they fit into the vision of the game and this leads to a significant amount of bloat: with so many things going on (especially when they clearly are not balanced against each other), the game feels like there wasn't much thought to the overall feel. The game would like play more or less the same with half of the features cut out; in fact it probably would be better if the game had fewer things going on and the features were more fleshed out.

I think with some adjustments to balance and perhaps a reevaluation of the games focus, this could be good. As it stands now though, I can't recommend it, especially for its current price.

Great amount of content, and multiple free DLCs just keep adding to the amount of possible gameplay

10/10 would pass the whisky.